The elfin adult Amelie ( Soo) relocates to Montmartre and starts working as a waitress at the Café des 2 Moulins, where “she lives quietly among her co-workers and loudly in her imagination.” Great. Mostly it just seems designed to distend a basic meet-cute scenario into some kind of Rube Goldberg-esque torture. Much is made of geometry lessons in which the homeschooled young Amelie (Savvy Crawford, excellent stage name) learns about Zeno’s paradox, positing that no two objects can ever connect because each attempt to reach a point results in the arrival at a halfway point to somewhere else. To the writers’ credit, the film’s interminable streams of voiceover have been whittled down to their essence, for instance reducing the litany of neuroses and tics belonging to Amelie’s parents, Raphael ( Manoel Felciano) and Amandine (Alison Cimmet), to a line or two each in song. The musical, like the movie, has a pathological aversion to simplicity. Instead, we get a string of labored metaphors. If there was a number that satisfyingly expresses Amelie’s longing to escape her chronic shyness and engage with the world as a whole human being, I must have missed it. Moments that don’t cry out to be musicalized get slathered in song, while others where the emotional amplification of music might have helped go unsung. Don’t get me started on the interlude in which Amelie imagines herself a beloved saint of the people like the freshly deceased Princess Diana, prompting a gushing tribute anthem from a chunky Elton John in garish “ Croc Rock” glam mode (Randy Blair). So we get an odious character, a jarringly insensitive insult and an asinine song performed by someone with zero relevance to the plot. And yet they appear long enough onstage for the latter (Heath Calvert) to sing an ode to, yes, figs before the boss tells him, “Get moving, spaz!” Then they pretty much disappear from the story. For instance, the creative team has jettisoned the movie subplot in which Amelie teaches a lesson to the spiteful greengrocer who mistreats his slow-witted clerk. For every smart decision made by book writer Craig Lucas, composer Daniel Messe and his co-lyricist Nathan Tysen, there’s a trousseau of head-scratchers.
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