Édith Piaf was known in France as “the little sparrow,” a reference to her tiny body. Who would have thought that such a fragile-looking bird of a singer could produce such an enormous sound? Piaf performed without reservation, as if each song were her last.
Sophia Anne Caruso also possesses that same wonderful contradiction of small-equals-big, and uses it to magnificent effect in the new musical “Memoirs of Amorous Gentlemen,” which opened Thursday at the Culture Club.
Caruso plays Colette, a Belle Époque prostitute with the proverbial heart of gold that extends upward all the way to her vocal cords.
Book writer Leah Nanako Winkler and the late songwriter Duncan Sheik have based their new stage musical on the 2013 Japanese manga novel of the same title, written and illustrated with kewpie doll paintings by Moyoco Anno.
Maybe in Japan there’s still some exoticism left surrounding the evil Western culture and its weird fixation on whores. Playwright David Henry Hwang (“M. Butterfly,” “Yellow Face”) has made a career out of trashing Western icons like Giacomo Puccini for presenting demeaning stereotypes of Asians. Clearly, that boat now sails in both directions. The real problem with “Memoirs,” as Winkler has translated it from Anno, is that the cardboard characters aren’t demeaning and offensive enough. They’re just dull and tired from too many retellings. The story told here is very old:
Colette loves a no-good creep named Leon (Cory Jeacoma) who takes her money while romancing Nana, a former prostitute (Nkeki Obi-Melekwe) with current underworld connections. Oh, and the madame (Jenny Powers) who runs the brothel where Colette toils is (shocking!) a lesbian. That may have been daring back in 1962 when Barbara Stanwyck played a lavender madame in “Walk on the Wild Side.” Now it’s a cliche. Martha Plimpton plays a lesbian madame in Netflix’s new “East of Eden.”
What gives this tired narrative some new juice is Caruso’s strong vocals and the songs Duncan Sheik has written for that amazing voice. As torch songs go, “Immured” is a real keeper despite “Immured” being a really terrible song title. Regardless, Caruso knows exactly to do with it. She thrills when singing, “Here I was wondering / What makes me cry? / Consider that mystery solved / ‘Cause now, I want to die.”
Caruso also has the guts to be historically correct and not shave her armpits! Now, that is something daring and new in the theater and film.
Sheik, who died last month at age 56, enjoyed an early musical-theater hit with “Spring Awakening” in 2006, written with lyricist-book writer Steven Sater. Since then, despite writing several musicals, Sheik never scored another hit, although his “American Psycho” in 2013 deserved much better reviews than it got. Too often, Sheik’s musical scores have been swallowed up by inferior books, most notably “Whisper House” and “Alice by Heart.”
Winklers’ book for “Memoirs” is somewhat less clunky, although one plot point emerges as a total muddle: Colette write her memoirs because a patron (Marc delaCruz) pays her. He also pays off Leon’s debts, even though the man is not wealthy.
When Colette gets around to writing that memoir, she reads it to us. Her jottings sound a lot like the stuff Carrie Bradshaw voiced for her sex advice column in the fictitious New York Star. Sheik’s score isn’t sabotaged by the spoken dialogue, but the musical merely marks time until the next song.
When Caruso’s Colette isn’t singing and spouting this dribble, the stage belongs to a series of visualized sex fantasies. Sheik’s throbbing alternative rock continues to tantalize but too off in the service of pedestrian reveries: the johns at the brothel want to be, among other things, a clown, a dog, a bird. What, no Godzilla?
At one point, the madame announces that one client wants to have sex in a coffin at his own funeral. Maybe it’s best that this sex fantasy takes place off stage, but at least it’s something that hasn’t already been recorded many times in other musicals, plays and films.
Rob Ashford directs with an in-the-round set design by Scott Pask that looks left over from the last Broadway revival of “Cabaret.” Visually, Ashford keeps the stage moving even when the story stalls. The musical feels much longer than its 90 minutes.
In the end, “Memoirs” is worth seeing, not for all its tepid raciness but Sheik’s music, Caruso’s singing and her delightfully furry armpits.
