Amélie the Musical – Criterion Theatre

Picture: Pamela Raith Photography

Amélie the Musical continues at the Criterion Theatre, London.

Star rating: five stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

It has become the hot take du jour to be cynical about Amélie, the 2001 Jean-Pierre Jeunet film that so delighted us all those years ago. In real life, wouldn’t such a person – quirky nearly to the point of her own DSM entry – actually be a bit of a nightmare? Wouldn’t time in her company stripped of the camera tricks and editing and vivid colour pallet actually be less whimsical and more of a chore?

Amélie the Musical has had a long journey to the West End. Anticipation was sky-high for the original Broadway production, but the show received a subdued response and closed early after receiving no Tony Award nominations. Given that the film was such a hit, and the star was none other than Hamilton/Great Comet legend herself, Phillippa Soo, could it be that the show itself just isn’t very good?

With these worries behind it, the UK production opened in 2019 at Newbury’s Watermill Theatre, before enjoying a nationwide tour, an extended run at London’s Other Palace Theatre, and a hibernation during the pandemic lockdown. Now playing at on the West End at the Criterion Theatre, it is a great relief to report that Amélie has turned out to be undeniably weird, but entirely delightful. Director Michael Fentiman leans hard into the quirky magic of the source material and employs a cast of talented actor-musos to re-create that quaint, Parisian feel.

French-Canadian star Audrey Brisson has been with the UK production from the start. As the show has carved out its own identity, she has done something remarkable with the character of Amélie. That kooky ‘otherness’ has only ever been written by male writing teams, and in the hands of less talented an actor could conceivably slip into unrealistic fantasy – that ‘manic pixie dream girl’ trope. However, Brisson finds tiny moments in every scene to make Amélie real, understandable, and relatable. It is her performance that will most stick with you after the show, a lingering feeling of just having met the most fascinating friend of a friend, who can sing really really well.

After the last year, how wonderful it is to again experience in-person ‘otherness’. We are crying out to rediscover the width, breadth and depth of humanity, and few pieces of theatre will serve that interconnected, social feeling like this one. As well as playing all the instruments you hear throughout the evening, the supporting cast does a sterling job of making the world real. A surprising number of minor characters are given their own mini-plotlines, each with big songs for their actors. No story is about just one person, even when that person is as iconic as Amélie herself.

Chris Jared plays love interest Nino, an aspiring artist with an outlook on life and set of social skills that resonate with Amélie’s own. Jared brings enough mystery and danger to the role to help the audience feel as wary as our love-averse heroine, yet tempers it with a beautiful singing voice that could win over the most unsteady of hearts. Love can be silly at the very same time it is making your whole world grind to a halt. Jared and Brisson’s chemistry captures this contradiction beautifully and their climactic coming together is a perfect moment of silent musical theatre.

As well as the lockdown starving us of human interaction and turning us all socially awkward in our own distinct ways, we have also been starved of foreign travel. Designer Madeleine Girling and lighting designer Elliot Griggs deserve a lot of credit for transporting us to a magical Montmartre. The stage proves endlessly adaptable over the course of the evening, yet each scene contains an impressive amount of detail that nearly-but-not-quite makes up for any travel ban.

The songs by Daniel Messé and Nathan Tysen are well thought-out and clever, but definitely are elevated by the decision to have them performed by the ensemble in quasi-gallic arrangements. A lot of theatre is described as ‘transportive’, but this show is more deserving than most.

There is a cliché in writing that your work should be streamlined and stripped of anything not immediately pertinent to the main plot. By this logic, Amélie would be about half as long and a very different experience. It would not evoke that famous Parisian pastime of spending hours in a café people-watching, and nor would it honour the source material’s fascination with the interconnectedness of everybody and everything.

If you are the sort of theatregoer who enjoys sitting in an expertly crafted world and luxuriating in all of its quirks – even when those quirks include a piano full of dildos – this could be the show for you. I could not be happier that a piece of musical theatre so unafraid to be its odd and joyful self has found a home in our West End.

Ian Bowkett