Review An American In Paris

An American In Paris
Music and Lyrics by George Gershwin & Ira Gershwin
Book by Craig Lucas
Inspired by the Motion Picture

Damsel In Distress
https://www.anamericaninparisthemusical.co.uk/

The cultural exchange and relationship between Paris and New York perhaps reached its apogée before the Second World War when a favourable exchange rate meant that many American writers, artists and artistes found a cheap and artistically amenable home in the French capital.

By 1951, the war was over, a once beleaguered Paris still had her more than her fair share of attractions but the USA and Europe were embarking on a newly configured relationship. At that time,  Ira Gershwin, Vincente Minelli, Alan Jay Lerner and Gene Kelly clubbed together and came up with An American In Paris.

Its innovative dance routines, painterly design, lucid script and a muscular lead any American man could feel ok about identifying with produced (or rather Arthur Freed produced) a sure-fire post Second World War hit.

Now Brit ballet choreographer and director Christopher Wheeldon  has put on stage a balletic version inspired by the film with a new book by playwright Craig Lucas pushing the action back to the days following the liberation of Paris in 1945.

With, naturally,  spectacular dance routines, and exquisite set and costume designs by Bob Crowley, the production values of this musical extravaganza are superb. There are touches of magic, even apart from the dance.

The moment when the character of American composer Adam directs an orchestra on stage and has his mirror image in musical director John Rigby stands on its two feet while being a gloriously inventive transformation of a sequence in the movie. 

In both the movie and the stage show army veteran Jerry Mulligan falls in love with both the City of Lights and a mysterious young woman when he pursues his dream, on the GI bill, to become a painter.

Lucas's new book adds backstory to the young woman and also makes her the centre of a love triangle with Jewish American composer Adam and French would-be American musical theatre star Henri. The book's additions also draw on the lives of the original movie actors - for example stage Henri becomes the heir to a textile business  reflecting the life of the French actor in the film role,

However, whereas the movie kept references to the past war with a light touch, the stage scenario digs into the civil strife which erupted just after the Nazis were routed.

Robert Fairchild, a New York Ballet principal, cuts an energetic figure as Jerry from the first falling under Paris's spell and then the spell of gamine Lise - Leanne Cope from the Royal Ballet. Both have voices which can hold their own in a selection of Gershwin Brothers' songs. Zoe Rainey's American patroness and would-be love interest of Jerry Milo certainly has the voice and tap dance prowess to make her mark.

You can't really go wrong with the Gershwin songbook, although the stage transfer jettisons some  elements in the movie songlist to bring in other songs, often as a smoother entrée for dance routines, The major omissions being Embraceable You, Nice Work If You Can Get it and Love Is Here To Stay.

In comes  I've Got Beginner's Luck, The Man I Love, Liza, Shall We Dance, Fidgety Feet, Who Cares?, For You, For Me, Forever More, But Not For Me and They Can't Take That Away From Me. But comparing songs is like trying to tell the difference between identical Russian dolls. There are always equal delights to emerge.

While the songs remain tender and exuberant, the wavering accents jarred a little with your reviewing pas de deux of TLT and her deux chevaux, where we just willed the singers to drop them. The movie used real French voices. When "Jerry" sounded like "Cheri" in the stage version, we thought we'd wandered into a French literary maze of musical theatre sources!

We did wonder why they hadn't tried a more sophisticated linguistic trick of making the French speak without accents amongst themselves and then switchng to accents when talking in English. Used wisely this could also extract a lot of comedy. 

Anyway, oddly, despite the apparent simplification of the Lerner's original  screenplay,  the movie script of An American In Paris still wins hands down for us. For we feel it's always dangerous to underestimate the savviness of a movie production team which judges correctly the mood of a nation, says what the writers want to say and finds the - er - mot juste.

And after all, movie director Minnelli, with the same producer Arthur Freed, had previously directed Meet Me In St Louis, a seemingly light confection nevertheless containing a visceral sequence of a child full of fear running in striped pyjamas  - in 1944 when noone supposedly knew anything about concentration camps. This was a scene Minnelli fought to have in the movie.

Some of the changes for the stage are interesting but superfluous. Surely the altering of Lise's surname to Dassin is a gesture towards blacklisted American movie director Jules Dassin who went into exile in France with his family? It's not quite as glaring as the Lise/Liza shoo-in but it indicates a certain self-indulgence.

Even so, the magnificent ballet sequences and Gershwin songs with arrangements by Rob Fisher, like Paris itself, can more than survive a bit of accent mangling. As Paris, New York and London prepare for a new configuration of their relationship, it's a joy that some things are here to stay and it's an amber/green for a marriage of music and dance with oodles of joie de vivre.

Review The Glass Menagerie

A  fine revival sheds fresh light  for reviewer Francis Beckett on the fragile mother and daughter relationship in a landmark 20th century American play.

The Glass Menagerie
by Tennessee Williams 

Lost Horizon
http://www.atgtickets.com/venues/duke-of-yorks/

Tennessee Williams's classic memory play The Glass Menagerie is, as director John Tiffany says,  "pure heartache and pure craft".

Technically it is a perfect play, minutely observed, occurring in one claustrophobic space. Small things, that are to make a difference at the end, are unobtrusively seeded at the start: the glass animal collection; the charm of the man we are to meet in the second act. The plot hangs together. There are no moments which make you think afterwards "I don't quite believe that".

In 1930s' St Louis, Missouri, on the banks of the Mississippi, lives former southern belle Amanda, deserted years ago by her drunken husband. Living with her are her two adult children: Tom, who works in a local warehouse and hates it, but cannot leave because the family depends on the small income he earns; and Laura, the disabled and chronically shy daughter.

Amanda knows that the only way to secure her daughter's future in a society which does not value women, especially shy women with ungainly legs, is to make sure she is well married. When Tom finally agrees to invite a workmate home, it seems to Amanda that her prayers have been answered.

She works on the project of getting her daughter married with all the dedication, unselfishness and blind obsessiveness that Jane Austen's Mrs Bennett puts into the same project. In fact, Mrs Bennett, transferred to another century and another continent, would have been very like Amanda. (I mean that as a compliment, as I happen to think Mrs Bennett has been traduced by most people who have written about her, including her creator.)

And it is the actor playing Amanda upon whom this play hinges. If she convinces, so will the play. Cherry Jones convinces in spades. You can see just what drives her; what it has taken to bring up two children by herself in that society, and how it has drained her; why she is what she is; and why she is slowly, but surely, driving her beloved children away. Jones puts in a truly magnificent performance.

She provides several wonderful moments, but two of them stick in my mind. One is when she learns there is to be a gentleman caller whom she can hope her daughter may charm, and she suddenly sees her dismal, cheaply-furnisheed apartment through the eyes she expects him to bring to it. The other is when the gentleman caller arrives, and she cannot stop talking to him - or selling her duaghter's charms as though she is selling soap flakes.

Amanda is based on the playwright's mother and Tom on the playwright himself. Michael Esper puts in a fine performance as Tom, dreams clashing with duty, and Kate O'Flynn is heartbreakingly good as the shy, crippled Laura. The scene where her mother insists she answers the door to the gentleman caller shows us in just a few seconds the ways in which we kill the spirit of those we love the most: both women are slowly stifling each other.

Brian J Smith, the gentleman caller, is also a pure delight: an amusing, popular, handsome, thoroughly decent young man, wishing his fellow human beings nothing but good, knowing in the end, to his utter distress, he has only done harm.

John Tiffany's direction of the four-strong cast is neatly understated, but I was not at all sure about designer Bob Crowley's set. There was a kind of tower which, I think, was supposed to signify higher landings in a high-rise apartment block, but only suggested to me a castle in Fairyland; and there was also a puzzling dumb show.

But this is a small criticism. Tiffany's The Glass Menagerie is a wholly convincing, moving, sensitive production of one of the great plays of the 20th century.I urge you to go and see it. A green light from me.