ABSTRACT
The chapter discusses the major incarnations of the Lerner and Loewe musical Gigi: the 1958 movie directed by Vincente Minnelli, the 1973 stage transfer and the 2015 Broadway revival, which was substantially revised by Heidi Thomas. All three versions are imbued with a strong sense of artifice and artificiality, although the form of these stratagems varies: whereas Minnelli, using a carefully calibrated colour scheme, depicted a stilted society averse to bodily spontaneity, the stage musical attempted in vain to replace the sensuous ambience of the screen original – the film was famously shot on location in Paris – with new songs which only underlined that the property seemed contrived outside its ‘natural’ habitat. The 2015 rewrite on the other hand, responding to criticism by cultural critics in the United States who found several aspects of the movie objectionable and ‘disturbing’, overlaid the story with a ‘modern sensibility’ that went against the core of its source material and thus created its very own type of disingenuousness.
