Vanessa Hudgens in a Squeaky Clean "Gigi" on Broadway
Charles IsherwoodApril 8, 2015: A shower of soap bubbles descends upon the audience at the finale of the pretty and pleasant revival of the musical “Gigi” that opened at the Neil Simon Theater on Wednesday. The gentle downpour is meant to evoke the fizz in a glass of Champagne, the delights of which have been celebrated in one of the bounciest songs from the score by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe. But it inadvertently brought to mind how thoroughly the musical, about a young woman being groomed for a life as a courtesan in turn-of-the-20th-century Paris, has been scrubbed of anything even remotely naughty or distasteful. In this squeaky clean version of the material, Gigi’s potential future as a demimondaine — that’s French for high-end prostitute — is alluded to in such delicately vague terms that no parent chaperoning a tween fan of the show’s star, Vanessa Hudgens, of “High School Musical” renown, will have much explaining to do after the curtain has fallen. You probably remember the most uncomfortable passage in the froufrou-bedecked 1958 film, which won a hefty nine Oscars including best picture (and which was also more treacly than the Colette story on which it was based). Recall Maurice Chevalier, playing the narrator, the suave silver fox Honoré Lachaille, singing “Thank Heaven for Little Girls” as he strolls through the Bois de Boulogne, eyeing young girls romping in the park.
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