New Musical on Broadway
Irma La Douce is small scale and French, piquant and jaunty—a musical in which everything turns on sex and money and promptly turns into sentiment and make-believe. A prostitute in a dregsy quarter of Paris, Irma gives her love and earnings to a virtuous young law student named Nestor. Growing jealous of her clients, Nestor—using earnings of his own, and a false beard and spectacles—becomes Irma's one-man provider, "M. Oscar." Irma thereupon falls in love with Oscar; Nestor "kills" him, is sent to Devil's Island, and escapes so as to be back in Paris in time for Christmas and Irma's gift of twin sons.
By putting its bad apples at the top of the barrel and its milk of human kindness inside Pernod bottles, Irma La Douce endows its harmless story with a nice tingle of iniquity, even a certain mixture of sweetness and bite. Now and then the gags and goings-on go sour, or the story droops: Nestor-Oscar, for example, outwears its welcome. But under Peter Brook's brilliant direction, most of Irma moves remarkably fast, with the advisable speed of things outside the law and people on the lam—or it kicks its heels with Parisian verve and pertness. Marguerite Monnot's score has a gay street-music tinniness that can have resonance too, as in the rousing wail of From a Prison Cell or the ring and bounce of There Is Only One Paris for That. But it is England's dark, dynamic Elizabeth Seal in the title role—indeed, as the only woman in the show—who stands foremost. Without her fresh, bright gifts for dancing and prancing and singing, and her gamine knack for being sinful yet childlike, Irma might choke a bit on its story and at the same time go hungry for charm.
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