Review: The Addams Family: The Musical Comedy ★★★★ - America’s favourite dysfunctional family is right on song in a darkly delicious musical treat

The real-life drama of Jersey Boys – the legendary hit from this terrific all-Jewish creative team – is a world away from this deliciously knowing crowd pleaser. Think a cross between the high-school teenage angst of Grease and the outrageous camp of cult smash hit The Rocky Horror Show. Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice go back to Charles Addams’ much-loved cartoon strip for their characters, rather than previous live incarnations, the TV series and the film. Andrew Lippa’s well-placed musical numbers are a vital part of the show’s weird and wonderful atmosphere, his richly varied music and witty lyrics working nimbly to reveal the kooky characters and move the plot along.

It's not the most labyrinthine of plots (Meet the Parents with a Gothic twist), but it's the fun on the way to a foregone happy conclusion that makes for such a joyful night out to share with packed houses of aficionados happily clapping along to the iconic theme tune even before the show starts proper. Director Matthew White, choreographer Alistair David and orchestrator Richard Beadle work seamlessly to provide fun that somehow manages to be broad and sophisticated at the same time.

What fans want is all-singing, all-dancing incarnations of their favourite dysfunctional family members and that's exactly what they get in Samantha Womack's curvaceous gently-assertive matriarch Morticia and Cameron Blakely's gallant, ardent Gomez: husband, lover and caring dad. Thrillingly-voiced Carrie Hope Fletcher makes for a real flesh-and-blood (honestly no joke intended!) Wednesday, as much a teenager in love as any high-school heroine. Grant McIntyre's loveable masochistic little bro Pugsley, Valda Aviks' scary Grandma and Les Dennis's terrific Uncle Fester, showman and master of ceremonies, complete the living family.

The spectacular coup de theatre here is that at Addams family conferences, the dead outnumber the living. A glamorous motley crew of 10 assorted ancestors, summoned from the family vault to help solve a problem like Wednesday falling for Oliver Ormso's clean-cut, all-American Lucas, range from matador to geisha, female warrior to jester. They make a daft, colourful chorus, singing, dancing or just eavesdropping from the high windows of designer Diego Pitarch's crazy Gothic realisation of the Addams' ancestral pile. And presiding over it all is Dickon Gough's monumental manservant Lurch, a benevolent golem.

Into this singular set-up stumble Wednesday's dinner guests: Lucas with his parents Mal and Alice, perfectly channelling Rocky's Brad and Janet in middle age, he obstinately square-jawed, she spouting delectably trite rhymes (“When I’m depressed, or feeling blessed, a poem will get it off my chest”) – and of course ripe for unbuttoning. The Addams Family – dead or alive – constitute a life-affirming treat.

By Judi Herman

Photos by Matt Martin 

The Addams Family tours until Saturday 4 November, stopping at Canterbury (23-27 May), Southend (30 May-3 Jun), Birmingham (6-10 Jun), Bath (13-17 Jun), Cornwall (20-24 Jun), Nottingham (27 Jun-1 Jul), Bradford (4-8 Jul), Southampton (18-29 Jul), Cardiff (1-12 Aug), Dublin (15-26 Aug), Salford (29 Aug-9 Sep), Sheffield (12-16 Sep), Bristol (19-23 Sep), Woking (26-30 Sep), Belfast (3-7 Oct), Glasgow (10-14 Oct), Wolverhampton (17-21 Oct), Milton Keynes (24-28 Oct) and Dartford (31 Oct-4 Nov).

Visit www.theaddamsfamily.co.uk/tour for further details.

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Review: No Place for a Woman ★★★★ - The imagined story of two women caught in the Holocaust has real power

Extraordinary stories continue to come out of the Holocaust. And writers continue to explore how human nature is pushed to its limits through the extraordinary circumstances of the Shoah.

Writer Cordelia O’Neill sets her play in 1945. Her protagonists, Jew and Nazi, appear to the audience as interviewees of the Allied forces. Isabella is a Jewish ballerina, interned in a concentration camp; like the well-documented real-life examples where musicians were corralled into playing for camp officials, she is ordered to dance at a party thrown by Annie, wife of the camp commandant, Fredrick.  Their lives become not only intertwined, but actually interchanged (almost like Mark Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper, in which the future Edward VI, Henry VIII’s little son, swaps lives with a street urchin), so that they actually change places, as Annie sees Fredrick attracted to Isabella, who begins to see Fredrick – himself disillusioned with the war – as a man she could love.

O'Neill has imagined a nightmarishly Kafkaesque situation, which she handles with an extraordinary subtlety and delicacy, making it all the more unsettling. For the two women speak not just for themselves but for Fredrick and interchange their personalities on a seesaw of power and influence over each other and over Fredrick, as they try to understand, influence and change their own plight – their own reality and indeed their own pasts. There are vivid memories of Isabella’s childhood, family and life as a dancer; of Annie’s meeting with Fredrick, how dependent she is on his love, her increasing isolation, even from her children, in the role imposed on her as an officer’s wife.

I guess you could call this a 'woman's story' and director Kate Budgen gets beautifully nuanced performances from Emma Paetz as Isabella and Ruth Gemmell as Annie. Paetz shows all the contrasting delicacy and steely resolve and discipline, even ruthlessness, necessary to become a leading ballerina – and to survive, even flourish in a concentration camp. Gemmell makes the repressed, damaged Annie sympathetic. Extraordinarily hers is the cup that is half empty, Isabella’s half full, as they recall intimate moments with Fredrick, the mistress remembering tenderness, affection; the wife anger and impatience.

Composer/musician Elliott Rennie’s plangent live cello music underscores the whole and helps the constantly shifting balance on Camilla Clarke’s eerie set – truly a black box intersected with a jagged light (courtesy of Sarah Radman). He and his cello make an extra physical presence, at once dividing and uniting the women. And Movement Director Lucy Cullingford works equally subtly with the pair, somehow making their movements seamless and complementary, just as their words are, without them actually connecting physically. O’Neill consulted survivors and it shows, for her imagined story has real authenticity and dramatic power.

By Judi Herman

Photos by Jack Sain

Click here to listen to Judi Herman's interview with Cordelia O'Neill on JR OutLoud.

No Place for a Woman runs until Saturday 27 May. 7.45pm (Tue-Sat), 3pm (Wed & Sat only). £15, £12 concs. Theatre 503, SW11 3BW. 020 7978 7040. www.theatre503.com

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Review: All Our Children ★★★★ - Director turned writer Stephen Unwin vividly brings a lesser-known Nazi atrocity to our attention

The horrors of the mass killing of disabled children perpetrated by the Nazis are less well-known than the Holocaust, though they were arguably a rehearsal for the final solution. All Our Children, a moving drama from director turned writer Stephen Unwin, tells their story by focusing on one so-called clinic and the awakening conscience of Victor, the ageing doctor who runs it. Unwin dedicates his drama to his son Joey, who has profound learning difficulties, so this first play from the acclaimed theatre director is an intensely personal story.

Colin Tierney captures every nuance of Victor's struggle in a finely-calibrated performance, neatly contrasted with the cool certainty of his co-administrator Eric, a ruthless young Nazi ideologue, played with terrifying authenticity by Edward Franklin. Eric has no problem with the argument that these 'imbeciles' are a waste of money and precious resources.

The only woman in Victor's life is his gentle solicitous housekeeper Martha (luminous Rebecca Johnson). Indeed there is a suggestion that the bachelor might be gay, which we know could mean he'll share the fate of his charges. Meanwhile Martha has a hinterland that brings the outside world into the clinic, a husband at the front, a bright five-year-old son and a nubile 17-year-old daughter attracting unwelcome attention from Eric.

The doctor receives two visitors, catalysts for a change of heart, Frau Pabst, devoted mother of one of his 'patients' and Bishop Von Galen, a real-life champion of the helpless victims of Hitler's Euthanasia Decree.

Lucy Speed plays Frau Pabst, with heartbreaking and increasingly strident desperation, convinced Victor is hiding the fate of her son, but his evasive answers are more an indication of his inability to explain why he cannot help her and his fears for his own predicament than of callousness.

So it is left to Bishop Galen to make a difference, to add his righteous anger to her furious distress, and so fully awaken Victor's conscience. David Yelland plays Galen with blazing authority – the words righteous indignation are overused, but this is surely what they mean.

Mindful of the fate of so many committed Christians under Hitler and in the light of Eric's contemptuous denouncement of the Bishop, you fear for him. Unwin does not reveal his fate – suffice to say he was beatified by Pope Benedict XIV.

One of the most moving moments, a beautiful heartfelt declaration of real love and affection for her charges from Martha which serves to finally determine Victor's way forward, has all the authenticity of the playwright's experience of the love and joy of living with these children. That he can also write witty, albeit dark lines, evoking audience laughter, only makes the situation more real and immediate. A fine writing debut for this seasoned director.

By Judi Herman

Photos by Camilla Greenwell

All Our Children runs until Saturday 3 June. 7.30pm (Mon-Sat), 3.30pm (Sat only; plus 18 & 25 May). £22-£30. Jermyn Street Theatre, SW1Y 6ST. 020 7287 2875. www.jermynstreettheatre.co.uk

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If This is a Man 70 years on: AL Kennedy discusses an anniversary reading of the Primo Levi novel

At 3.15 pm on Sunday 30 April a cast of actors, writers and academics amongst others will read from the first page of Primo Levi’s seminal novel If This is a Man. Taking on chunks of the text each to read aloud, they will only stop when they reach the novel’s final page – an estimated six-hour feat. This unique reading is taking place at London’s Southbank Centre to mark 70 years since the publication of Levi’s harrowing account of the year he spent in Auschwitz concentration camp when he was 23 years old.

We spoke to one of the curators of the event, novelist AL Kennedy, about why the book remains so significant today.

When did you first read If This Is A Man? I read If This Is A Man and the Truce (the accompanying volume that describes Levi’s experiences immediately after the liberation of Auschwitz) for the first time when I was a teenager. In the 1970s and 80s you were beginning to see mass representation of the Holocaust on TV so it was a subject that was beginning to make an impact on me.

I was brought up in a nominally Christian family, but my mother who was at teacher’s training college told me stories of a woman she trained with who had escaped from Europe under a train with her husband. It was the first time I had heard of anyone having to do something like that.

I was filled with the inescapable question: how could this have happened? As a teenager the book was one of my principle educational experiences.

Why is it important to read today? The seeds of the event were sewn last year. We had just had the Brexit vote and there was the discussion about EU citizens and their rights. There was a demonisation of foreigners here, and of Muslims in the States, and antisemitism alongside the rise of Donald Trump. The book seemed very prescient.  Levi seemed to be saying that if you ignore the rise of these things the end result could be a prisoner death camp.

How can literature combat these trends? Books are a way to understand people who aren’t you.

Are you worried people might be put off the event because it is so long? It’s a long reading but we wanted to dispel the fear that terrible things will happen if we sit and listen to literature all night!

The further east you go in Europe, the longer the literary events go on, especially in the former Soviet Union countries. There is an understanding that it is a privilege to read literature, there is a hunger for it.  In the past people risked their lives to hear literature. In Britain we take the freedom to read what we want for granted.

Literature balances oppression. We need to be wary as it is rolled back and becomes increasingly commercial. The importance of literature has drifted and we need to ensure that we don’t take it for granted.

By Rebecca Taylor

Photo by Donna-Lisa Healy

Primo Levi's If This is a Man takes place on Sunday 30 April. 3.15pm. £15-£25. Royal Festival Hall, Southbank Centre, SE1 8XX. 0844 875 0073. www.southbankcentre.co.uk

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Thoughts on the centenary of artist Charlotte Salomon

Yesterday, Sunday 16 April, marked Charlotte Salomon’s centenary. I find myself imagining what the trajectory of her life – and art – might have been had she survived the Holocaust. Would she have rebuilt her life and perhaps settled in Amsterdam, where her parents had taken refuge during the war, and raised a family with her husband, fellow refugee Alexander Nagler? Would she have gone on to become a well-known artist and perhaps a grandmother and great-grandmother, founding a dynasty of artists? Perhaps she would now be celebrating her centenary. Her stepmother, the renowned mezzo soprano Paula Salomon-Lindberg, lived to celebrate hers, dying at the age of 102 in the year 2000.

Sadly this is idle speculation. The reality is that her achievement by the age of 26 stands as unique and extraordinary: the series of 765 autobiographical gouaches that make up her artwork Life? or Theatre?, which you can see for the first time in full from this October at the Jewish Historical Museum, Amsterdam.

The proof of her enduring fascination and the inspiration she continues to provide can be seen from this June in the performances of Charlotte – A Tri-Coloured Play with Music, in Canada and beyond, as its creators told me in the April 2017 issue of Jewish Renaissance.

Details and links to the exhibition of Life? Or Theatre? and performances of Charlotte - A Tricoloured Play with Music are below and I know that this year, and every year, Charlotte Salomon will continue to gain new admirers.

By Judi Herman

An exhibition of Charlotte Salomon’s artwork Life? Or Theatre? will be shown for the first time in full at the Jewish Historical Museum, Amsterdam, from 25 October to 25 March 2018. www.jck.nl.

Charlotte – A Tri-Coloured Play with Music will be featured in two Canadian Festivals this June. The Human Rights Arts Festival in Kingston, 1 June, and Luminato Festival, Toronto, 16-18 June. Then from 30 June to 2 July at World Stage Design Festival Experimental Theatre in Taipei, Taiwan.

Visit www.theaturtle.com for other upcoming performances.

Review: How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying ★★★ - Guys and Dolls meets Mad Men in musical satire on big business

New Yorkers Abe Burrows (Borowitz), Willie Gilbert (Gomberg) and Jack Weinstock did not invent the title of their 1961 musical satire on big business. It’s actually based on this best-selling lampoon of contemporary office life in 1950s USA, disguised as a self-improvement handbook. Clutching the book he consults on every step of the corporate ladder he climbs from window cleaner to chairman of the board, their anti-hero J Pierrepont Finch really lives up to the book’s subtitle, "The dastard's guide to fame and fortune". Burrows had worked with Frank Loesser on Guys and Dolls and the marriage of witty, amoral book with jaunty music and slick lyrics ensured the show’s award-winning success.

So what’s not to like? Amoral corporate greed and ruthlessness is a hardy perennial and even company boss, JB Biggley’s name sounds like a topical joke trumping the adverb coined by the businessman who won America ‘bigly’ himself.  Well, time is a cruel master and the sensibilities of the 1960s don’t easily translate. Just as with Promises Promises, revived earlier this year, the sexism may be satirised, but it’s still hard to swallow. These gals with cinched-in waists emphasising their curves are reduced to wives-in-waiting, whiling away time as secretaries (and occasionally mistresses).

Pneumatic blonde, Hedy La Rue, a career ‘bit on the side’ played to the hilt by Lizzii Hills, does not share the ambition of Mad Men’s aspiring copywriters: it’s an LA perfume counter or marriage for her. And while Andrew C Wadsworth perfectly captures the cynical charm of Biggley himself, a fun creation who secretly knits for relaxation in his top-floor executive suite, Marc Pickering’s gleefully ruthless Finch is a real Richard III. Still, anti-heroes can be compelling and indeed Hannah Grover’s sunny Rosemary, the perfect secretary, manages to swallow her reservations and put her resourcefulness at his disposal, even as he puts his naked ambition before his love for her.

Director Benji Sperring’s almost cartoonish performing style works with the material, matched by Lucie Pankhurst’s choreography and Mike Lees’ pastiches of 60s corporate clothing, complete with wonderful fluorescent coloured shoes. Lee’s art deco design – steps leading to matching lift doors – provides an appropriate backdrop for the frenetic comings and goings of these stock characters. MD Ben Ferguson’s excellent small band ignites Loesser’s music, instantly appealing but not particularly memorable, with the exception of the now standard number 'I Believe in You'.

This is as fine a version of this collectors’ item as you are likely to see, a great showcase for its 10-strong cast and all involved, but maybe the catch is that a modern audience does not want to see the Finches of this world actually succeed in business without really trying.

By Judi Herman

Photos by Darren Bell

How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying runs until Saturday 22 April. 7.30pm, 2.30pm (Wed & Sat only). Wilton's Music Hall, E1 8JB. 020 7702 2789. www.wiltons.org.uk

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Review: Filthy Business ★★★★ - Sara Kestelman keeps it in the family in Ryan Craig’s new Jewish comedy

Families – can’t live with 'em, can’t live without 'em. Matriarch Yetta Solomon has no intention of allowing a single member of her family to escape from Solomon Rubber. Craig's title is clever - rubber is self-evidently a filthy business. You can almost smell the huge bales and coils of the stuff looming from every shelf downstairs and off every table upstairs on Ashley Martin-Davis’s towering two-tier shop set. Yetta is not afraid of playing dirty either, from reeling in a reluctant phone customer with the promise of "a special one-time-only deal" (actually almost double the asking price) to micro-managing a Machiavellian insurance scam, with violence thrown in that almost makes this feel like Yiddishe (as against Scandi) noir.

Craig’s drama is rooted in the reality of his own upbringing. It turns out that "lolloping about" in the mattress, bed and foam-rubber shop his Dad painstakingly built up from off-cuts collected working as a tyre fitter, was time well spent. The action spans a quarter century, from 1968 to 1982. There’s a marvellous sense of place and time in Edward Hall's sprightly production, especially when the 60s are swinging and the grandchildren yearn to be part of the action. Callum Woodhouse’s appealing grandson Mickey aspires to be a trendsetting Teasie Weasie hairdresser and Callie Cook’s sunny-natured granddaughter Bernice has already got a bouncy  bouffant.

Like my own, Craig’s antecedents made it to London from Russia long before the Holocaust. Sara Kestelman’s magnificently malevolent Yetta is self-avowedly moulded by the cruelty of Jew-hating Cossacks and the hardships of escape and life in London. She repeats her well-rehearsed saga in English peppered with Yiddish: the boychiks (sonny-boys) and ganovim (thieves) deployed by my great-grandmother.

So however loudly and violently her warring sons  Nat and Leo (nicely-sustained virulence from Louis Hilyer and Dorian Lough) feud with her and each other and scheme to strike out alone, it’s clear she’ll stop at nothing to keep the family together - in the business and under her thumb. It’s a large family, too, eight of the 13-strong cast gather round the family dinner table.

The warring family of nations toiling at Solomons extends to Nigerian immigrants represented by hard-working machinist Rosa (feisty Babirye Bukilwa). Yetta effortlessly sees off the man who claims the money Rosa owes for the citizenship he’s provided with a sham marriage. The xenophobia suffered by "blackies" and "Yids" alike has telling contemporary resonance.

Her fellow machinist, put-upon young Monty Minsky (Edmund Derrington, terrific) , blinking as he ascends from the basement machine room into the comparative light of the showroom, reminded me of Willie Mossop, the worm who turns in Hobson’s Choice – that early 20th-century classic comedy about a Northern family warring over their shoemaking business. It’s a good omen that Craig’s comedy could become a Jewish classic for our time.

By Judi Herman

Photos by Dominic Clemence

Filthy Business runs until Saturday 22 April. 7.30pm, 2.30pm (Wed only), 3pm (Sat only). £10-£35. Hampstead Theatre, NW3 3EU. 020 7722 9301. www.hampsteadtheatre.com

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Allons enfants de la Patrie! France during and after WWII provides fertile soil for rich drama, music and art this year

What links London’s latest hit musical An American in Paris, a revival of Incident in Vichy – an Arthur Miller drama not seen in this country for 50 years – and the centenary of the young German artist Charlotte Salomon, who continues to enchant more than 70 years after she perished in the Holocaust?

The clue is in the titles of the theatre pieces. Arthur Miller's Incident in Vichy concerns the fate of 10 men detained in Vichy, France, at the height of World War II in 1942, when Vichy became notoriously synonymous with the French government of Marshal Pétain that collaborated with the Nazis. An American in Paris, freshly adapted from the much-loved Gershwin movie musical, is reimagined with a story set in the City of Light in 1945, in the immediate aftermath of the war. The heroine is a young Jewish ballerina safely hidden by Parisians, while her parents have disappeared in wartime Provence. And the young German artist Charlotte Salomon, escaping Nazi Germany to take refuge in the South of France, was herself arrested in Villefranche in September 1943 aged just 26 – within a month she had been murdered on arrival in Auschwitz.

Salomon was born 100 years ago this April and in the April edition of Jewish Renaissance, which will reach subscribers just before Passover, I explore the continuing allure of her life and work as expressed in the 765 autobiographical series of gouaches that make up her Life? Or Theatre?, in the company of the co-creators of a new play with music telling her story "in three dimensions".

I have just had the good fortune to marvel at the glorious evocation of the newly-liberated City of Light in American in Paris – a show that adds depth to the light-as-air story of the much-loved film musical without losing any of its charm and vitality, thanks to a fresh plot with Jewish protagonists at its heart. Find out more in my American in Paris review.

My most recent review is of an extraordinarily well-cast and tightly-directed revival of Arthur Miller's Incident at Vichy. The production successfully ratchets up the tension of Miller’s 90-minute morality play examining the different responses and fates of those 10 men picked off the streets of Vichy by a Nazi regime intent on rounding up Jews for deportation. It continues at London's Finborough Theatre until Saturday 22 April.

By Judi Herman

Click here to read all of our theatre reviews.

Review: Incident at Vichy ★★★★ – Rarely-performed Arthur Miller is 90 minutes of mounting tension in wartime France

Set in the detention room of a Vichy police station in 1942, Miller’s drama explores the ways paranoia among those detained by the Nazis could descend so easily into guilt and fear, making it all too easy for the perpetrators of the Holocaust. Ten men wait to be called. At first, the strained and nervous discussion is about why they might be there (a random pick up, routine check on their papers), but it soon emerges that some (or most) are Jews who have fled German-occupied northern France for the southern, ‘unoccupied’ Free Zone.

The play examines the various characters (some not even given a name: Gipsy, Waiter, Boy, Old Jew) and how they react to the increasingly frightening circumstances in which they find themselves. Some hope against hope that it will all turn out alright, even after communist railway worker Bayard (powerful Brendan O’Rourke) warns of cattle trucks full of people going to Poland to rumoured death camps. Others urge direct action, by the able-bodied at least. Are there ‘bad’ Germans and ‘passive’ Jews? In this classic morality play laying out the choices of good and evil between man and man and particularly within man himself, there are serial confrontations that reveal just how many points there can be on the so-called moral compass.

Previous, rare, productions of this Arthur Miller play suffered from trying to crank in dramatic action to beef up the morality statement, risking pre-empting the play’s climax, which does offer the promise of redemptive action (the ‘incident’). Here, director Phil Willmott makes the wise decision to let the words speak for themselves by focusing on designer Georgia de Grey’s white banquette within a white box that works brilliantly (literally) in the Finborough’s limited space. His superb line up of detainees are arranged on or around it in shifting poses as eloquent as Da Vinci’s Last Supper. Above them looms their eerie shadows, sharply-defined by Robbie Butler’s lighting.

From Lawrence Boothman’s painter, eyes eloquent with terror, to PK Taylor’s wonderfully infuriating actor, apparently in denial about his predicament; from Edward Killingback’s conscience-ridden Austrian nobleman (authentically tall and blonde) to Gethin Alderman’s French (Jewish) army doctor presenting Miller’s moral dilemma; this is a faultless and generous ensemble, perfectly cast to flesh out Miller’s selection of ‘types’ and to invest his rhetoric with humanity and pathos. And among the German captors, Timothy Harker, chillingly embodying the Nazi professor who revels in flushing out Jews, and Henry Wyrley-Birch’s conflicted Major, his war wound rendering him terrifyingly unpredictable, contribute to 90 minutes of almost unbearable tension.

The questions Miller poses are relevant today and this is an exceptional opportunity to see a rarely performed play in a production that Miller would surely have adored.

By Judi Herman

Photos by Scott Rylander

Incident at Vichy runs from Wednesday 7 – Sunday 25 June. 7pm (Tue-Sat only), 2.15pm (Sat & Sun only). £19.50-£25, £16 concs. King's Head Theatre, N1 1QN. 020 7226 8561. www.kingsheadtheatre.com

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Review: An American in Paris ★★★★★ – A glorious evocation of the City of Light illuminates the stage

A lone figure limps into the light on a bare stage. Wounded in action, GI Adam Hochberg, confides his life, loves, hopes and fears and takes the audience back to newly-liberated Paris, 1945. David Seadon Young’s sardonic, worldly-wise American Jew in Paris is the first surprise in a show that adds depth to the light-as-air story of the much-loved film – without losing any of its charm and vitality.

Director and choreographer Christopher Wheeldon and book writer Craig Lucas collaborated to develop the story – Hochberg is one of three young men who become comrades – the ’Three Musketeers’ – all sharing one beloved object, gifted ballerina Lise Dassin (equally gifted ballerina, Royal Ballet principal Leanne Cope, proving she can sing and act, with all the delicate vulnerability of the film’s Leslie Caron). She too is Jewish, surviving the war hidden by the cultured family of her second admirer Henri Baurel (Haydn Oakley, all Parisian charm), though she hides her personal tragedy: her parents are missing after the Holocaust. Aficionados of the film will guess the third admirer is the American of the title, ebullient demob-happy GI Jerry Mulligan – breath-taking triple threat Robert Fairchild doing rather more than making the Gene Kelly role his own.

The creative team build on the film’s glorious ballet and lush Gershwin brothers’ score, with daring extended dance sequences performed by this multi-talented 18-strong ensemble, peopling a hopeful Paris striving for normality after the traumas of occupation. Alongside the joyful expression of freedom, there’s a telling moment, the shaming of a woman accused of sleeping with the enemy, all without a word of dialogue. Lucas’s book is wonderfully witty, though, and his rounded characters are a gift to actors such as Jane Asher, who is superb as bossy matriarch Madam Baurel, and Zoë Rainey, a revelation as the irresistible force that is Milo Davenport, socialite arts patroness extraordinaire (based on real-life inspirational Jewish art collector Peggy Guggenheim).

The numbers are subtly staged to reveal plot and character. Take the complementary numbers, one in each act, featuring that trio of musketeers yearning after Lise. They get to sing first '‘S Wonderful' and then 'They Can’t Take That Away from Me' and for each the lyrics mean something different and personal. Just 15 versatile musicians realise Bill Elliott’s expansive orchestrations.

The performers inhabit the extraordinary evocation of Paris conjured by designer Bob Crowley’s 3D streets, buildings and landmarks (realised by 59 Productions Projection Design), the City of Light living up to its name thanks to lighting designer Natasha Katz’s palate of complementary glowing colour. Crowley dresses everyone with lovely period detail, especially the ensemble – gorgeous glamour for those essential Parisian showgirls and sophistication for Asher and Rainey. A ravishing, life-affirming joy.

By Judi Herman

Photos by Johan Persson

An American in Paris is currently booking until Monday 30 October. 7.30pm (Mon- Sat), 2pm (Sat, Wed). £17.50-£125. Dominion Theatre, W1T 7AQ. 0845 200 7982. www.anamericaninparisthemusical.co.uk

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