Le Guide du Parfait Gentleman Assassin – Théâtre du Palais-Royal, Paris

Picture: Fabienne Rappeneau

Le Guide du Parfait Gentleman Assassin continues at the Théâtre du Palais-Royal, Paris until 20 December 2026.

Star rating: five stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

The lineage behind Le Guide du parfait gentleman assassin is almost as tangled as its plot. Roy Horniman’s 1907 novel Israel Rank: The Autobiography of a Criminal first became the basis for the 1949 Ealing classic film Kind Hearts and Coronets, in which Alec Guinness famously played all eight members of the doomed D’Ysquith family single-handedly.

The same novel, decades later, inspired Robert L Freedman and Steven Lutvak’s stage musical A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder, which opened on Broadway in November 2013, ran 905 performances, and picked up four Tony Awards in 2014 on top of seven Drama Desk honours.

The same source material resurfaced on the big screen earlier this year in How to Make a Killing, John Patton Ford’s contemporary New York reworking starring Glen Powell as the murderous heir — a reminder, released to a fairly muted reception, of just how well the Edwardian original still holds up.

Stéphane Laporte’s French adaptation, staged at the Théâtre du Palais-Royal under Virginie Lemoine’s direction, finally brings the musical home to the country that indirectly inspired it. For Laporte it is nothing less than “the adaptation of my life” – the work he considers the most French of all Broadway musicals, a cocktail of “one third Benny Hill, one third James Ivory and one third 1/3 Agatha Christie”. For him, the show mixes the sophistication of a Guitry comedy with the frank hilarity of an Offenbach operetta, the very British polish of Downton Abbey and The Remains of the Day, and the detective intrigue the French public has always adored. So protective of the original was he that, for the first time in 25 years, he altered neither a single line nor a single rhyme. The wait has been worth it.

Lemoine, a writer-director whose own credits range from Suite française to this year’s revival of Le Manuel de la jeune mariée 1957 at Avignon, describes her intention as something like the improbable voyage Jules Verne might have taken in the company of Edgar Allan Poe and Groucho Marx — and that’s exactly the tone the production hits.

Her staging departs quite deliberately from Darko Tresnjak’s Tony-winning Broadway original, favouring a lighter, more nimbly theatrical solution over Broadway’s more elaborate physical production. Grégoire Lemoine’s set leans on a handful of Edwardian arches and frames that reconfigure constantly rather than a heavier scenic apparatus, and Mariejo Buffon’s choreography is woven so tightly into the scene changes that the two become genuinely hard to tell apart.

Standing out, however, is the tongue-in-cheek, tango flavoured, irresistible duet ‘Better With a Man’ between the characters Monty Navarro and Henry D’Ysquith, the latter of whom the irrepressible Benoît Cauden portrays with a clear nod to Michel Serrault, who headlined the original stage production of La Cage aux folles in the very same Théâtre du Palais-Royal from 1973 to 1978.

That inventiveness extends to the show’s cast, led with real command by Gaétan Borg as Navarro, who has also co-written award-winning musicals of his own with Laporte. Monty’s murderous ascent through the aristocracy is genuinely believable, with a faux innocent charm, never letting his body count curdle his likeability. Borg’s natural nonchalance and neutrality serve the character especially well.

Opposite him, Cauden takes on the production’s most obvious high-wire act: every single one of Monty’s ill-fated D’Ysquith relatives – the same one actor conceit Guinness originated on screen – and does it with the comic elasticity that won him the 2022 Molière for Best Male Newcomer as Leo Bloom in Alexis Michalik’s staging of Mel Brooks’ The Producers.

Camille Nicolas brings a bright, socially ravenous energy to Sibella, while Emma Brazeilles gives Phoebe D’Ysquith a warmth that makes the love triangle’s other corner genuinely count rather than just mark time.

Charlotte Gauthier’s musical direction deserves particular credit. The orchestra here is deliberately minimalist, and she conducts it with a precision and wit that never lets the small forces feel less than bigger. That suits Lutvak and Freedman’s score, which was never built to produce hit songs in the first place: taken out of context, individual numbers rarely announce themselves as standalones and none of them are likely to linger as earworms on the way out.

Within the show, though, that same quality becomes a real strength – the songs are so tightly stitched into the plot’s comic momentum that they barely register as songs at all, more a continuous, faintly operetta-flavoured patter that never once stops the story to applaud itself. Act by act, that seamlessness is arguably the production’s most impressive achievement.

The result is a show that more than earns its place at the gorgeous Palais-Royal, a theatre that has been staging comedy since 1783, as well as operettas such as the excellent Les Fiancés de Loches in 2014. This well-crafted though little known gem of musical theatre, yet to be seen in the West End despite being so British in tone, is a great choice for the venue.

A musical adaptation of Alfred Hitchcock’s TV series Alfred Hitchcock Presents, another work by Lutvak who sadly passed away in 2023, was given a brilliant full production at the Theatre Royal in Bath in the spring of last year, but despite its climatic jazz-infused score, it unfortunately never went further.

Though it may not boast the flashiest of scores either, this French adaptation of A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder, showcasing la crème de la crème of French musical theatre, is probably one of the most purely enjoyable and closest to perfect Broadway evenings Paris has seen in years.

Patrick Honoré