‘Le Manege’: Around and Around in French Cliche

In the intriguing if exasperating way of so many things French, the imported musical “Le Manege” (The Carousel) is a deeply introspective look at the human condition in which contradictions abound and change occurs only by the smallest of increments.

Just think of a French film--pretty much any French film--and you get the idea.

Love is the subject scrutinized in this piece by Manon Landowski, the singer, dancer, actress and composer who heads the cast of a production brought to the U.S. by fashion designer Pierre Cardin after a run last year at his Paris theater, Espace Pierre Cardin. Playing a character named Clara, Landowski takes us inside the mind of a woman who has grown so restless in her relationship that she’s dreamed up an ideal lover who, though a mere figment of her imagination, has become all too distractingly real.

Told in the free-floating fantasy of dreams, “Le Manege” is more an evocation of mood than an actual story, more a song cycle than a full-fledged musical. The pulsing Euro-pop score--flavored with carousel waltzes, French cabaret songs, jazz and techno--is fun to listen to as Landowski and company perform it in French, with English translations projected on a screen above the stage of the newly reopened 271-seat New Ivar Theatre in Hollywood. For eye candy, director Daniel Mesguich provides a surgically sleek staging, accented with segments of so-so modern dance by Gilles Baron.

Yet the show has nothing original to say about romance, which proves to be a fatal hole in its heart. The carousel imagery is hackneyed beyond belief, and when the memories in Clara’s dreamscape suggest that she can’t trust in love because her parents divorced when she was at an impressionable age, one feels like groaning at the sheer mundaneness of it all.

In sleep, Clara is surrounded by the toys and doll furniture of her childhood while adult women in pure white and men in brooding black--the colors intended to be symbolic, no doubt, in designs by Cardin himself--revolve on an imaginary carousel, pausing now and again to peer at her. Hovering over her, the ideal lover, Pierre (Matthew Gonder), suddenly snatches away the sheet, waking her. Abruptly facing the pressures of adult life, Clara moans, “Everything’s gone, my life has turned to dust.”

Already in these opening moments of the intermissionless, 95-minute show, one’s eyes begin to roll at the arty pretension.

Soon, the real-life lover, Gauthier (Hubert Helleu), is talking to Clara over dinner when, in her mind at least, she stands up and wanders elsewhere. He continues talking to the empty space she had occupied. Unable to understand what is happening to the relationship, Gauthier finds himself tangled in their bedclothes--bound, mummy-like, in long white sheet after long white sheet that Clara has coolly, almost cruelly, wrapped around him. Later, Pierre will pull one of these sheets between them and send ripples of air through it, to symbolize the river that separates them. And Clara will be caught in an all too literal tug of war between the men.

Meanwhile, the lyrics raise such circular questions as “Will we ever understand each other?” and “Tell me why there’s always something missing,” while bewailing “The promises we make are all illusions bound to collapse.”

Cheery? Ah, non. Trite where it means to be profound? Cheesy where it means to be sophisticated? Mais oui.

*

* “Le Mangege,” New Ivar Theatre, 1605 N. Ivar Ave., Hollywood. Tuesdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 3 p.m. Ends May 13. $20-$30. (213) 480-3232. Running time: 1 hour, 35 minutes.

Manon Landowski: Clara

Matthew Gonder: Pierre

Hubert Helleu: Gauthier

Lionel Desruelles, Rabah Aliouan, Sandrine Diard, Armelle Ferron, Jean-Francois Kessler and Frederique Leroy: Chorus

Produced by Pierre Cardin. Book, lyrics and music by Manon Landowski. Directed by Daniel Mesguich. Musical director: Jean-Pierre Pilot. Choreographer: Gilles Baron. Costumes: Pierre Cardin. Lights: Patrick Meeus.