Singin’ in the Rain completed its six-week run in the nave of the Grand Palais in Paris earlier on this month and proved itself the most popular English-language musical since the Theatre du Chatelet started bringing one over every year.
The powers-that-be at the1,800-seat Chatelet, closed for two years for elaborate refurbishment, daringly revived their Christmas show (which had two spins at their own theatre in 2015) at the Grand Palais at the bottom of the Champs Elysees.
The show, which had Dan Burton as Don Lockwood, Gareth Valentine as musical director, Stephen Mear as choreographer and Canadian-born Robert Carsen as director, attracted 105,603 audience to its 45 performances and played to 99.85% capacity.
In part, it was a new, younger audience as 65% had never seen a musical at the Chatelet. In March 2015 the same cast attracted 25,200 to 15 performances and when brought back for 50 shows over Christmas and New Year at the end of 2015, a further 82,350 saw it.
In total, 213,180 Parisian theatregoers, already familiar with the 1952 Gene Kelly classic movie, have now seen the musical comedy.
It was Chatelet director-general Jean-Luc Choplin in 2006 who decided Parisians needed to see and appreciate the great American musicals, in English with surtitles, and thus began to educate them in an art form they had previously shunned.
Candide was followed by The Sound of Music; West Side Story; Sondheim himself took a bow at the end of A Little Night Music, Sweeney Todd; Into the Woods; My Fair Lady; The King and I;, Kiss Me, Kate; Passion; An American in Paris fittingly premiered in Paris before taking Broadway and London by storm with the same leads; and 42nd Street brought Choplin’s reign at the helm to a triumphant close at the end of 2016.
Ruth Mackenzie, the new artistic director, has pledged to continue Choplin’s obsession with American musicals and rolled out Singin’ in the Rain again for starters, but in a different setting, in a huge 2500-seater “greenhouse” at the foot of Paris’ most famous street. A winning beginning.
Jeremy Chapman
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Singin’ in the Rain – Theatre du Chatelet, Paris – Review
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