The third and last presentation in the 2014 Encores! Season
of Broadway musicals in concert was Irma
La Douce, which premièred in New York at the Plymouth Theatre (now the Gerald Schoenfeld) in
1960 and then moved to the Alvin Theatre.
Unusual for its era, Irma La Douce
was a French musical play (music by
Marguerite Monnot and lyrics and book by Alexandre Breffort) which débuted
in Paris at the Théâtre Gramont in
1956 and then opened in London’s West End in 1958 (with English book and lyrics
by Julian More, David Heneker, and Monty Norman) in a production directed by
Peter Brook. The Broadway version, which
was produced by David Merrick and
starred Elizabeth Seal (in the title role), Keith Michell, and Clive Revill,
all from the London cast, played for more than a year, running 524 performances. (The Paris première ran for four years and
the London production stayed on the boards for three, accumulating 1,512
performances.) Of the Broadway staging, which
was nominated for several 1961 Tonys including Best Musical (Irma lost to Bye Bye Birdie, but Seal won for Best Actress in a Musical), Life magazine said Irma was “a
French fairy tale for wicked grown-ups who want to believe in love.” As the title character repeatedly says, “Dis donc!” (an untranslatable French
interjection that can mean anything from “wow,” to “goodness,” to “hey,” to “look here,” to “by
the way,” to “that’s enough,” to “well,”
to “listen,” and just about anything else that expresses surprise or draws
attention to what you are about to say; it’s also the title of one of Irma’s most striking songs and dance
numbers).
I was a tad young
to have seen this “adult” show, which Jack Viertel, Encores! Artistic Director,
dubbed “by far the hippest musical on Broadway” in its day, when I was first starting to see Broadway
musicals, either in Washington or in New York City, but I recall that Irma did play at D.C.’s National Theatre
(before its Broadway run), and there was talk among my parents’ friends of this
peculiar (and naughty) play (Dis donc!). (In fact, my mom says she recalls having seen
it with my dad, which seems both possible and likely.) Let’s remember that September 1960 was still
the Eisenhower era (John F. Kennedy wasn’t elected president until November and
didn’t take office until January 1961), more part of the complacent ’50s than
the go-go ’60s, so a comedy about a lady of the evening was a startling
phenomenon. Irma’s biggest competition on Broadway when it opened was Rodgers
and Hammerstein’s final collaboration, which Viertel called “undoubtedly
the un-hippest” show on Broadway, The Sound of Music: a singing nun versus a singing prostitute! Hair,
the musical that put nudity on a Broadway stage, didn’t début there until April
1968, the end of the decade. Sweet Charity, a musical about a taxi
dancer, the stand-in for a hooker, opened in January 1966, over five years
after Irma La Douce came to New
York. (In Federico Fellini’s
1957 film Nights of Cabiria, the
young woman was a streetwalker, but Neil
Simon, Cy Coleman, and Dorothy Fields sanitized Charity Hope Valentine, who’s
still in “the rent-a-body business” in the adaptation, for Broadway
consumption.
Soon, I began
hearing some of Irma’s score,
particularly Clive Revill’s rendition of “The Valse Milieu,” the ballad that
introduces the setting and atmosphere of the play (and much of its Parisian
argot, which I’ll mention in a bit), and it has always fascinated me. (“Our Language of Love,” sung in the
first act and then reprised twice, was the song from Irma’s score that became what Viertel called a “semi-enduring
standard.”) Long before there were French
musicals on U.S. stages (Les Misérables, 1987-2003; Miss Saigon, 1991-2001), even before the British
started writing and exporting musical plays, when musical theater of the kind
we know from old-time Broadway was a solely American art form, Irma La Douce was a phenomenon and its
very existence was intriguing. (In 1958,
a French revue, La Plume de Ma Tante,
had opened on Broadway—and also played at the Capital’s National— but that had
no book and French musical revues had been the basis for U.S. entertainments
for decades, though not at the Broadway level for the most part.) Beyond some of the songs, however, I only
knew Irma from the non-musical 1963 Billy
Wilder film starring Shirley MacLaine and Jack Lemmon, which dispensed with three-quarters of the material’s
charm along with the songs. (Without the
songs, as you’ll discern, Irma La Douce
is just a frantic farce that happens to be about a whore and her pimp. The only explanation I’ve found for the
deletion is that Wilder wasn’t comfortable staging songs and dances.)
There’s been no revival of Irma
in New York aside from a truly stripped-down concert (one piano—but without
amplification) in 2008 by Musicals
Tonight! and the only other
restaging I found in the United States was another concert version in San
Francisco in 2008.
The concert
version of Irma, the first
Encores! musical “that didn’t originate on American soil,” opened at the New York City Center on West 55th
Street on 7 May for its customary brief run, closing on 11 May. Diana, my usual theater partner, and I saw
the show on Friday evening, 9 May. The
concert adaptation and direction was by John
Doyle (Tony for the 2005 revival of Sweeney
Todd; his 2006 revival of Company
won the Best Revival of a
Musical Tony), with choreography by Chase Brock (assistant choreographer of the 2003
revival of Wonderful Town on
Broadway; Lucille Lortel Award
Nominee for Outstanding Choreography for 2011’s The Blue Flower). The orchestra is once again conducted by
Encores! Musical Director Rob Berman (who did the same honors for The Most Happy Fella, on which I
reported on ROT on 10 April) using
arrangements by André Popp and additional orchestrations by Robert
Ginzler, the original orchestrators. (Supplemental dance music was composed for
Broadway by John Kander.) John
Lee Beatty designed the sets, more elaborate for Irma than is usual for Encores!
Irma La Douce, in the dead-on characterization of IBDB, the
Internet Broadway Database, “is not only French; it is intensely
Parisian French. Set in an area tourists
seek, but so seldom find, its musical idiom, its moral atmosphere, its plot and
its argot are part of Paris not even all Parisians know.” It is, in the words of the opening number (“The
Valse Milieu”), a “story of passion, bloodshed, desire and death . . .
everything, in fact, that makes life worth living.” (Dis
donc! Along with the argot terms,
that phrase has echoed in my head ever since I first heard Revill sing it on the
cast recording.) The plot is the tale of Irma-La-Douce
(her name means “Irma the Sweet” and is typical of the characters’ names in
this play, as you’ll see), a successful Paris prostitute, or poule (‘hen’) in the show’s vocabulary. An impecunious law student, Nestor-Le-Fripe (“Nestor
the Shabby”), wanders into Bar-Des-Inquiets (Bar of the Anxious), the bistro in
Pigalle, Paris’s red-light district, owned by Bob-Le-Hotu (hotu is a kind of fresh-water fish commonly called a nase, but the
slang meaning is hard to translate; the closest I can get here is Bob the
Creep), who acts as the narrator. Nestor,
like many of the other men in the milieu
(argot for the underworld scene), falls in love with Irma and becomes her mec (‘guy’), the local slang for ‘pimp.’ The
young law student becomes jealous of her customers, however, so to keep her for
himself, Nestor disguises himself as a rich, older man with a long, red beard
named Oscar and becomes her sole client.
(One reviewer characterized Nestor as “poor but noble”: “poor,” yes, but
“noble,” not so much. He’s not trying to
save Irma from the streets—he wants to keep her to himself!)
To pay Irma’s fee (grisbi, argot for ‘money’), Monsieur Oscar takes a job polishing a
dance floor at night—by hand—and is admired for his coup by the other mecs, who welcome him as one of them: Jojo-Les-Yeux-Sales (“Jojo-Dirty-Eyes”),
Robert-Les-Diams (“Robert the Rocks”), Persil-Le-Noir (“Persil the Shady”), and
Frangipane (“The Flower”). (Apparently Breffort actually knew a crook
called “Jo-Les-Yeux-Sales.” Don’t you
just love these French “underworld” names?
They’re a hoot ’na half!) But having
taken Irma out of the clutches of Polyte-Le-Mou (“Polyte the Bull”), AKA Le
Boss, and falling afoul of the corrupt Police Inspector, the chief flic (‘cop’), for taking Irma out of
circulation, Nestor makes a few enemies, too. No longer able to keep up this exhausting ruse,
however, Irma’s “Wreck of a Mec” does away with his alter ego. Convicted in a kangaroo trial of murdering
Oscar, Nestor’s transported to Devil’s Island, the French penal colony off the
coast of French Guiana near the Equator.
Hearing that Irma is expecting their baby at Christmas, he determines to
get home and escapes with the gang of mecs
convicted with him. Returning to Paris
and proving that Oscar’s not really dead, Nestor and Irma reunite in time for
the births of their twin sons, Nestor and Oscar, upon which, in order to
conform, however belatedly, to the conventions of morality, they get married. Dis
donc!
(I wonder if that last plot bit, which Bob tosses out at the end as a kind
of “oh, by the way” afterthought, was added for the tenderer sensibilities of
English and American audiences. After
all, France is the nation where former President François Mitterrand’s funeral
in 1996 was attended by both his wife and his long-time mistress and where
another French president, François Hollande, had an affair with an actress
while living in the official residence with another mistress—after having
separated from his first mistress with whom he had had four children. Dis
donc, I don’t think the French would much care if a mec marries his poule or
not just because they had a couple of bébés,
non.)
Okay, I’m being a little silly, I admit. But that’s sort of the effect that Irma La Douce has. It is silly—without the music and the Gallic frisson it’s practically inane. (It doesn’t help matters that almost the
whole story is in act one, leaving mostly a lot of vamping for act two.) Let’s acknowledge right off that M. Breffort
is no Molière; he’s not even Jean-François Regnard (“Molière lite,” on whose
play The Heir Apparent I reported on
25 April). I don’t know his other plays
(he also wrote prose works), none of which seem to have been published or
performed in English, but I read that the book for Irma was based on a short piece, Les Harengs terribles (“The terrible herrings,” ca. 1950—and no, I
have no idea what it’s about), Breffort wrote for a Paris cabaret
performance. (That could explain why Irma couldn’t sustain a
two-hour-ten-minute stretch without petering out after intermission.) It’s not just the overall plot that creaks,
but several scenes seem to have been composed with Breffort’s logic switch in
the off position. (Granted, I don’t really
know how much of the book was reinvented by Mssrs. More, Heneker, and
Norman.) Nestor’s trial is beyond
absurd—and I don’t mean Beckett, Ionesco, or even Kafka—and his attempts to
prove that he didn’t kill Oscar because, first, he was Oscar and, then, Oscar’s still alive, defy recapping
altogether. (Kris Kringle proves he’s
real because he gets mail through the U.S. Post Office; Oscar proves he’s alive
because he pays sales tax! Dis donc!) You just have to buy it or the play doesn’t
conclude. Despite these weaknesses,
though, Irma La Douce is fun
precisely because it’s (French) fluff and because of the music, which retains
its Gallic panache even in translation. (Marguerite Monnot wrote many of the songs
performed by the great French chanteuse Édith Piaf, including “La Vie en rose”
and my favorite Piaf recording, “Milord,” and that musical style is audible in
several of Irma La Douce’s
numbers.)
The musical ensemble,
perhaps better described as a band this time, which numbered a “herculean”
38 for Fella, was pared down to ten instruments for Irma, approximating, Viertel said, “the original
instrumentation” of the Broadway production.
The “café-style band” came “complete with an accordion for Parisian
color.” Musically, the decision worked
very well indeed, both as a vehicle for the songs and also for the “Parisian
color,” which was created and maintained excellently by the musicians
(particularly that accordionist, William Schimmel), the singers, the set and
costume “consultants,” and the cast. (After
Most Happy Fella, I voiced some
complaints about the sound system at City Center, and I have to reiterate them
here. When one or two people sing, I
could distinguish the words well enough, but when there were more than two
voices, the lyrics mostly got lost. The
sound design for Irma La Douce was
from Scott Lehrer.) But there was an
unexpected element to the band’s presence on stage—they were placed on a raised
bandstand up and left of center stage—and I don’t know whether it was original
with director Doyle or came from the West End/Broadway staging—perhaps even the
Paris première. The frequenters of Bar-Des-Inquiets, occupying the rest of
the stage below the bandstand, treated the musicians as the house band,
acknowledging them with raised drinks or other gestures. Dis
donc! (Our seats were high up in the
balcony again, this time on the house left side, so I couldn’t see the band
members very well—my view was cut off by the proscenium arch—so I don’t know if
they gestured back, though I presume there was some quid pro quo.) This wasn’t a
big part of the show—there was no accompanying dialogue, just random silent
bits—but it went along with the heightened theatricality of the production
(which I’ll describe more later).
As I mentioned,
the look of this show was a little more elaborate than most Encores! concerts,
with Beatty (retiring from the Encores! gig following Irma after designing every presentation for the concert series
since the start in 1994) having conceived a scaffold-like matrix that framed
the Bar-Des-Inquiets as well as the
other suggested settings, which include the streets of Pigalle, Irma’s room,
the Hotel Rapid, the Bridge of Caulaincourt (the poules’ stroll), a courtroom, a prison ship, Devil’s Island, a
police station, and so on. Talkin’ Broadway’s Matthew Murray called
Beatty’s milieu, “real and
fantasy Paris all at once.” Only the seedy bistro, with its exposed brick
walls decorated with French liquor ads, had set pieces (the counter, café
tables and chairs); the rest of the scenes were suggested by a few select props
and action. The playing area was less
narrow than the one for Most Happy Fella
(principally, I assume, because the bandstand needed to be so much smaller than
the one for the previous show), so there was more staging and bigger dance
numbers. Beatty’s set was moodily lit by
Paul Miller who kept the feel of a gritty Paris quartier and one of its seamier bouges
(dives). The denizens of
Bar-Des-Inquiets were clothed by costume consultant Ann Hould-Ward who put Irma
alone in color, a bright red dress (the color of passion . . . and hookers)
with a purple, heart-shaped bodice. (One
reviewer noted that these are the colors of blood and bruises—though neither
figures in the plot of Irma La Douce;
the mecs, even Le Boss, are decidedly
unviolent and Irma’s no Suzie Wong.) The
men’s duds, all shades of gray or brown, are variations on suits (not even one apache scarf or striped shirt in the
lot!); they may not be chic, but these mecs
are respectably dressed.
The acting and singing ensemble, all male (Irma’s the only
female role), performed well, evoking the slightly sleazy underworld characters
that might be the Gallic counterparts to Guys
and Doll’s gamblers and lowlifes (that is, not really dangerous or even bad
. . . if you overlook how they make their livings) with panache and good
spirits. Even Le Boss, potentially the
nastiest mec because he wants to
control Irma and goes after Nestor, is less Tony Soprano (whom he resembled
vaguely in Chris Sullivan’s
performance) than Lippy or Slug, the two gangsters from Kiss Me Kate (in the film; they have no names in the stage
version). There’s little distinction
among the mecs (Sam Bolen as Frangipane, Ben Crawford as Persil-Le-Noir,
Zachary James as Jojo-Les-Yeux-Sales, and Ken Krugman as Robert-Les-Diams)
aside from appearance and vocal range (Bolen is a little guy with a high tenor,
for instance), but they perform well together in their several group numbers
(when I could overlook that amplification muddle). In the role of the Police Inspector, Stephen
DeRosa looks like an accountant but manages to project a little menace even as
he lets us see that he’s not terribly effective at either graft (innocent
Nestor bests him, after all) or law enforcement. (I was reminded, in a comic and
non-threatening vein, of Gideon, the vicious killer played by Ned Glass in Charade—a bald little man described by
James Coburn’s Tex Panthollow as “even meaner ’n’ I am.”) All the men save McClure took on incidental roles,
and Gets especially became a sort of utility actor, as part of the theatrical
style of Irma that also encompassed Beatty’s
multi-purpose unit set.
As Nestor, the naïve and
straight-laced law student—he drinks milk, dis
donc!—who becomes Irma’s lover and mec,
Rob McClure was disappointing. His voice is fine and he did well in the
musical numbers from the technical point of view, but he projected so little
character aside from wide-eyed innocence that he left Jennifer Bowles
essentially alone in their two-character scenes and duets. There was little romantic chemistry between
the two leads, and I couldn’t help wondering what would possibly have attracted
Bowles’s Irma to McClure’s Nestor to start with. McClure has gotten considerable praise for his
Broadway début as Charlie Chaplin in Broadway’s Chaplin (2012), for which he received a Tony nomination, and his
appearance in the 2011 Encores! presentation of Where’s Charley?—in which he also played a dual role—but I’ve never
seen his work before (he worked regionally, particularly in the Philadelphia
area, before his New York début), and I’m not impressed with his range. A lot of shows need a star turn, or at least
a really sparkling performance, to sell them, and Irma La Douce appears to be one of those, but McClure didn’t shine
here. He just seemed like a little boy
(he’s a small man) trying to play a grown-up and not pulling it off, leaving a
hole in the center of the production.
McClure got no
help from Malcolm Gets as Bob-Le-Hotu, either.
More than anything else, this Irma
needed Clive Revill! (I’d add “or
someone like him,” but there isn’t any such person. Revill’s the kind of performer who just
dominates a scene; he’s so magnetic I can’t focus on anything or anyone else
when he’s on the stage or screen. Who
else can do that without being a scene-stealer or scenery-chewer, dis donc?) Gets, like McClure, received
great mentions for past work (Tony nom for 2003’s Amour and an Obie in 1995 for Merrily We Roll Along and The Two Gentlemen of Verona), but like his castmate, I don’t know his work and he
was so lacking in personality as Bob, I couldn’t reconcile the centrality of
his role, the glue that holds this slim story together, with his performance. With a weak Nestor and a bland Bob, the whole
of this Irma rests on the performance
of Jennifer Bowles. It also places the entire
weight of the show’s theatrical success on the silly book and the score since
two of the three main performances have been nullified.
Fortunately for John Doyle and Encores!, Bowles hit mostly
the right notes (as it were) with the title role. Even without much of a partner off of whom to
play, her singing was evocative of character and story, full of naïve cynicism
(is there such as thing as that?—she’s sort of the Gallic musical comedy
counterpart of Melina Mercouri’s Ilya in Never
on Sunday, a film that opened in the U.S. three days after Irma preemed on Broadway) and total amour for her mec. Charles Isherwood of
the New York Times
complained that Bowles’s Irma was “a bit like . . . Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm
going slumming”; but that’s how the part’s written, so either you buy it or you
have to reject the whole play (which is pretty much what Isherwood did). Bowles’s dancing, while energetic, expressed
less character than her singing, but that may have been more the fault of Chase
Brock than the actress herself.
Fortunately for Encores! and Diana and me, Irma La Douce is basically an ensemble
play, with two characters spotlighted and a narrator/Greek chorus to fill in
the gaps. Both Bob and Nestor join the mecs for many of the scenes and numbers,
and even Irma takes part, albeit as a focal figure, in several of the group
dances. Brock’s choreography is
pleasingly saucy and energetic, with an especially delightful and spirited “dance
of the penguins” in act two’s hallucinatory “Arctic Ballet,” with Bowles and
four men in long, red beards! (Dis donc!) So Doyle could paper over the deficiencies of
his individual casting choices and make the show work as a whole—although with
a less sparkle than it ought to have (and otherwise would have had). The original Broadway outing got Tony noms for
Best Musical, Best Direction of a
Musical (Peter Brook), Best Actress in a Musical (Elizabeth Searle, who won over Julie
Andrews in Camelot, Carol Channing in Show Girl, and Nancy Walker in Do Re
Mi), Best Featured Actor in
a Musical (Clive Revill), among others; the Encores! edition wouldn’t
have gotten such recognition, I don’t think.
Nonetheless, for what Irma is
and for what Encores! purports to present—essentially a rearview-mirror glimpse
of a moment in musical-theater history—this Irma
La Douce was nicely handled and presented, resulting in a completely
enjoyable, if not scintillating, theater experience for me (and, from the
chatter as we left the theater, for many other spectators that Friday
night). I have reservations about some
of Doyle’s casting decisions, but not his stage work. He probably could have gotten more
distinctive and emphatic performances out of McClure and Gets (I’m guessing
based on their résumés since I haven’t seen their previous work), and for that
I judge his work less positively, but I also have to acknowledge that Encores!
only rehearses for eight days (plus one dress rehearsal)—and Gets replaced the
announced Allan Corduner on 14 April for a rehearsal period that started nine days
later. Given all those circumstances,
Doyle did an acceptable and competent job of mounting Irma La Douce for Encores!, though not a truly excellent interpretation
that might have shown why the play caught so many people’s attention 54 years
ago. That’s a shame, but not a calamity.
The press was largely negative, a consensus to which the
crowd with whom I left the theater didn’t subscribe, as they vocally
affirmed. (Notices bore headlines or
subheads like “Musical story of
Parisian prostitute suffers from stodgy direction and a convoluted plot,” “‘Irma
La Duce’ production lacks zest,” “Lovely
songs—and penguins—save dated musical’s plot,” “Irma La Douce Isn’t
So Sweet,” and “How Was Irma la Douce Ever a Hit?!”) In the Times,
Isherwood dismissed the play as “a rusty relic” which needed “a small Pernod .
. . [o]r maybe a large draft of absinthe . . . to restore the zest” of the
original. Although the Timesman praised the “small but
hard-working cast,” particularly Bowles and McClure, who, he said, “fling
themselves into” their roles “with energy to spare,” in the end, “it all feels
about as fresh and tasty as a day-old croissant.” Isherwood gave a lot of credit to Berman’s instrumental
ensemble, who “make a comparatively mighty and merry sound that does more than
anything to bring alive the musical’s now-faded charms.” “Still,” the reviewer concluded, “‘Irma La
Douce’ may be a show destined to live on in its admirers’ memories, and on
recording, as opposed to a viable work for the contemporary stage.” He ended his notice with a bitterly humorous
quip: “By intermission, I was ready to give myself my own cute nickname:
Charles-Le-Bored-Senseless.”
The Daily News’s
Joe Dziemianowicz labeled the play “so leaden that it’s ‘Irma La Dull,’” declaring that “the story is unwieldy”
and adding that “flaky casting and direction . . . don’t help matters.” Dziemianowicz did concede, though, that “bouncy
songs . . . and the 10-piece orchestra add jolts of ooh-la-la.” He concluded, “It takes buckets of charm and
magnetism to pull off this walk on the weird and wild side,” but observed that
the cast, singling out McClure and Bowles in particular, can be seen to be “working
hard” to accomplish this. In her New York Post review, Elisabeth Vincentelli called the plot of Irma La Douce a “bizarre comic romance,” and objected that director
Doyle “lacks the soufflé-light touch required for a show big on whimsy,”
engaging in “heavy-handed staging.”
Making matters worse, Vincentelli asserted, “the leads don’t click,”
expressing complaints about both McClure’s and Bowles’s performances. In the end, the Post reviewer decided that “this one’s for hardcore showtune buffs.”
In am New York, Matt Windman pointed out
that the play, touted 54 years ago as “hip and sexy,” just “looks sanitized by
today’s standards.” The musical’s “premise
. . . is relatively thin and the farcical shenanigans produce few laughs,”
Windman affirmed, but added that “it has some attractive songs” despite Doyle’s
“grim-looking production” which “lacks any sense of zest.” After disparaging each and every ridiculous
plot element—which he made even sillier by his presentation, of course—Jesse
Green wondered, “Well, perhaps the joke came off better in 1960,” in New York magazine. “I have to say this is entirely mystifying,”
he continued, and declared that the musical’s book, “is possibly the most repulsive
I have ever encountered and, for what it’s worth, the most bizarre.” (Just to drive home his point, Green noted
that “just when you think the thing can’t get any weirder, there’s the
penguin-hallucination ballet. Oh, you
read that right.”) Of the play’s vaunted
“frankness,” Green decided that it “now reads as a smokescreen for smarm” and
that the “fablelike tone is also a dodge to keep the reeking thing at arm’s
length.” The man from New York described the result, “a rare
botch” by Encores! directed with “dour sensibility” by Doyle, as “part Fantasticks,
part letters to Penthouse” and even asserted that “to modern
sensibilities, wholly misogynistic—with a soupçon of homophobia and racism
thrown in for good measure.” (I get the
misogyny—it’s endemic in the mid-century plot—but I don’t see the racism and
homophobia. Race and sexual preference
aren’t mentioned in Irma La Douce as
I remember it.) Even when it comes to
the songs, which Green agreed are “lovely,” the New York review-writer added that Monnot “proceeds
to drill them into your ears until you want to shoot the accordionist.” Green’s conclusion was by far the most
unrelievedly negative of all the notices I read:
Maybe it would take a full-bore zany like Jerry Lewis, so beloved of the
French, to make material like this silly enough to be palatable. Or a sexual culture so far advanced from our
own that laughing at the wacky life of streetwalkers would be like laughing at
cavemen now. In the meantime, let’s put
this one back in its box and bury it. No
one will weep . . . .
Dis donc!
On Broadway World, Michael Dale described Irma as
an “intimate, semi-seedy musical comedy” that’s “an interesting obscurity with
a lively collection of songs, a sufficient amount of cleverness and some
wonderfully atmospheric orchestrations.” Despite “holes in the plot,” said Dale, the show,
“as second-tier musical comedies go,
. . . is quite enjoyable
through to its first act curtain twist.”
Act two, the BWW writer felt,
suffers “from a lack of sufficient plot,” as I noted. Additionally, Dale wrote, “there is little in
director John Doyle’s production that pops out at the audience” because the
director “takes a whimsical farce and tones it down toward realism.” He derided the main performances with the exception
of McClure’s Nestor, although the reviewer found “little chemistry displayed—romantic,
comedic or otherwise—between” McClure and Bowles. The score, Dale affirmed, is the “main
attraction” in Irma and in Berman’s
rendition, “audiences at Irma la Douce are treated to a rare and
succulent taste of 1950s Parisian authenticity.” Wondering if Irma La Douce isn’t “simply a case of some charming songs
but a book that’s too hopelessly dated and contrived, not to mention too skimpy
to work as more [than] a drawn-out sketch,” CurtainUp
review-writer Elyse Sommer
asserted that “John Doyle wasn’t the right . . . man to save this from being
the invaluable staged concert series’ first stumble that I can recall.” Sommer blamed all the contributors, including
a director less “adept at dishing up a light souffle than a heavy bouillabaisse,”
a leading lady who’s “more gamely energetic than gamine,” and the male ensemble
“who also sing and dance well, also lack Gallic panache.” The concert presentation “does have its
pleasures,” noted Sommer, naming a number of the songs and dances, but
essentially asserted that they’d be more enjoyable without Doyle’s “fully
staged and rehearsed set-up.”
Huffington Post’s
David Finkle called the musical “the
feeble enterprise that apparently is all there is of Irma La Douce” and felt, “There absolutely had to be a
great deal more [than Seal’s original performance], for nothing else would
explain why Irma La Douce . . . could have captivated audiences, critics
and Tony voters” back in 1960. During the sequence when Nestor and his
alternate identity, Oscar, shift busily between roles and activities, Finkle
asserted that “audience members are
beginning to lose patience and/or nod off” (although I’m not sure how the
reviewer gets to speak for all spectators).
“What Irma La Douce really is,” Finkle believed, “is rampant
idiocy, for which there may be no excuse” and “the perfectly adequate, though
ultimately lackluster . . . troupe assembled [at Encores!] are unable to make
anything of it.” He praised the songs,
but added, “There aren’t enough of them, however, to serve as show redeemers.” Opening his Irma notice with, “It’s tragic when comedy falls flat,”
David Gordon on TheaterMania lamented
that “humorless direction gets in the way of earning the production the thing
it most yearns for: laughs.” Gordon
characterized the play as “a silly trifle of French farce” and warned, “Everything
involved with this storyline should be funny, and it’s clear that we’re
supposed to be laughing, but we’re not.”
Blaming director Doyle, the TM
reviewer observed, “Tonally, this production is confusing, taking itself way
too earnestly to be funny, and yet not seriously enough for you to care about
the romance.” He also criticized the
romantic leads who “fail to ignite the requisite sparks” and pointed out that
the rest of the acting ensemble “have turned in more memorable performances
elsewhere.” Praising the physical (and
instrumental) production, especially Beatty’s farewell design, Gordon
concluded, “If only this staging of Irma La Douce were more worthy of
the great send-off that Beatty has provided for it.”
Noting that Irma’s
“story is as light as a French pastry, and has aged just about as well over the
years,” Jena Tesse Fox of NY Theater
Guide wrote, “As plotlines go, there’s not much there . . . and the score—while
quite enjoyable—just isn’t enough to sustain the whole show on such flimsy
bones.” Despite these reservations,
however, Fox concluded that “the Encores! cast, under Doyle’s somewhat muddled
and vague direction, gives it their all, and elevates the show beyond the sum
of its parts.” Repeating her admonition
that Irma hasn’t aged well, and
acknowledging that it isn’t “likely to go down in history as one of the
must-see Encores! revivals,” Fox felt the musical “is certainly worth catching
if only for the chance to see a rarely produced Golden Age musical.” Dubbing Irma
La Douce a “raucously Gallic curiosity” and “a silly, vaguely adult entertainment that’s
as free of pretensions as it is inspiration,” Talkin’ Broadway’s Matthew Murray pronounced it as Encores! “most
laid-back” and “certainly the weirdest” concert in the series and the most “flamboyantly
flagrant way” for the project to abandon its original mission of staging “Great
American Musicals in Concert.” The
production, Murray noted, “revels in its chapeau-to-chaussure French-ness while
doing everything possible to avoid the sauce, spice, and whimsy that usually
implies” even as “it works as far as it goes, provided you’re expecting it to
not go very far.” Murray insisted,
though, that “there’s so little here” that in the end, “you may wonder whether
you’re actually supposed to care about any of this at all.” (The Talkin’
Broadway writer continued that “all I can say is that I didn’t.”) He blamed Doyle’s “cool, broad staging” and
lamented that the stars couldn’t “transcend such obstacles.” Even the songs “are pleasing in the moment,”
the reviewer wrote, “but fade into the mist not long after.” In the end, Murray found, “You either buy
into what the show is selling or you don’t . . .”—and he apparently
didn’t.
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