A most American of musicals
Its title might straddle two countries, but George Gershwin’s orchestral work “An American in Paris” speaks distinctively of the national character of its composer’s homeland: the bumptiousness of brassy car horns, the might of industry’s clings and clangs — and then, as the tempo slows, the nostalgia of a languorous jazzy melody, carved out by a swelling trumpet solo. What qualities could be more American?
The Tony-winning musical that shares a title with Gershwin’s tone poem, and which uses that song and many oth-
ers of his and his brother Ira’s, centers on an American who epitomizes those traits, exclusively for the worse. (The show opened Wednesday, Sept. 13, at SHN’s Orpheum Theatre.) But Christopher Wheeldon’s direction, and especially his choreography, wrings greatness from an underwhelming story and protagonist.
That antihero is Jerry Mulligan (McGee Maddox), a World War II vet turned aspiring visual artist who decides to expatriate in Paris. He unironically espouses the values of “Team America: World Police.” Why don’t the citizens of Paris, France, speak plain English? Why can’t he have everything he wants — a girl who’s dating someone else and an instant career as an artist — by virtue of being an American white male? Why doesn’t that girl he fancies, Lise (Sara Esty), adore his suggestion that she change her name to something more American?
If you’re going to the trouble of writing a new book for a 1951 movie musical, dated gender politics and troubling notions about America’s place in the world ought to be the first dust bunnies you swab away. But Craig Lucas’ script ranges from insipid to cringeworthy, qualities Maddox’s wooden delivery only exacerbates (as does his froggy singing). He replaces the lightness of Gene Kelly, who played the role in the film, with vacant menace. You want to tell Lise to run for her safety, or at least pick either of her less-creepy suitors, the foppish Henri (Nick Spangler) or the antsy Adam (Stephen Brower).
But “An American in Paris” was never about the story. Those Gershwin tunes, like “But Not for Me” and “’S Wonderful,” drive it. Though the orchestra, conducted by David Andrews Rogers, is a bit sluggish with the title track, it also re-establishes a time-honored medical certainty, which is that hearing the opening strands of “I Got Rhythm” automatically makes blood course more quickly through veins.
Wheeldon devises a choreographic equivalent to this infectious score. To the opening number, “Concerto in F,” he paints a city still reeling from the aftershocks of war, a citizenry that hasn’t shaken the fight-or-flight impulse. In his postwar Paris, a charge lingers in the air. Fisticuffs or a lovelorn sob might erupt at the slightest provocation. Dancers’ lines are always skewed, leaning, the way jazz gravitates toward the note a halfstep off from the one ears expect. Without Jerry’s uttering a word, you can see why he rips apart his ticket home: the City of Light is too fascinating.
That visual storytelling reaches an apogee in Wheeldon’s ballet accompaniment to the lengthy title number — surely among the most forceful counterarguments in contemporary choreography to those who find ballet stodgy or inaccessible. Esty (whose dancing throughout the evening has such grace as to appear unencumbered by gravity, her limbs hoisted afloat by invisible strings) and Maddox are ravishingly carnal, matching every peak and trough of the dramatic score. Modernist color-block set pieces (by Bob Crowley) and projections (by 59 Productions) shift in tandem, so that the Orpheum’s very foundation seems to give way.
The sequence is enough to make you think the whole show could dispense with a basic tool most musicals require: words.