PARIS LOVES MUSICALS (FINALLY)

Broadway ambitions on the Champs-Élysées, a new Les Miz à la française, and how the City of Lights changed its mind about musical theater

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum at the Lido 2 Paris. Photo: Julien Benhamou

Bonjour and welcome to Jaques, your weekly guide to the global theater industry. We’ve got a new schedule now, alternating weeks between ABROAD/WAY BULLETPOINTS, my round-up of recent international theater headlines, and an in-depth SPOTLIGHT STORY. We’re up for a SPOTLIGHT this week; you can find last week’s BULLETPOINTS here:

ABROAD/WAY BULLETPOINTS FOR JAN. 16, 2024

SPOTLIGHT: COMÉDIES MUSICALES, PARIS VOUS AIME

Broadway used to talk about Paris like it was a hard nut to crack. Every time the City of Lights came up in industry conversations, I was told that musicals—les comédies musicales—rarely caught on there, despite the best efforts of both local and international producers. Even the mildly successful titles never ran long. The general consensus was: Musicals? The French just don’t like ’em.

But over the last few years, there’ve been signs that things are changing. One of the leading indicators: In a town where shows generally play one season (September to June), tops, Stage Entertainment’s Broadway replica staging of The Lion King is now in its third year—and might well stick around for an unprecedented fourth season.

“With Lion King we are opening new doors and showing that the French market can be open to a long-run show,” says Laurent Bentata, managing director of Stage Entertainment France.

This year Lion King is one of three Stage-produced shows in town (up from two last season), alongside Mamma Mia! and a locally created production of Spamalot (separate from the current Broadway revival).

At the same time, a freshly renovated Champs-Élysées theater just reopened with a new production of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Forum as the first offering on a programming schedule largely dedicated to musical theater. Across town, a small-scale, homegrown Madonna jukebox musical has turned heads while a couple of popular Francophone arena musicals, Starmania and Notre Dame de Paris, swooped into the city for return runs.

There’s evidence of a surge behind the scenes, too. “The number of requests for Anglo-Saxon musical titles has exploded,” says Suzanne Sarquier of Agence Drama, a Paris literary agency that represents creatives involved in a number of musical properties, in some cases in partnership with international licensors like MTI and Concord.

What—or who—is responsible for the shift? That’s what I set out to discover. In this SPOTLIGHT STORY, I’ll highlight:

• the ambitious, musical-centric redux of a storied Champs-Élysée venue

• the success of snob appeal

• the industry stats on the city’s competitive performing arts scene

• a new version of the global megahit Les Misérables, retooled specifically for French audiences

• the Broadway ambitions of the man widely credited with burnishing the reputation of musical theater in Paris

Allons-y!

A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO THE CHAMPS-ÉLYSÉES

Standing among the lush scarlet-and-gilt banquettes of the famed Parisian theater he was about to reopen, Jean-Luc Choplin asks me, “Would it be pretentious of me to say that I was the one who made the American musical really accepted in Paris as a serious form of art?”

It might not be. Ask anyone in the theater industry about the rise of musical theater in the City of Lights, and chances are Choplin’s name will come up. During his 13-year tenure (2004-2017) as the director of the Théâtre du Châtelet, Choplin made musicals a regular part of the public institution’s schedule. Of the 74 major productions he programmed during his time there, 24 of them were comédies musicales. Along with the arrival in the city of Stage Entertainment in 2006, Choplin’s shows at the Châtelet are one of the two factors most often credited with making Paris into a musical market.