The enduring popularity of West Side Story, now well into its seventh decade, has hit new peaks with the just-ended ten-week run of the Bernstein-Sondheim-Robbins-Laurents musical at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris.
Without any big box office names in the American touring cast, the 2,500-seat Châtelet reported the 85 performances from 20 October to 31 December 2023 played to an average capacity of 98%-plus and amazingly 73% of tickets sold were to first-time visitors to the theatre famed for staging famous Broadway musicals in English. Altogether 138,385 saw the Lonny Price-directed classic.
West Side Story was making its fifth Châtelet appearance since 1981, this time in a production which first saw the light of day at the end of 2022 in Germany and has since toured Europe and Asia. It goes to Bordeaux, Lyon, Rouen and Nantes this year.
Since the then artistic director, Jean-Luc Choplin, de-emphasised the operetta and ballet side of the Châtelet’s programme in 2004 and experimented with English language musicals, Parisians have been treated to high-quality productions of five of Sondheim’s finest, A Little Night Music, Sweeney Todd, Into the Woods, Sundays in the Park With George and Passion, as well as iconic Broadway shows like Singin’ in the Rain, Kiss Me, Kate and 42nd Street.
The theatre also hosted the world premiere of An American In Paris in 2014 (adapted from the iconic 1951 Gene Kelly movie) before it went to a successful Broadway run. Since Choplin left the Châtelet, he has kept his love affair with the Great American Songbook burning bright with lavish productions of Funny Girl at the Marigny (2019) and Cabaret (2022) and A Funny Thing Happened On the Way to the Forum (2023) at Lido2.
When Forum ends next month, waiting in the wings at Lido 2 is Richard O’Brien’s cult classic Rocky Horror Show (27 February to 4 April).
This year the Châtelet is breaking with tradition – no American musical with French surtitles but a French musical, Les Misérables, with English surtitles!
Forty-six years after Claude-Michel Schönberg and Alain Boublil’s box office smash first took off Les Mis returns to its roots with a reworked libretto by Boublil under a French director, Ladislas Chollat, best known for the 2019 movie Let’s Dance.
So for ‘One Day More’ expect ‘Le Grand Jour’ and ‘On My Own’ will no doubt still sound just as heartbreaking as ‘Mon Histoire’. It opens on 24 November and runs to 31 December.
Jeremy Chapman
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