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13.06.2016
Review: ‘Paramour’ Brings Cirque du Soleil to Broadway
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Description
Pity the poor chanteuse. Flame-haired, beautiful and buxom, clad in a spangly dress and draped seductively against a piano, she’s singing her heart out, pouring her soul into a song about … er, something. Love? Loss? Her favorite nail salon?
Hard to remember, because while she was doing all that heartfelt warbling, the patrons in the speakeasy where she was performing were bouncing around the room like tennis balls, or rolling around on skates, or contorting themselves into peculiar poses on their tables. A few particularly enterprising folks were even swinging from the light fixtures. It was difficult to focus on the song when the room resembled a pinball machine heading toward tilt.
Welcome to “Paramour,” or as I like to call it, “A.D.H.D.! The Musical.” The production, which opened on Wednesday at the Lyric Theater, represents the latest attempt by the French Canadian entertainment behemoth Cirque du Soleil to make a big splash in New York. This time the company, having failed to wow the local masses sufficiently with its traditional nouveau-circus spectacles, has decided to splice the time-tested yowza diversions — acrobats and gymnasts and jugglers, oh my! — into a traditional musical, with a plot, characters, show tunes and even a little tap-dancing.
The resulting show, I’m sorry to say, achieves the singular feat of being simultaneously frenetic and tedious.
Conceived and directed by Philippe Decouflé, the production pays lavish, if often ludicrous, homage to the “Golden Age” of Hollywood, the vague era when it is set, and features a star-is-born plot reeking of mothballs. The principal characters — really, the only ones — are the autocratic director AJ (Jeremy Kushnier, sporting a nice Brooklyn beard and ’stache); the aspiring singer Indigo (Ruby Lewis); and the songwriter Joey (Ryan Vona).
AJ meets Indigo and Joey, her piano player as well as a songwriter, at that speakeasy in a seedy corner of Los Angeles — a lowdown dive that resembles the Stork Club on steroids — where the director has come to find a new star for his latest picture, “Paramour.” Or rather his new “film,” as he insists his work should be deemed, although I doubt that term was tossed around much in the Hollywood of yore.
He hires both on the spot, and soon Indigo is being groomed for stardom, striking poses emulating various screen goddesses in famous posters: Marlene Dietrich in “The Blue Angel,” Vivien Leigh in “Gone With the Wind,” Elizabeth Taylor in “Cleopatra.” So much for a sane sense of chronology. How did we get from a speakeasy to the 1960s?
Ms. Lewis, who has a fine voice and acts with game forthrightness — for all the world as if her dialogue were not riddled with clichés — actually gets to make like Liz in an extravagant Cleopatra sequence that follows shortly. But while she stands atop a grand staircase, looking imperious and sporting a towering bit of headgear, she’s really a bit player. The stars of this sequence are the blond identical twins Andrew and Kevin Atherton, dazzling aerialists who soar out above the audience, swooping high and low as they grasp each other sinuously in an extended airborne pas de deux that leaves the crowd understandably enraptured.
Therein lies the fundamental problem with “Paramour.” The athletic circus acts that are laced throughout the show provide the real entertainment, and make the surrounding book scenes and songs feel even more bogus and synthetic. The first-act finale, the filming of a sequence for AJ’s magnum opus, focusing on Calamity Jane (although it’s really more “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers”), features acrobats flying up to the proscenium, twirling in the air as they trade turns jumping from a large seesaw — technically called a teeterboard.
A scene from “Paramour,” at the Lyric Theater, a production by Cirque du Soleil. CreditSara Krulwich/The New York Times
Yes, it’s exciting and impressive, but it overshadows Indigo and Joey’s warming to each other romantically (“Your music, Joe, it’s food for us who starve for love”), or the frenzy of dancers hoofing up a storm, performing the ample but serviceable choreography of Daphné Mauger.
It’s possible — albeit unlikely — that “Paramour” would be more engaging as a traditional musical if the songs, the story and the characters didn’t feel quite so numbingly generic. The story is credited to West Hyler; the music is by Bob & Bill (a.k.a. Guy Dubuc and Marc Lessard), with Andreas Carlsson billed as lyricist and co-composer. While some tunes resemble old-style standards, others feel like trunk songs Andrew Lloyd Webber would have the good sense to leave in the trunk. (There’s even one that sounds more like Florence and the Machine than old Hollywood; I actually liked it.)
Piled on top of the banal star-aborning story line is an equally exhausted love triangle plot, with Joey and Indigo falling for each other, to the fuming outrage of AJ, who wants to marry Indigo and keep a Svengali-like hold over her. Still, the number in which their interrelationships are symbolized in an aerial ballet is among the more inspired touches, although, here, too, you feel a tug of war between the supposed human drama and the kinetic theatrics. (Lyrics like “All three hearts are in a tangle when they’re caught up in a love triangle” don’t do the actors any favors.)
Perhaps best of all — and not just because it signals the merciful end — is the finale, a chase sequence that finds Indigo and Joey on the lam, with AJ’s minions, wearing brightly colored zoot suits, in hot pursuit. On a set representing the roof of a hotel and surrounding buildings, everyone bounds back and forth and up and down, jumping onto unseen trampolines.
There’s no denying the breathtaking magic of seeing bodies swim through the air with such apparent weightlessness. Too bad the musical surrounding them feels just as weightless, and far more forgettable.
Cirque du Soleil: Paramour
Lyric Theatre, The
213 W. 42nd St.
Midtown West
877-250-2929
Category Broadway, Circus, Experimental/Perf. Art, Play
Cast Jeremy Kushnier, Ruby Lewis , Ryan Vona, Bret Shuford, Sarah Meahl and Kat Cunning
Preview April 16, 2016
Opened May 25, 2016
Closing Open Run
Upcoming ShowsMonday June 13 7:30 PM Tuesday June 14 7:30 PM Thursday June 16 7:30 PM Friday June 17 8:00 PM Saturday June 18 3:00 PM This information was last updated: June 4, 2016
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/26/theater/review-paramour-brings-cirque-du-soleil-to-broadway.html?module=Slide®ion=SlideShowTopBar&version=SlideCard-3&action=Click&contentCollection=Theater&slideshowTitle=‘Paramour’¤tSlide=3&entrySlide=1&pgtype=imageslideshow
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