The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - The Telegraph Magazine
The making of a song and dance
Sally Williams goes behind the scenes of An American in Paris as the cast and crew prepare to take the West End – and meets the ballet dancers stepping into Gene Kelly’s Oscar-winning shoes
Following in Gene Kelly’s sublime footsteps 65 years after An American in Paris swept the Oscars, a spectacular stage adaptation is coming to the West End. As a choreographer with a broken ankle wrangles ballet dancers who’ve learnt to sing, Sally Williams steps behind the scenes
An American in Paris is one of the most imaginative musical confections turned out by Hollywood in years,’ declared one critic on the film’s release in 1951. The story of Jerry – played by Gene Kelly – an American GIturned-painter who calls Paris home after the Second World War, was a box-office sensation. It won six Oscars (unexpected for a musical, especially one that climaxes with a 17-minute fantasy ballet sequence). Its sense of good cheer was the perfect antidote for audiences still getting over the war, and its exuberance has echoed through the years.
The film launched the Hollywood career of Leslie Caron (Kelly cast the unknown teenager as the female lead after spotting her in a ballet in Paris), and Kelly won an honorary Oscar (his only Academy Award) af ter making it. Above all, it popularised some of George and Ira Gershwin’s most wonderful songs: I Got Rhythm, ’S Wonderful – people will recognise the tunes even if they don’t know the film.
And now, more that 65 years later, a stage adapt at ion is coming t o t he West End. Choreographed and directed by Christopher Wheeldon, with the book by Craig Lucas, the show first opened in Paris to critical acclaim in 2014, then t ransfer red to Broadway the following year, where it ran for 18 months and won four Tony awards.
So how did an English choreographer from a classical-ballet background come to direct such a quintessentially American musical?
Wheeldon says Holly wood musicals are responsible for his career – ‘my first introduction to dance’ – and Kelly was a par ticular influence. ‘Astaire was the debonair, elegant, slight, mercurial dancer, whereas Gene Kelly was the guy’s guy. The dude who could dance – a real matinee idol,’ he says.
After training at the Royal Ballet School, Wheeldon danced with the company for two years. In 1993 he joined the New York City Ballet, then in 2000 he gave up dancing in order to choreog raph full-time. Recent successes include Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and The Winter’s Tale for the Royal Ballet.
But when he was first asked to direct An American in Paris in 2010, he refused. ‘I said, “You are crazy.”’ Eventually, he let himself be talked into it. ‘I sat down with Craig Lucas and he said, “Look, it’s beloved, so why don’t we find a way to pay homage to it but really do our own thing?”’
The plot is much the same as in the original: Jerry Mulligan, a painter who was stationed in France during the war, is so in love with Paris he doesn’t want to leave. Armed with little more than a sketchbook and a grin, he tries to make a living on the streets of Montmartre. Jerry meets Milo, an American heiress, who offers to finance his work, though her interest isn’t strictly in business. He falls in love at first sight with a French shop girl, Lise, only to discover that she is involved with another man.
Wheeldon’s version is darker, however. The show opens not in 1951 but in 1945, when Paris was just emerging from the shadow of Nazi occupation. Wounded soldiers and beggars are on the streets. ‘We’ve been able to place the story in a far more grounded context than was possible in 1950. We can raise issues no one would have dared to back then,’ he says.
There is also more depth to the characters: Jerry suffers from traumatic memories; Lise is Jew ish; Jer ry ’s f r iend Adam’s leg was injured in the war. ‘These young people are emerg ing f rom a devast at ing per iod a nd finding their way through art, and the city of Paris it self is f illing wit h light and hope,’ Wheeldon explains.
Januar y 26, 3 Mills Studios, east London. For ty rails of costumes have ar rived from Broadway and assistants are working out what needs replacing. Shoes are being bought, feathers ordered.
In Rehearsal Room 1, Wheeldon is rehearsing his dancers. Aside from the two leads – Leanne Cope as Lise and Robert Fairchild as Jerry – it’s a new cast. At 43, Wheeldon is fresh-faced and boyish in jeans, a hoody and a baseball cap, though he is walking with a slight limp, recovering from a broken ankle. During rehearsals for a production of The Nutcracker, he fell backwards off the stage. ‘It’s my first day out of the boot,’ he says. ‘I’d normally be tearing around.’
His manner is relaxed and genial as he gives detailed instructions to the dancers. ‘We’re going to be breaking lots of rules,’ he says. ‘You are going to work your lower body like crazy but keep your upper body chic. You know how models move – we want that preeny walk.’
The defining element of the film is Kelly’s tapdancing. In Wheeldon’s version, the only tap number is I’ll Build a Stairway to Paradise, a dream sequence in which Henri (an aspiring singer and the possibly gay son of a wealthy industrialist, played by Haydn Oakley) does a spectacular routine flanked by showgirls. Lise is now an aspiring ballerina, and there is a new subplot in which the main characters stage a ballet (an echo of the dream dance in the film). ‘I have ballet-ed it up,’ Wheeldon admits.
The title of the f ilm came from George Gershwin’s jazz-influenced symphonic poem, which premiered at Carnegie Hall in New York, in 1928. Inspired by the time Gershwin spent in Paris, his aim was to ‘portray the impression of an American visitor in Paris as he strolls about the city…’ George, who always envisaged the piece as a ballet, died of a brain tumour in 1937, aged 38, and the producer Arthur Freed bought the rights to make the film from his brother Ira in 1949. The studio, MGM, then hired Ira to write new lyrics, Alan Jay Lerner to write the script and Vincente Minnelli to direct. The dance numbers were choreographed by Kelly.
For the stage musical, the Gershwin estate gave Wheeldon free rein to introduce new arrangements of the songs. In the film version of I Got Rhythm, Kelly, dressed in casual clothes and a baseball cap, uses the song to give some Parisian children an English lesson. On stage, it is Jerr y’s friend Adam who plays the first version of the song at an angsty, sombre pace, before accepting it works a whole lot better at a zippier beat. The stage version also includes songs of Gershwin’s that weren’t in the original film, such as the uptempo Fidgety Feet.
Of course talking, let alone singing, is highly unorthodox for ballet dancers, and of all the challenges set for Wheeldon, none was quite as difficult as finding his two leads. Leanne Cope had been with the Royal Ballet for 11 years when, in 2014, while dancing Swan Lake, she received a message from Wheeldon: ‘I hear you used to sing in the choir at school. Would you like to sing for me?’
‘I stopped her in the hallway of the Royal Opera House,’ Wheeldon recalls. ‘She st ill had swan feathers in her hair. I stood her in a shower cubicle because the acoustics were so good. She sang a few bars of The Man I Love and I thought, “OK, there’s a natural gift there.”’
With her gamine look, Cope bears a striking resemblance to Caron (though Cope was 30 when she got the part; Caron, 19). ‘She [Caron] has a very similar story to mine,’ Cope says. ‘She was a ballerina, she had never spoken [on stage] before. She didn’t speak English and she came and made this amazing film. There is a real innocence about her that I wanted for Lise.’
Robert Fairchild, 29, a principal dancer with the New York City Ballet, has a touch of Kellylike vigour and aplomb. ‘I saw Gene Kelly in Singin’ in the Rain when I was about 10,’ he says. ‘He was so masculine and athletic, such a great role model. In Salt Lake, Utah [where Fairchild grew up], if you didn’t play American football you were not cool, and he made dancing cool.’
Fairchild heard he got the job by text. ‘It said, “Hi, I think I’ve got the wrong number. I’m act ua lly look i ng for Jer r y Mullig a n. Congratulations Rob, the part is yours.”’
Both leads were put through a singing and acting ‘boot camp’ to prepare for the 600 performances on Broadway. ‘I had to be really careful because singers have to worry about their voice,’ Fairchild says. ‘You can’t go out late at night and drink, you have to be very mindful of what you eat. And on top of that, as a dancer, you have to worry about your body. If a dancer tweaks an ankle, t hey can’t perfor m t hat night.’ He did Pilates and Gyrotonic, and followed each show with an ice bath.
Most of the film wasn’t shot in Paris, of course,
‘Leanne stood in a shower at the Royal Opera House to sing a few bars because the acoustics were so good. I thought, “There’s a natural gift there”’
but on MGM’S lot in Los Angeles. In the show, Bob Crowley, the set and costume designer, suggests the Seine with projections. ‘It’s postwar Paris, so it’s quite monochromatic,’ he says. There are bursts of vibrant colour, such as the scene in t he upmarket bout ique Galer ies Lafayette, where customers and assistants take off drab coats to reveal Dior-style dresses in sky blue, mint green, lemon yellow. ‘They burst out like flowers in spring,’ Crowley says. From left Artwork for the stage production by Andrea Selby; the show is set soon after the war
The show has opened up new opportunities for Wheeldon. Last year, he served as artistic director of an exhibition, Fashion Forward , 3 siècles de mode (1715-2016), at The Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. ‘That came from people coming to see An American in Paris and being inspired to use a choreographer,’ he says.
He points to the success of La La Land, which has infected us all with song-and-dance fever. ‘The poster looks just like ours, which we think is absolutely the best form of flattery,’ he says. ‘They also have a scene by the Seine in which they dance together, and that is an homage to the original film. It’s kind of great how things all seem to have come together at the same time.’ An American in Paris previews from March 4 (anamericaninparisthemusical.co.uk)