Does Hollywood have a liberal agenda?; Amélie the Musical

Tonally, I think we are trying to be quite faithful, but I frequently hear people, when I tell them that I'm doing a musical adaptation of Amélie, they say, I love that movie. It was so beautiful. There was so much color. Her eyes were so beautiful. But they don't really have much memory of story. In many respects, that really liberated us. We were able to streamline it, able to change things around. The emotional spine is the same, the bullet points of her story — it's about a young woman's coming of age in Paris and finding love — are the same as the movie. But I think because it lives in memory in such an emotional way, we had some license. 

Jeunet had a camera and could have those wonderful closeups of her face and the big eyes and sort of left it to the audience to fill in what she was thinking. In some respects, that's great territory to start a musical that has a title character at its center. She can sing what she's feeling. I don't have that camera, but we give her voice. I was very excited when I first saw the movie 15 plus years ago. There were moments of it that frustrated me because I was like, dammit, give this woman some agency! Let her tell us what's going on. I don't just want to observe her. I feel that was something that we've done with our show, that we can get inside her brain. 

The movie in many respects is a love letter to cinema and my hope is that my Amélie is a love letter to theater. What theater can do so well is really celebrate that we are people all in one room. And that includes the actors on stage creating this imaginative world and imaginative environment. So we focused on the hand-made quality to activate the story. We also have some puppets. I mean, there's certainly a lot of technology involved, but I always wanted it to be on a human scale. 

I had a long-standing friendship and creative relationship with Edward. I think it's really about mining the intent of what's on the page and honoring the author's intent. I feel really strongly about that. That yes, there's an authorial voice that I have putting up the show and what it looks like and working with designers and working with my wonderful choreographer, Sam Pinkleton. And that's authorship too. But I want to try to unpack and put into three dimensions what the writers have struggled over, wrestled through to try and get it down on a page. I definitely feel that Edward taught me that.

I think there's something really great about the freelancer, journeyman career of constantly having to reinvent my relationship to a story depending on what it is and also the room in which I'm telling it. So that keeps it from getting stale, that's for sure. I think Amélie, like a great storyteller, loves to observe people and loves to capture what she thinks those people are. I have some years on Amélie so I hope that I've learned that you don't only have to keep people at arm's length and that observing is fantastic, but also making connections and being intimate with people. The way I am with my actors and with collaborators and going into life risking something emotional, I feel more like Amélie II as opposed to Amélie.

I think we're running 101 minutes in Los Angeles so yeah. It's a story with a really deep and universal and strong emotional spine, but it doesn't have a huge amount of plot. It doesn't have a huge amount of story. I'm a big fan in unless your story demands that you take an intermission — demands that you take that break structurally — I would love to just go through it, get immersed and come out the other side.