City of light musicals

One could argue that there is no American cultural phenomenon the French can manage to resist -- le speed-dating, le lap dance, le carjacking, le Halloween. And in the last five years, a form of entertainment once found primarily on Broadway or London’s West End has begun unaccountably to bloom on the Paris stage.

Ladies and gentlemen, la comedie musicale.

“ ‘West Side Story’ was a flop in Paris; ‘Porgy and Bess’ was a flop in Paris!” the Oscar-winning French composer Michel Legrand says with a note of incredulousness during rehearsals for “Les Demoiselles de Rochefort,” a stage adaptation of the 1966 film he scored for Jacques Demy that opened here last fall. “We did some musicals for the screen, like ‘Umbrellas of Cherbourg.’ But we had a very, very, very difficult time getting the money. Producers said, ‘Oh, musicals don’t work.’ ”

Then in 1997, Legrand, along with writer Didier van Cauwelaert, made “Le Passe-Muraille” (which won three Moliere awards, the French equivalent of the Tony, and had a brief New York run as “Amour” in 2002), a small stage musical they like to say is in the French operette tradition of the 1950s. “Everybody was surprised it was a big success,” Legrand says. “They said, ‘Oh, maybe musicals do work.’ And everybody tried one.”

Others cite the rock opera “Starmania” 20 years ago as the first sign of what was to come. But it wasn’t until years later, when “Notre Dame de Paris” (1998), “The Ten Commandments” (2000) and “Romeo and Juliette” (2001) attracted a few million spectators each, launching overnight solo careers with bestselling album sales, that the phenomenon really caught fire. Now it seems that everyone has a comedie musicale up the sleeve.

But because Paris lacks both the built-in audiences and the Broadway-sized houses, the most commercially ambitious musical comedies a la francaise have mostly been huge, loud musical extravaganzas staged in stadium-sized, acoustics-challenged convention-center auditoriums and sports stadiums without orchestra pits. And while the 50 actors, dancers and singers it can take to fill up one of these stages are often doing all three tasks at once, the talent pool can make the Solid Gold Dancers look like the Bolshoi.

The music sounds different too. More French, for one thing, with more swirling orchestrations and unabashed melancholy. In France, this means the music sounds “pop.” In the United States and Britain, musical cast albums rarely reach No. 1 on the pop charts, and stars are no longer born on Broadway (though they sometimes vacation there).

But France’s musical comedy producers have found that the way to create an audience for a genre that does not exist -- most French people’s familiarity with the form tends to come from film versions of musicals, such as “Singin’ in the Rain” or “West Side Story” -- is to write a tune with the hummable DNA of a pop hit, make a video and get your radio and television partners to air it relentlessly. Make a hit video, and they will come to watch it staged live. Or so the theory goes.

“In England and America, the marketing of musicals is done mostly by critics,” says Gerard Presgurvic, who adapted and composed the music for “Gone With the Wind,” which looks like this season’s hottest comedie musicale ticket. “People come to the show if the reviews are good, then nothing comes out of it -- no stars, few songs. Here we bring out the disc a year before, like a pop star would do.”

Gerard Louvin is the fast-talking, cologne-soaked producer of “Les Demoiselles,” his second musical venture, after the highly successful “Romeo and Juliette.” “After ‘Romeo and Juliette,’ I had 25 propositions for musical comedies,” he says, snapping a wad of gum. “People said, ‘C’est la mode, c’est la mode.’ In France we are like that. One minute la mode is models, les boys band, now les comedies musicales.”

Jumping on le bandwagon, producers during the last five fall seasons have unveiled a few dozen musical comedies. Which is a lot a lot of fledgling musicals in this town, but not a lot by New York or London standards.

“The problem in France is there is no culture of the musical comedy,” says “Ten Commandments” and “Gone With the Wind” producer Dove Attia, “so you have to do these big events, get lots of people on stage, have a lot of sets. And to do something that expensive, you have to fill up a big hall and therefore do a special kind of marketing. One day we dream that we won’t need to do it like that, that we can put one on in a small theater, and people will come because they’re used to it.”

Despite le mega-marketing, not all have been les mega-hits. Despite much hype and a popular pop star at its center, last year’s “Cindy,” based on the Cinderella myth, bombed. A small production of “Le Petit Prince” -- one of the world’s most popular books -- failed to find a wide audience. The third big scheduled comedie musicale -- after “Les Demoiselles” and “Gone With the Wind” -- “TinTin et le Temple du Soleil,” a Belgian musical based on that most beloved French icon (and adapted for the French by Van Cauwelaert), postponed opening for weeks and was finally canceled.

A few weeks after its opening, “Les Demoiselles de Rochefort” was playing to only half-full houses, despite the name recognition of Legrand and the track record of Alain Boublil, half of the French musical team behind such blockbusters as “Les Miserables” and “Miss Saigon,” back from his home in London (where he moved over a decade ago because of a lack of work in France).

“With ‘The Ten Commandments,’ ‘Romeo and Juliette’ and ‘Notre Dame de Paris,’ all those shows were huge mega-hit records before they were taken to the stage,” Boublil said backstage one night at the Palais des Congres. “And more or less people were expecting the stage version of the record, which is an odd concept. So it has created a different format of musical -- mostly a bunch of songs strung together, not really drama first, which is my school. Drama first and then you know once you finish with the book, which can take two years to write, then you start the music and the lyrics.”

Boublil and Legrand said they were hoping to take the comedie musicale one step further toward resembling its Anglo-Saxon forebears.

“My taste is ‘West Side Story’ or Rodgers and Hammerstein, the classic musicals where the story is what makes the musical,” Boublil says. “That’s the difference. It’s not a difference which is clearly perceived in France, and it doesn’t matter, as long as the French people have the impression they have reinvented the genre, and the genre has found a new customer base.”

The manpower problem

One of the biggest nightmares for a producer has been finding talent that can sing, dance and act. “Before ‘Romeo and Juliette,’ ‘The Ten Commandments’ and ‘Notre Dame de Paris,’ we didn’t have people who could do all three things,” Lanvin says. “Now we are starting to. But that’s completely new.”

Twenty-year-old Parisienne Frederica Sorel got her break as Juliette when the lead fell ill a few years ago and is one of the demoiselles in “Les Demoiselles de Rochefort.” Is it possible to have a childhood dream of starring in a musical in a country where they don’t exist?

“Being in a musical wasn’t my first goal,” she says by phone. “My idols are Mariah Carey, Whitney Houston, Christina Aguilera, Aretha Franklin -- I listen to a lot of American music.

“I listen to very little French music. My dream would be to have an international career, and I said to myself to begin it’s not a bad idea to do a musical comedy, because that way I can learn everything. It was for me a way of beginning, but my goal is to have a solo career as a singer.”

She, like many comedie musicale evangelists, tends to see Broadway as the benchmark. But not every French musical producer sees Broadway as the promised land.

Attia insists that “Gone With the Wind” was an attempt to put on a big show with all the dramatic elements of a Broadway musical -- not in the style of a Broadway musical but with its bone structure. “The kind of musical that works well on Broadway and in London has a hard time working here because of the difference between Anglo-Saxon and Latin cultures,” he says, making an explanatory Gallic gesture that involves rubbing his fingers together in the air above his nose, sniffing audibly.

“In the Anglo-Saxon culture, you can go out of reality, have a hero who is a bad guy and can be a clown in the next scene,” he allows. “Here it’s more based in reality, in emotion. What works in France is emotion, nostalgia, sadness. In Anglo-Saxon culture, they accept more a childish spirit. In Latin countries, for people to believe in the story, you have to respect the rules of the character.”

Nevertheless, producers have never been known to turn down a potential buck, and Attia says he is adapting “The Ten Commandments” for an L.A. run (it has already toured Europe and Japan). Even Legrand, who has already had his international career validated with an Oscar, asks if “Les Demoiselles” could make it in New York. Well, “Notre Dame de Paris,” for one, had a short run in London to disastrous reviews and only got as far as Vegas.

“But it’s terrible,” Legrand says.

“The songs ain’t bad,” he continues, showing off his playful command of colloquial English. “But there is no story, there is no choreography, nothing.”

It’s too early to tell if the comedie musicale will grow up to look more like its Anglo-Saxon role models. But Presgurvic says he’s now working on an original idea, hedging his bets with his past two successes and a growing French audience. He’s been waiting for this moment for years.

“I’ve been going to see producers and authors for 20 years trying to get them to do a musical,” says the composer, who has a long pop-songwriting career. Some cross-cultural transplants take mere weeks to cross the pond; others lie dormant for years before being discovered and adapted a la francaise. Why now?

“After ‘Notre Dame de Paris,’ producers and television stations realized that if they put the money in, people would come,” Presgurvic says. “The audience was always there, but the producers wouldn’t take the risk.”

“Suddenly people realize they can make money with musicals,” Legrand agrees, adding that he has a fistful more waiting in the wings.

“Five years from now it will be something else.”