After a triumphant standing-room-only tryout run at Washington’s Kennedy Center, a new production of Gigi is opening on Broadway this spring. It is a revival that is nothing like a replay: this is a dynamically refashioned musical that brings a 21^st century sensibility to the world’s oldest profession.

In the classic 1958 Lerner and Lowe movie musical, Maurice Chevalier purred and winked his way through a celebration of La Belle Epoque’s grand horizontals. But the spectacle of an elderly roue smacking his lips at young girls does not work in the predatory atmosphere of 21^st century life.

Much has been changed, but like the movie the new Gigi is based on Colette’s 1944 novella. Colette was a woman-of-the-world who clearly understood the role of Belle Epoque coquettes. The grandest courtesans were the era’s most dazzling media figures—great beauties with high social status and wealthy lovers; their love affairs were written about and gossiped over by le tout Paris. They cultivated a high-on-the-radar lifestyle that included driving in the Bois every afternoon during the Paris Season, attending races at Longchamps, watching polo matches at Bagatelle, and appearing at the Paris Opera on Mondays. They wore fabulous jewels and dined at Maxim’s; some even endorsed perfumes, couturiers, and cars.

For a young woman born without means in Belle Epoque Paris, the life of a courtesan offered one of the few paths to a life filled with luxury and glamour. As Cornelia Otis Skinner has shown in Elegant Wits and Grand Horizontals (1962), courtesans in Belle Epoque Paris were beacons of female independence: “They were celebrities as firmly established as the top stars of the theatre.”

Left, and below, right: Vanessa Hudgens as Gigi.

Colette lived and absorbed the life of the grand horizontals. Like Coco Chanel, whose career was launched when a wealthy patron established her as a couturier in a fashionable Paris neighborhood, Colette earned economic independence through various alliances with men of wealth and position. She worked in Parisian music halls, married several times, and somehow managed to have a writing career. In 1920 she published Cheri, a novel about a courtesan’s life, and quickly became part of the artistic circle that included Jean Cocteau. She became a celebrity herself, and by 1927 was recognized as France’s greatest woman writer.

Gigi was written during the German occupation; Colette had stayed in Paris during the war and continued to write “to make a living.” She set Gigi in the Belle Epoque world of courtesans because she thought that describing that glamorous world would “sweep her readers away from their everyday concerns of wartime shortages and danger.”

Gigi was made into a Broadway play in 1951, and starred Audrey Hepburn—then a virtual unknown who was chosen for the role by Colette herself. While this play had little success, the 1958 movie that followed pulled out all the stops. With a much-loved score by Lerner and Loewe, the film was directed by Vincente Minnelli and starred Leslie Caron, Maurice Chevalier, and Louis Jourdan. It won nine Oscars, including Best Director and Best Picture.

Today’s Gigi has retained the Lerner and Loewe score, but the narrative has been greatly restructured. Heidi Thomas, acclaimed for writing the BBC drama Call the Midwife, has given the show a major makeover. The key shift she has made has been to transform the story’s perspective: Thomas has said that the movie made her wonder “why it’s called Gigi and not Honore.” In her adaptation, she—like Colette did in her novella–shines the spotlight directly on Gigi’s emergence as an autonomous woman. The production now serves as a triumphant tableau of Gigi’s self-determination.

Thomas argues that Belle Epoque courtesans were among the most independent women of their age, able to build alliances that could bring them economic independence as few other occupations could. To prepare for her career, Gigi is being “finished” by her grandmother and aunt: she is taught table manners, the importance of fine jewelry, and a genteel bearing. “Explain yourself without gestures,” her Aunt Alicia instructs her. “The moment you gesticulate you look common.” She is also told, “Marriage is not forbidden to us,” although “Instead of marrying ‘at once,’ it sometimes happens that we marry ‘at last.’”

Right:Corey Cott as Gaston Lachaille

The age difference between Gigi and Gaston has also been reconsidered from the yawning generational gap presented in the movie. Now Gigi is sixteen, while Gaston is a more politically correct twenty-four instead of middle aged. Gigi is played by Vanessa Hudgens, and Gaston by Corey Cott. In the pre-Broadway production I saw in Washington, Hudgens romped delightfully, and Cott plays a much differently conceived Gaston than Louis Jourdan did in the movie. He brought the house down when he sang the title song “Gigi,” which has some of Alan Jay Lerner’s finest lyrics: “Gigi, while you were trembling on the brink/Was I out yonder somewhere blinking at a star?/When did your sparkle turn to fire/And your warmth become desire?/Oh, what miracle has made you/The way you are?”

The Lerner and Loewe songs have been re-ordered from the movie version. The narrative has shifted, and because Thomas’s production does not focus on Chevalier’s role as a seasoned playboy, Honore (here played by Howard McGillin) does not open the show singing “Zank ‘heaven, for leetle grrrrrls.” In fact, he doesn’t get to sing this song at all. Now it has morphed into a duet sung by Aunt Alicia and grandmother Mamita, and becomes a maternal love song. Dee Hoty as Alicia and Victoria Clark as Mamita are phenomenal performers who remind us of Broadway’s glory days.

Right: Paris Exposition Champ de Mars and Eiffel Tower, Paris, 1900.

Paris in the year of the 1900 World’s Fair remains the star. The heart of the Fair was the “Palace of Electricity,” decked out with 5,000 multi-colored incandescent bulbs and steam-driven dynamos. The Fair’s focus on new inventions for the new century helped open the door to modernism.

This production uses the World’s Fair as an ongoing metaphor for change. Gaston, who complains that life is dull (“It’s a Bore”), is transfixed by new gadgets he’s seen at the Fair, such as a lantern slide projector he shows off to Gigi. More pointedly, the context of the Fair’s revolutionary modernism makes Gigi’s self-determination a natural outgrowth of changing attitudes.

Left: Sem, “fin-de-soiree-chez-maxim” 1901. 

The sense of newness is reinforced by Derek McLane’s spectacular sets, notably the sweeping grand arches of the Fair’s entrance that hold center stage throughout the show. The scenes set at Maxim’s—where glamorous people congregated to be seen–have inspired some very clever choreography by Joshua Bergasse and Alison Solomon: the habituees of Maxim’s were often depicted by a caricaturist named “Sem,” who drew them with noses in the air and bejeweled arms afloat. The choreographed numbers staged at Maxim’s—notably “The Gossips”—bring these caricatures to life, and the effect is delightful.

This Gigi is a wonderfully entertaining example of musical theater at its best. Re-imagined for today’s audiences, it also gives voice to our times. As Heidi Thomas explains, “I’ve always found Gigi to be an empowering character for women. She understood what she wanted for her life and she was going to make what she wanted known.”

By Amy Henderson, Contributing Writer

The revival had a tryout run at Washington, DC’s Kennedy Center. New York previews at the Neil Simon Theatre begin March 19th; the Broadway run officially opens at that theater April 8^th.