Marry Me a Little – Theatre Marigny Studio, Paris

Marry Me a Little at the Theatre Marigny Studio, Paris until 24 February 2019.

Star rating: three stars ★ ★ ★ ✩ ✩

Just a couple of weeks after an original-language French musical, Notre Dame de Paris, hit London, we see the reverse side of the coin, an original-language American musical launching in Paris, at the elegant Theatre Marigny, just off the Champs-Elysees.

Not really a musical but Marry Me a Little, a sung-through revue using out-takes from the final versions of some of Stephen Sondheim’s best shows (and one of his worst!), Follies, Company, A Little Night Music, Anyone Can Whistle and A Funny Thing Happened On the Way to the Forum.

Also in the mix – three numbers from Sondheim’s first musical Saturday Night, written to be the writer’s Broadway debut in 1955 but cancelled when the lead producer died and underfunded when the chance came again.

The score was put away until the Sondheim Society rescued it and gave the show its world professional premiere at the Bridewell Theatre just off Fleet Street in 1997. Three years later Saturday Night finally received its first and notable production Off-Broadway at Second Stage Theatre.

When Marry Me a Little opened in 1980 as an Off-Broadway revue pieced together by Craig Lucas and Norman Rene, Saturday Night had been lying idle for a quarter of a century and ‘So Many People’, ‘One Moment With You’ and its title song were being heard for the first time.

Marry Me also promoted one or two Sondheim curios, ‘The Girls of Summer’, a mournful early beauty written for a 1956 Broadway play starring Shelley Winters, and the witty ‘Pour Le Sport’, the one survivor, also from 1956, from the unproduced The Last Resorts.

The revue consists of 19 songs without dialogue to illustrate Lucas and Rene’s slight confection of two lonely people living single lives in cramped New York apartments, knowing of each other’s existence, fancying each other, yet too shy to start a relationship.

The loneliness reaches peak on Saturday nights when everyone else seems to be having fun but still the fellow can’t pluck up the courage to arrange ‘A Moment With You’, look into ‘Your Eyes are Blue’ and live ‘Happily Ever After’. But life is rarely like that.

They can only get it on in their fantasies and the story predictably ends when he admits ‘It Wasn’t Meant to Happen’, one of five axed numbers from Follies, the best-known of them ‘Can That Boy Foxtrot!’, now a cabaret favourite.

As sung by Canadian soprano Kimy McLaren, you would never have guessed that ‘Foxtrot’, with its wicked innuendo, was Sondheim at his naughtiest. 

She barely raised a smile from an initially quiet audience who came into their own with sustained applause at the end. That’s the French way: as an actor you never know from the muted reaction during a performance whether you’re winning or not until it’s all over.

Opera-trained singers and musicals are often disappointing bedfellows and McLaren, remembered from her Cinderella in Into the Woods at the Châtelet in 2014, misses the mark here. 

Although diction and pitch are perfect, especially in ‘There Won’t Be Trumpets’, a great number unbelievably ditched from the original production of the ill-starred Anyone Can Whistle (Angela Lansbury’s first musical), she was just too operatic for my taste.

McLaren and Châtelet regular Damian Thantrey were also older than intended when Marry Me was first written but that was a feasible scenario as the sense of loneliness can only deepen the longer it goes on. He delivers a finely acted ‘It Wasn’t Meant to Happen’ to close the show but generally a lighter touch is needed.

Thantrey is a Sondheim veteran, having played the Wolf and Cinderella’s Prince in Into the Woods in a Châtelet portfolio which also features A Little Night Music, Sunday in the Park With George and Passion.

Director Mirabelle Ordinaire has matched them well in this 70-minute two-hander although there are three people on stage most of the time with the audience never quite sure whether pianist Charlotte Gauthier is part of the story or not.

Phillipine Ordinaire’s effective and updated set places the two cluttered apartments side by side with computer and mobile replacing typewriter and landline. Both actors are on stage together but telling their back-stories and future fantasies separately.

It was inevitable that when Jean-Luc Choplin, that great supporter of American musicals and Sondheim’s in particular, retired from the hot seat at the Chatelet just before it closed for a massive make-over, he would be honouring Sondheim somewhere else in Paris.

He is now director of the Marigny and Marry Me a Little, played in the 180-seater Studio, ideal for this bijou piece, was his opening shot. More and better Sondheim can be expected.

Meanwhile, it’s all systems go with the gorgeously renovated 1,000-seat Grand Salle ready to welcome Guys and Dolls ­– the cast is headed by Ria Jones – in an 18-week run from 13 March. More work for the surtitles writers!

Jeremy Chapman