Amelie NYC Reviews and Tickets

"It is pleasant to look at, easy to listen to and oddly recessive. It neither offends nor enthralls...'Amélie' the musical seems to have no nationality, or sensibility, to call its own...All credit to this show’s creative team, overseen by the director Pam MacKinnon, for giving coherent life to a tale that exists as much in Amélie’s imagination as in anywhere else...That the show’s creators are aware of the potential dangers of cloying cuteness probably accounts for its seeming so subdued."
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"During this promising but never delivering musical fantasy, you can easily (and frequently) dream up ways the creative team might have better turned the 2001 film into a stage event that didn’t cloy and harden into static quirk halfway through...Book writer Lucas and songwriters Messé and Tysen are at pains to articulate a singable emotional center of the source while staying true to its careening, cinematic narrative. The two duties ultimately cancel each other out."
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"Amélie the character and thus 'Amélie' the show remain alluringly, maddeningly remote...When a narrative is held together by tone instead of the working out of interpersonal conflict...there’s no bright line between what’s pertinent and what isn’t...As a result, MacKinnon’s staging, which has little choice but to underline the aesthetic, develops a bad case of nonspecific where-the-heck-is-this?, often leaving the audience more amused than informed."
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"It is clear how little concern there is here for the wry Truffaut-esque wit of the 2001 film...The musical is so full of stage business that the main impression is of tumult, which is more evocative of Times Square than Paris...There are so many misjudgments of taste and style in the first two-thirds of the show that I was becoming immensely sympathetic to Amélie’s desire to avoid excessive human contact...Most songs were bland and mildly tuneful."
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"I had the luxury of seeing 'Amélie' twice, and I admit to finding its charms more readily revealed on second viewing, The score, for one thing, is more sophisticated than a single hearing suggests, and perhaps more cunning...The authors, along with MacKinnon, avoid gratuitous winking, trusting both 'Amélie' and Amélie to work their charms. You’ll buy it, or you won’t. By the end, I was a bit in love, even if – as so often is the case with the real thing – it wasn’t at first sight."
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"The Broadway musical adaptation is simply pleasant—at least when it isn't plodding...Virtually all signs of Frenchness are gone in director MacKinnon’s staging...Soo is lovely and her crystalline singing has every bit as much pull as Tautou’s big brown peepers. If only Messé and Tysen had given Soo something outstanding to sing...'Times are hard for dreamers,' the heroine observes. The same goes for audiences dreaming that this show would transcend, or even match, the movie."
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"It’s almost mandatory to have seen the movie if you hope to follow the erratic events of Craig Lucas’s twee book...Soo's lovely voice isn’t enough to animate the character...As listlessly played by Adam Chanler-Berat, Nino is a case study in vapidity...Messe’s music is emphatically insipid, with zero flavor of Paris, and the songs keep landing in awkward moments...In the end, it’s just wearying, looking for some logic in all this relentless whimsy."
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"This grating stage musical takes the slenderest of romances and drowns it in cartoonish quirks in place of genuine warmth or feeling...Moments that don't cry out to be musicalized get slathered in song, while others where music might have helped go unsung...With more swinging doors than most farces, this is a show that manages to be simultaneously frenetic and inert...The talented cast fights a losing battle to give these annoyingly artificial characters life."
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