nothin Long Wharf Makes “Paris” Its Own | New Haven Independent

Long Wharf Makes Paris” Its Own

T. Charles Erickson Photo

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec is hunched over a table in a dirty cabaret when he discovers absinthe. It comes to him in the form of a dancer. She is borne aloft by several men so effortlessly, and her own movements are so fluid, that she appears to be half-flying, half-swimming through the air, bathed in green light. The music, born of the bal musette but reaching all the way to the present day, swells and swoons.

When Toulouse-Lautrec succumbs, so do we.

These absinthe-fueled fantasies are just some of the many high points in My Paris, a musical about the artist’s life, rise to fame, and subsequent fall due to health and substance-abuse problems. The show runs at the Long Wharf Theatre until May 29.

Toulouse-Lautrec — full name, Henri Marie Raymond de Toulouse-Lautrec-Monfa — was born to a French aristocratic family in 1864. He was afflicted from birth with a congenital bone disorder likely the result of inbreeding; his parents were first cousins. Both his legs broke in his youth, didn’t heal properly, and stopped growing, so that the artist ended up at about five feet tall, though with adult-proportioned head, torso, and arms. He was ridiculed all his life for his appearance.

He took to art early and studied it seriously, ending up in Paris as a young man and gravitating toward the bohemian Montmartre area of the city in 1884. He was intensely prolific. His posters for the nightclubs in the area made him instantly famous, and his visual style defines perceptions of the scene to this day. His paintings of the people of Montmartre, from waitresses and laundry workers to prostitutes, offered a realistic and humane glimpse into their subjects’ lives.

He was also a scenester, acquainted with several other Parisian artists of the day and their friends. He became a brothel patron and raging alcoholic, filling his cane with booze so he would never go dry. He contracted syphilis, had a nervous breakdown in 1899, and spent his last years in a sanitarium (where he continued to paint) until he died in 1901.

All of these details appear in My Paris, which follows the artist (Bobby Steggert) from his childhood at the hands of an abusive father (Tom Hewitt) and doting mother (Donna English), to his youth cavorting with artists, nightclub owners, dancers, drinkers, and prostitutes, to his sickness-ridden death.

My Paris is at its best when it conveys a heady sense of how Montmartre’s gritty hedonism and Toulouse-Lautrec’s own artistic and personal ambitions came together to produce great art. In these moments, the uniformly stellar acting and singing — My Paris boasts an ensemble cast that seems to be able to do it all — and some exceedingly clever staging, lighting, and choreography come together as well, producing truly great theater. In perhaps the show’s most breathtaking sequence, a deft use of projections of Toulouse-Lautrec’s actual paintings lets us see, almost as if we’re there with the artist, how inspired he was by the people he met, and how quickly he could capture their lives in painted images. That scene is theater at its best, doing what only theater can do.

Throughout, the production also subtly and constantly gives a true sense of Toulouse-Lautrec’s physical frailty, which the play argues (convincingly) is key to understanding much of his character. Part of the credit for this lies in a multi-tiered stage that allows the other characters to gain several inches on Toulouse-Lautrec even when they’re standing next to him. Even more credit, however, lies in Steggert’s physical performance of the part, and the other actors’ reactions to that performance. Steggert embodies the artist so thoroughly that when he finally has a chance to stand upright and dance — in another kind of dream sequence — it’s a surprise to learn just how tall the actor really is.

The sheer amount of talent deployed on the stage compensates for the shakier aspects of the show, most notably the decision to shoehorn what was surely a very complicated life into a pretty conventional plot. In Alfred Uhly’s book, Toulouse-Lautrec is given a single love interest — model and fellow artist Suzanne Valadon (played remarkably by Mara Davi). When she rejects his plans for a stable, monogamous relationship, he responds with an all-out bender of self-destruction that scares even his fellow artists and leads to his demise. This plot doesn’t quite jive even with the show’s own depiction of Toulouse-Lautrec as a man and artist hungry for life, fighting his physical limitations to seize every moment he has on this earth. Similarly, Jason Robert Brown’s lyrics, adapted from the original French, often have a plainness about them that borders on line-by-line predictability, a mismatch with the stunning score.

Which brings us, at last, to the real star of My Paris: the music itself, written by the legendary 92-year-old Charles Aznavour — whose collaborations range from Edith Piaf and Frank Sinatra to Bob Dylan and Josh Groban — and adapted by Jason Robert Brown. The music both immediately evokes the Paris of 125 years ago and seems fresh and surprising at every turn, and it is worth the price of admission just to hear it. The crackerjack band — David Gardos on piano and accordion, Sean Rubin on bass, Jeffery Carlson on guitar and mandolin, and Andrew Smith on violin — is wonderfully suited to the task and onstage for the entire time, functioning as both nightclub house band and Greek chorus. The band started the show by playing a number before the lights went down. When they finished, the audience broke into rapt applause. And in the final number, The Windmill Turns,” Brown’s adaptation of the lyrics rose to the quality of the music, producing a heartbreaking, nearly perfect song that could easily have a life of its own outside of the show. In a show filled with highs, it’s the highest.

My Paris runs at the Long Wharf Theatre until May 29. For more information and tickets, click here.

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