Theatre in Review: Paramour (Lyric Theatre)

	Photo: Joan Marcus

It's no secret that Cirque du Soleil, having conquered the rest of the world, has long yearned to colonize New York. Various proposals for permanent venues in the city have been floated, without success, and the company has worked at crafting an entertainment capable of sustaining a long run here. We will draw a veil over Banana Shpeel, a relentlessly unamusing clown show that was quickly buried following a barrage of bad reviews. Zarkana, designed to be a long-term summer tenant at Radio City Music Hall, was abandoned after a couple of seasons. Now comes Paramour, which, we are told, is "the first show created by Cirque du Soleil specifically for Broadway."

Well, let's not get carried away. It appears that some of the most elaborate sequences in Paramour, which is set in Hollywood, have been repurposed from Iris, a movie-themed Cirque show that had a disappointing run at the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood in 2012. These include the set for the number "The Muse," which features a scenic rendition of a strip of film -- a horizontal array of boxes, each of which represents a single frame, with an actor inside -- and the climactic chase across a series of rooftops into which are embedded trampolines, as well as an aerial act staged out in the house, above the audience, and the use of interactive video effects.

However, Paramour is also something new: It has been conceived as a book musical into which typical Cirque acts have been folded. Actually, "book musical" may be something of an honorific; you will scan the program long and hard looking for evidence of a book writer. West Hyler is credited with the story, but nobody is cited for the dialogue. Having seen Paramour, I think I understand why; any professional playwright would probably rather enter the Federal Witness Protection Program than take the rap for some of those lines.

It's really pushing things to say that Paramour has a book; it's more like the idea of a book, a un-fleshed-out concept with lines that sound like placeholders until somebody could come up with the real thing -- only nobody ever did. The striking, vivacious, and lovely voiced Ruby Lewis stars as Indigo, an unknown chanteuse who is discovered by A.J., a maniacal, controlling film director. A.J., played by Jeremy Kushnier, is a gasbag of the first order, forever yakking on about the magic of film and generally sounding like Orson Welles after a few too many bottles of Paul Masson. ("They say film is the truth at 24 frames per second, but I couldn't see it. Then one day a blinding light came into my life, washing out the shadows, overwhelming me with inspiration, filling my heart with so much joy that I couldn't handle it." Yes, he really does talk like that.) He decides that Indigo is his muse and makes her the star of an epic, every scene of which features another location, time frame, and style. A.J. must be doing something right; as somebody on the set marvels, Indigo has "received 3,000 letters in one week and we haven't even finished the film!"

Coming along for the ride is Joey, the pianist at Indigo's nightclub, who is hired to score the film. ("Your music, Joey; it's food for us who starve for love.") Of course, he carries a torch for Indigo, and, after a few weeks of A.J. committing flagrant acts of sexual harassment on the set, Indigo starts to return Joey's affections. (If Ryan Vona comes across as a big-voiced, but colorless, male ingénue as Joey, blame the script; we'll have to see him another time to discover what he can do.) The prospect of Indigo and Joey making eyes at each other ticks off A.J. no end and soon he is employing threats and blackmail to get his way, forcing Indigo into a very public wedding and sending a bunch of thugs to do away with his pesky romantic rival.

The songs -- music by Bob & Bill, Guy Dubuc and Marc Lessard, and Andreas Carlsson; lyrics by Carlsson -- often sound like they were translated from another language without a grammar check. In the opening number, a bunch of chorus girls run downstage, singing, "Welcome to the golden age/Tuxes and tails, it's all the rage/Brought to life upon a stage, with magic!" In a number about the show's central love triangle, called, yes, "Love Triangle," we hear, "I am torn/No one can win this twisted game we play/It's my move/But either way/A heart must break today." Indigo is introduced singing a number called "Something More," which has one of the most hilarious maladroit lyrics in memory: "Can anyone have too much love?/Surrounded from below, above/If the Lord could only weigh in/Turn an ear to one girl's humble praying/For something more...."

When Paramour gets down to what Cirque du Soleil does best, delivering all sorts of gasp-inducing feats and design trickery, it becomes an entertaining show. A Cleopatra number (don't ask) titled "The Goddess of Egypt" quickly sidelines Indigo for a stunning strap act by the brothers Andrew and Kevin Atherton. "Help a Girl Choose," which consciously evokes the classic musical film Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, features plenty of exciting acrobatics. "Love Triangle" segues into a three-way aerial sequence that functions much like the old dream ballets of the Rodgers and Hammerstein era, gracefully expressing the characters' emotional conflicts. And that final chase scene with trampolines is a genuine attention-getter. In one really clever sequence, "The Honeymoon Days of Fame," video magic merges Indigo into classic posters for movies like Sunset Boulevard. At other times, the cast is upstaged by the effects: The big second-act ballad, "Everything (The Lover's Theme)," sees Indigo and Joey blindsided by lampshades, powered by drones, executing a series of intricately choreographed moves above their heads. I may be going out on a limb here, but I feel fairly certain that, for an actor, there is probably nothing more humiliating than being upstaged by a lampshade.

With Hyler directing the book scenes and Philippe Decouflé staging everything else, Paramour is aimed strictly at the ADD set, every scene packed to the gills with jugglers, aerialists, comic bits, and frantic choreography by Shana Carroll. The design is sometimes spectacular, sometimes postively weird. Jean Rabasse's sets include such eye-poppers as the gilded, lightbulb-lined opening scene, the Cleopatra set, and the rooftop chase sequence. Philippe Guillotel's costumes are a bewildering mélange of styles and periods, leaving one wondering exactly when Paramour is supposed to take place, and employing a color palette that makes one yearn for the days of film noir. The scene set in Indigo's club is a riot of cloche hats, strapless '50s-era dresses, '40s-style Rosie the Riveter pantsuits, and several men dressed like London street buskers, in tight-fitting diamond-pattern suits. (One of the show's promotional videos says it is set in the 1940s, but there's no way of telling this when sitting in the Lyric Theatre.) The mob that chases after Joey in the climax is fitted out in zoot suits, for no reason that I could discern. The lighting is credited to Patrice Besombes and Howell Binkley, but it doesn't seem like the work of the latter; in any case, it gets the job done. The projections, by Olivier Simola and Christophe Waksmann, mix live video feeds with creative content. Working in the most acoustically unfriendly of Broadway houses, with an orchestra that is totally covered over, John Shivers' sound design at times seems eerily detached from the people who are speaking or singing; still, the lyrics are intelligible, which is probably no small achievement.

Paramour may verge on being a shambles, but the acts are genuinely thrilling; it has been doing good business since its first preview and, as a spectacle for a largely tourist audience already enamored of Cirque du Soleil spectacles in Vegas and on tour, it very well may get by. Since regular musicals tend to curl up and die inside the vast confines of the Lyric, this may be as good a use of this barnlike venue as any other. It's certainly possible to have a good time at Paramour -- as long as you know what you're getting into. But this fabled company has a long, long way to go if it wants to claim the title of producer of Broadway musicals. -- David Barbour