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It’s fitting there would be a musical adaptation of a film whose full title is a near-perfect rhyme: Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amélie Poulain. Better known as simply Amélie, the 2001 Jean-Pierre Jeunet film starring Audrey Tautou garnered major prizes throughout Europe: the Crystal Globe at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival, two BAFTA Film Awards, three César Awards, and four European Film Awards.
In 2015, a new musical adaptation of the film premiered at California’s Berkeley Repertory Theatre. Craig Lucas wrote the play along with lyricists Daniel Messé (of the band Hem) and Nathan Tysen.
Now, Amélie (The Musical) is playing at Magenta Theater in Vancouver’s city center. As the show started, director Erin Knittle suggested that if any audience members stepped outside during the performance, they might get swept up in the rush of cast and crew in the halls and be expected to perform in the next scene. This joking threat made sense as several cast members, between scenes, wheeled out doorways and signboards through the exits.
The stage design for this play proved versatile. There were two levels: an upper walkway which could act as one of Paris’ many bridges, or the path to the apartment where Amélie (Eileen Leyva) lives, plus a larger lower level with retractable and reversible panels at the back.
These panels allowed the lower level, with the right furnishings (audience members remarked on the complex system of multicolored tape markers), to represent several locations: Amélie’s workplace at the Two Windmills Café, a Métro station with a photo booth, or the adult novelty store “Secret Désirs Boutique d’Amour.” The last is not correct French, but it doesn’t have to be to ensure the audience gets the point. Most did, laughing uproariously as one panel revolved to reveal a display of Playboys and sex toys.
Though the musical is written in English, with occasional French expressions, almost all the actors make an effort to sing and speak in French accents. This contrasts with the 2017 Broadway production, where Phillipa Soo performed in her own American accent.
In the playbill, Knittle said of the story, “Community was the first word that popped into my mind.” A play populated with a found family of quirky characters, each with their own emotional struggles, resonates strongly at a time following on the heels of the pandemic and widespread social isolation.
In particular, Amélie, imaginative and intelligent as she is, owes a lot of her difficulty connecting with people to her parents’ misplaced fears of her physical fragility. In her own way, she must come out of her shell, even if she holds herself back and resorts to elaborate schemes to better her friends’ lives. Leyva captures all of the contradictions in her performance as Amélie, portraying an anxious young woman with so much more heart than she knows—heart helps make her friends’ lives so much more full.
Those friends include Amélie’s neighbor, Monsieur Dufayel (James Stevenson). In a nice touch, the production commissioned Vancouver artist Scott McHale to create a painting “by” Dufayel—and for $10 a ticket, the theater will raffle off McHale’s piece on the night of the final show, to help recoup production costs.
Knittle speaks the truth: Amélie is a community production, and an ever-strong reminder that, despite the assertions of Amélie’s mother (Demarie Day) and her predilection for Zeno’s First Paradox, no one is truly alone.
SEE IT: Amélie (The Musical) plays at Magenta Theater, 1108 Main St., Vancover, Wash., 360-949-3098, magentatheater.com. 7:30 pm Thursday-Saturday and 2 pm Sunday, through Aug. 20. $28-$30.