A love letter to art and life that’ll whisk you off to Oh La La Land
An American in Paris Dominion Theatre
Apowerful, mindaltering substance is being peddled at the Dominion Theatre. You enter stooped by the cares wrought by Old Mawn Trouble. You leave with barely a worry in your head, a spring in your step, and an ache for Paris pumping so feverishly through every vein that if a representative from Eurostar were to be waiting outside, you’d follow them to St Pancras with no thought for your bank balance.
OK, bien sûr, I exaggerate un peu about this lavish stage-musical version of An American in Paris. The 1951 Oscar-winning MGM film starred Gene Kelly as Jerry, a poor American painter smitten with gay Paree, pursued by an art-collecting heiress and hankering after an already spoken-for jolie fille (Leslie Caron’s Lise). Its centrepiece was a chic ballet conducted to George Gershwin’s dreamy jazz “poem” of the same name.
Hard to beat? Yes. But I have to confess that I found this remake just what the doctor ordered and, inadvertently, a topical, poignant tribute to both France and good-ole USA.
True, some may find themselves immune to this show’s insistent charms. And yielding to it isn’t a straightforward business. In the first instance, it trades on virtues so old-fashioned as to look passé: directorchoreographer Christopher Wheeldon places the grace and gentleness (vigour and vitality, too) of ballet at the heart of the evening. Over at Drury Lane the dancers will be thunder tap-dancing through 42nd Street; here there are pliés, twirls and pas de deux (Lise, a parfumier assistant in the film, is now handily training as a ballet dancer).
While the action takes place at the turbulent end of the war, meaty drama is still dismayingly subject to rationing. This version boasts a more accentuated romantic tussle, with Jerry’s American composer pal Adam joining the amorous fray, and it’s clearer that French night-club singer Henri is being forced against his will (and proclivities) to marry Lise by his mother (a cameo of enjoyable hauteur from Jane Asher). Yet, much like the historical scene-setting, the emotion is telegraphed with brisk economy.
Those primed to spot the joins may wince slightly, too, at the way delectable numbers from the Gershwins’ back-catalogue (George’s brother Ira penned the lyrics) are bolted into the story. Early on, a bar full of carousing Parisians join the pals in a riotous version of I Got Rhythm, cheesily ploughing on despite a black-out. Fidgety Feet – snaffled from Gershwin’s 1926 musical Oh, Kay! – allows Robert Fairchild’s super-lithe Jerry to hoof it up during a pretentious soiree.
What the show does to perfection (besides airing music that’s steeped to its marrow with a Jazz Age joie de vivre) is capture the hard-to-take-in beauty of Paris. Bob Crowley’s set design is a marvel a minute: fast-moving, projected-on screens conjure twinkling boulevards and the flowing Seine as if they’re Jerry’s swooning handiwork writ large. This technical wizardry culminates in a Mondrian-inspired backdrop for the climactic ballet-sequence that’s ravishingly hallucinogenic.
And this impassioned love letter to art, to life, sharpens into focus the physical attachment between Fairchild’s impeccably fleet Jerry and former Royal Ballet dancer Leanne Cope, just divine as the bob-haired Lise, so adroit you feel she could walk down the Champs-Élysées en pointe. Together, the pair take you to Oh La La Land.
As the song says: who could ask for anything more? Until Sept 30. Tickets: 0845 200 7982; AnAmericanIn ParisTheMusical.co.uk