Gigi

Published Friday 15 August 2008 at 12:05 by Mark Shenton

Timothy Sheader has chosen a surprisingly risky - and risque - show as this year’s summer musical for his first season at the helm of the Open Air Theatre.

Adapted from a 1958 Vincente Minnelli movie musical that won a record nine Oscars including Best Picture, previous stage incarnations on Broadway in 1973 and in the West End in 1985 were bigger misses than hits, but also its story of a young woman being groomed for a life of sexual service to men by her courtesan aunt leaves one with a distinctly queasy feeling in these sexually more liberal and liberated times.

Throw in a leery older man whose declaration “Thank Heaven for Little Girls” suggests he should perhaps be signing the sex offenders register, and you have a show that seems to be not exactly ripe for consumption by family audiences.

But if Lerner and Loewe’s musicalisation of Colette’s novel feels both slight and sluggish to begin with, Sheader and his design and choreographic collaborators drive it beyond its artificial contrivance to give it a gathering warmth and emotional intelligence.

Gigi, played with feisty freshness and vitality by Lisa O’Hare, may be faced with limited life choices - to either follow in her unseen mother’s footsteps to become an opera singer, become a mistress to wealthy men, or marry a postman - but she finds her own romantic path to fall in love with Thomas Borchert’s handsome Gaston.

Begun in daylight, the production feels laboured and looks exposed, and isn’t helped by Topol’s weirdly tentative narration, but the enveloping darkness brings both the show and performances into clearer focus. It also looks a treat in designer Yannis Thavoris’ ravishingly costumes, while his set of a wrought-iron bridge and a pair of Parisian-style news kiosks that cleverly unfold to reveal interior scenes, wittily contribute their own sense of magic. And although the show hardly boasts a vintage score, Sheader and choreographer Stephen Mear make the most of the big numbers.