Word: gigi
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...Gigi reminds us theatregoers have yet to match the security of the wine connoiseur at a Paris cafe. This production of Gigi comes with the same winning label that made a delightful book for Colette, one of the first great musicals by the Lerner and Lowe team that brought Paint Your Wagon (1951), My Fair Lady (1956), and Camelot (1960), and swept nine academy awards in 1958 for the film version. We even see Louis Jourdan, who first achieved popular fame as Gaston, return as Honore, the role immortalized by Maurice Chevalier...
...matters little that Jourdan has starred in; films as diverse as Madame Bavary, Can-Can, and the Silver Bears, played everyone from a BBC Dracula to a sinister would-be James Bond nemesis in Octopussy. For anyone who has ever seen the MGM movie classic Gigi, Louis Jourdan is Gaston, the inveterate playboy with interminable ennui. To fixate momentarily on his Gallic features summons up visions of Jourdan-Gaston beside the original Honore (Maurice Chevalier) forever repeating. "It's a bore...
...though he believes the lines even less than we. That he appears to lip-sync this and "Thank Heaven for Little Girls" seems all the sadder because he can perform "I Remember It Well", with "Mamita" (Taina Elg) with too much meaning: we all remember another Jourdan and another Gigi all too well...
Rather it is the crepe-suzette thin plot that seems so unfamiliar. A kind of 1958 American version of a 1920's Parisian romance revived for a 1984 audience, Gigi seems doubly foreign today: its Paris treats the Eiffel Tower practically as a suburb of Maxime's; its romance treats women as...well, this is not the time for a discourse on social history...
Then comes Gigi. If Gaston and Honore want to treat women as little more than the stuff of shopping escapades. Mamita and Aunt Alicia (Betsy Palmer) will gladly help design the set While Honore keeps busy tutoring Gaston in the rules of the game--for status value, little can rival driving a spurned lady to attempt suicide Mamita enlists Aunt Alicia to perform daily finishing lessons seemingly as de rigeur as piano lessons for the varsity social climbers of New York in the 80's, or anytime for that matter...