As a teenager in the Noughties, it was a prerequisite to say Amélie was your favourite film if you wanted to prove how whimsical and cosmopolitan you were. Twenty years later, a musical adaptation of the 2001 film - one of the most successful French films ever made - faces two big challenges. One: can it overcome the defining impressions of Audrey Tautou’s performance and Yann Tiersen’s score? And two: can a quirky woman with a bob really bring back my now cynical generation’s joie de vivre? In short, oui.
No one ever really cared about the nonsensical plot, but: Amélie (Audrey Brisson) is a shy young waitress with weird parents who, moved by Princess Diana's death, begins to perform random acts of kindness around Montmartre. She’s also in an odd cat-and-mouse game with a man she fancies called Nino (Chris Jared), who hangs around photobooths collecting strangers’ photos. (Probably seemed arty rather than creepy in 2001).
Red-lipsticked and wide-eyed, Audrey Brisson is beguiling and mischievous as Amélie, eradicating memories of Tautou; Daniel Messe and Nathan Tysen’s jaunty score, performed nimbly by the superb cast themselves, evokes a real sense of place.
The show shines when it leans into the film’s weirdness; after being told by her parents to dispose of her suicidal goldfish, said fish comes to life and mournfully sings ‘Amélie - pourquoi? Au revoir’. It also does genius things with the film’s famous garden gnome and Amélie’s Princess Di obsession (shout out to Caolan McCarthy for stealing the show in the latter scene). Madeleine Girling's design cunningly conjures everything from flying lampshades to metro stations and dildo shops, and even the hammy French accents won me over in the end.
It sags slightly when there are too many soppy love songs; it strikes me that this is far more interesting as the story of a shy woman’s sexual awakening than a serious romance. But the world feels merde, and this charming show brings some much-needed silly delight.
Until February 1; theotherpalace.co.uk
