On & Off Broadway

‘Amelie’

Review by Elyse Trevers

Posted

How do you translate sugary sweetness from screen to the Broadway stage? Sometimes you just can’t. Such is the case with the movie Amelie, the 2001 French romantic comedy starring the winsome Audrey Tautou, and the new musical adaptation, Amelie, that has just arrived on the Broadway stage starring the lovely Phillipa Soo.

An the only child born to eccentric parents who home school her, Amelie grows up isolated, relying on her imagination. Played by a delightfully poised child performer, Savvy Crawford, Amelie must be resilient and creative. Her only pet is a fish, and later there’s a silly sequence where an actor wearing a fish head cavorts onstage.

Then Amelie grows up to become the wonderful Soo (Hamilton, Pierre and Natasha and The Great Comet). Soo is perfectly cast for the role; she’s adorable, has the soprano voice of an angel and commands the stage. Unfortunately, the show doesn’t do her justice.


Amelie goes to Montmartre and gets a job in a cafe. Some of the scenes and interactions between Amelie, the patrons, and other waitresses are reminiscent of Waitress. The other characters are quirky and Amelie finds her purpose in life by helping them covertly, yet she is afraid to live her own life.

After the death of her mother, her father became totally isolated and his only companion is a garden gnome. She steals the gnome giving it to a stewardess who then sends him pictures of the gnome traveling. Amelie takes a blind man through the Metro describing things to him that he’s never seen, and she plays cupid to two patrons at the cafe, one a surly plumber and the other a hypochondriac co-worker.

She does much of her meddling furtively but can’t fix her own life until she finds a photo album of torn up pictures from photo booths. She tracks down the artist-creator (Adam Chanler-Berat) and, although she’s attracted to him, fears a relationship.

Some of the show’s problems are with the music by Daniel Messe. For the most part, much of it is forgettable although some of the lyrics are clever (Nathan Tyson and Messe.) Part of the issue may be in the ineffable nature of the eccentric characters and the problems in conveying them in a few moments on a large stage. Perhaps this would have worked better in the intimacy of Off-Broadway.

Maybe it’s time producers realize that all movies can’t become shows. Think of Amelie as a dessert that isn’t sweet enough. You might find yourself leaving the Walter Kerr Theatre unsatisfied.