An American in Paris Returns to Chatelet

The triumphant return of An American in Paris.


You’ve heard about a love Triangle, but what about a love square with a woman on the side?

Photo Credit: Theatre Du Chatelet

Photo Credit: Theatre Du Chatelet

After closing for renovations for three years, the Theatre du Chatelet reopened its doors with the spectacle An American in Parisa musical inspired by a 1951 film of the same name. It’s the same theatre where the production, which has won awards including four Tony Awards, three outer critics circle awards, and a Drama League award, made its stage debut in 2014. 

On the day we caught the performance, Nathan Madden, who was an understudy in the Broadway play, starred as Jerry Mulligan, an American GI who remains in Paris after the Second World War to fulfill his dreams as a painter.

The musical is centered around the antics of Jerry and his two friends, war veteran Adam Hochberg (Zachary Prince) and French aristocrat Henri Baurel (Michael Burrell), who also pursue their dreams as artists. Unbeknownst to them, they all have fallen for the same muse: shop assistant, Lise Dassin, played by Kristen McGritty.

Lise is Henri’s girlfriend, but she is not in love with him. The aspiring dancer goes to a ballet audition where both Adam, the ballet’s music composer, and Jerry, the sketch artist for the day, take a liking to her. It’s love at first dance. Later, Jerry visits the Galeries Lafayette where Lise works and literally makes a song and dance about how much he loves her. He persuades her to meet him at the Seine that night, and after that, they meet every day for one hour, at the same place, where he draws her.

The whole other woman on the side is Milo Davenport, played by Emily Ferranti, who is very fond of Jerry. Milo is a wealthy American woman who thinks she can buy Jerry’s love. She funds the ballet that Lise is dancing in and allows Jerry to create the artwork, unaware that he is head over heels in love with Lise. 

The wonderful ballet dancing, hat tip to Christopher Weldon, is tied together with a projector background, and the fast-changing of the set on wheels is what stands out about the production. Theatregoers will really get the sense they are in different parts of Paris. It’s live theatre and yet the set changes happened so frequently and smoothly, it feels as though you’re watching television.

Madden told Dance Informa of the process,“I feel like it is everything you want a musical to be. The difference lies in there not being a separated dance chorus, and then a vocal chorus, or even stage hands and costumes moving around the set pieces. Nope. It’s all us. It’s all us.”

And they deliver. The orgasmic moment for me was when we peered into Henri’s fantasy world. He starts off dancing clumsily in a bar when, all of a sudden, the set changes and we get taken into a marvelous performance of show girls holding white feathers and guys dressed in tuxedos, to give us the impression he is thinking big and will become a star. When the song comes to an end, boom, a quick set change transports us back to the bar.

The George Gershwin heady musical is an amazing treat. The show will run at the Theatre du Chatelet through the 1st of January 2020.