As a young Frenchman visiting New York in the 1970s, Jean-Luc Choplin sat through the Broadway revival of the Leonard Bernstein comedic operetta Candide and was “utterly enchanted”, reports The Guardian.
When the curtains fell he found himself walking the streets of New York singing numbers from the show. Choplin vowed to himself that one day, when he had his own theatre, he would stage the musical adaptation of Voltaire’s satirical novel.
Three decades on, Choplin took over Paris’s imperial Théâtre du Châtelet, and made Candide his first production. Since then, the French director has been on a mission to bring Broadway to the boulevards in the original English. In 2007, Candide was followed by West Side Story, and now every year he brings another musical classic, including The Sound of Music, My Fair Lady, Sweeney Todd, The King and I and, later this month for the second time this year, Singin’ in the Rain.
Paris’s theatregoers who once turned their noses up at the Anglo-Saxon comédie musicale, as a popular and thus lower genre, snap up tickets so hungrily that the shows are often sold out before they have opened.
“When I started, people accused me of destroying the Châtelet, and said they wouldn’t ever come again. But then they saw a show and they’d be positively astonished to see something so completely different,” Choplin said. “It was as if they’d been struck by lightning and completely shaken out of their certainty about what they liked at the theatre and what they didn’t.”
Choplin says when he became director of the theatre, a grand building on the right bank of the river Seine built on the orders of Napoleon III’s chief architect, Baron Haussmann, he decided to drag into the 21st century. “It was another opera house in a city that already had several opera houses. I decided to change its DNA: I wanted it to be a place of music that was sophisticated but also popular, less elitist, and that put on theatre that was international,” he said.
Not everyone was as enthusiastic. The Châtelet had been a venue for some of the classical world’s most celebrated dancers and musicians, including Vaslav Nijinsky, Anna Pavlova, Debussy, Ravel, Satie, Tchaikovsky, Mahler and Richard Strauss. “People were horrified. They said ‘you cannot do musicals, this will be a complete catastrophe’, and they pointed out that others had tried before and it had always been a flop. It was a risk, but I felt I had to try,” Choplin said.
“Musicals were considered popular and Anglo-Saxon and there was a strong anti-Americanism back then in France, which has only recently come to an end.” Choplin recalls his insistence on putting on American musicals led one guest at a polite Parisian dinner party to accuse him of working for the CIA.
The French had operetta, a precursor to musical theatre, but the distinction between the genres is blurred. The most simple definition is that operetta is light opera with acting, while musical theatre is plays with singing and dancing.