“Amélie” doesn’t try to blow you away with showmanship. But the romantic outcome, while assured, is less the point than the puzzle of what’s holding her back from making herself available to someone who has beguiled her as much as she has beguiled him. Much of the romantic plot revolves around the cat-and-mouse game Amélie plays with Nino after she picks up the portfolio of photos he accidentally left behind. A down-and-out young artist who lives in a sex shop, he resembles in Adam Chanler-Berat’s performance a struggling art school grad - the kind of guy you might see smiling to himself on a train with only a few bucks in his pocket but with an imagination bursting with astonishing ideas. Nino, the man Amélie falls for after repeatedly seeing him hanging around a metro station photo booth, is less of a fantasy figure than he was in the movie. But she’s marked by a lonely detachment, and her fey air can’t conceal her very real, even if unarticulated, sadness. It allows us instead to discover the quirks and cracks of her character.īarks, a vivid Éponine in the 2012 film of “Les Misérables,” is as sprightly and otherworldly as the garden gnome Amélie uproots from her widowed father’s backyard to encourage him to venture out into the world again. But the musical wisely doesn’t oversell Amélie’s adorableness. The movie’s occasionally saccharine tone made some critics’ teeth ache. The danger with the material is that its daffy sweetness can grow cloying. Messé’s music sets the narrative in swift carousel motion. The character’s back story (featuring a delightful Savvy Crawford as young Amélie) is largely dispatched musically, in song and jaunty recitative. David Zinn’s scenic design and Jane Cox’s lighting create a unique wonderland simply by changing the hues from blue to lavender, launching a few gold stars and creating pockets of darkened mystery amid the shifting scenery.Īmélie’s childhood losses - first a beloved goldfish, later, in a freak accident, her stern and overanxious mother - are enacted with puppets. The spry and simple visuals find stage analogies for the way Jeunet’s movie celebrates the eccentric fluidity of the cinematic imagination. The production, directed with unostentatious verve by Pam MacKinnon, slyly revels in the infinite possibilities of theatrical merrymaking. But this isn’t as far-fetched as it might seem, for the real location of the musical is unapologetically the theater. When Amélie, played by Samantha Barks in a manner that is less ethereal than Tautou’s but just as winsome, tries to disguise her voice on the telephone, she sounds a bit like a Southern kook out of Flannery O’Connor.
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