The sex worker with a heart of gold is a trope that’s existed since ancient times, and it gets another tired work-up in Memoirs of Amorous Gentlemen, a luxuriously mounted but wan new musical adapted from a popular manga graphic novel by Moyoco Anno. Duncan Sheik, who died last month at age 56, has composed a ballad-heavy score for the show, with a clunky book by Leah Nanako Winkler that lumbers between cliché and melodrama and plays like a slightly more NSFW version of Moulin Rouge that still manages to keep its PG-13 rating.
The setting is an early-20th-century Paris brothel dubbed the Night Egg, which is brought to spectacular life by set designer Scott Pask and lighting expert Brian Tovar in the basement space of the far-west-Chelsea warehouse that once housed Sleep No More (now rechristened The Culture Club). The audience is seated cabaret-style around a circular stage where we meet the naive but noble Colette (Sophia Anne Caruso), her madame (Jenny Powers), and fellow courtesans — as well as a menagerie of clients with bizarre but endearing kinks. There’s the guy who thinks he’s a bird, the hairy man with a shaving fetish, and the voyeur who likes to watch the girls dressed in circus outfits (Catherine Zuber’s costumes look like Cirque du Soleil castoffs).
Colette, though, has fallen for the wrong guy: a similarly penniless hustler named Leon (Cory Jeacoma, looking hunky in a thanklessly one-dimensional role) who keeps begging Colette for money and jewelry that he squanders on gambling debts and other women, especially a high-class sex worker named Nana (Nkeki Obi-Melewkwe) formerly in the madame’s stable. Our Colette remains stubbornly, stupidly devoted to this creep — pouting and whining like a petulant schoolgirl in a way that robs us of any sympathy for her. How can she be so savvy about human nature and yet so naive about her own circumstances?
While the expository book scenes are a disaster, made even more cringey by Rob Ashford’s overly broad direction, things do perk up during the musical numbers. Sheik has delivered some challenging but melodic torch songs, and Caruso nails them with a velvety belt that maintains its tone through her upper register. Caruso (saddled with a mousey wig by Tom Watson) also blends nicely in ensemble numbers and her duets with Jeacoma. And Ashford’s choreography has a lithe sensuality that fits the show’s theme and setting. But there’s a sameyness to the tunes, which too often substitute surface bounciness for strong hooks. Sheik’s lyrics are often a mouthful, including a solo bizarrely titled “Immured” that repeats that somewhat archaic term for feeling imprisoned, and Cody Spencer’s muddy sound design adds to the challenge of pulling meaning from the songs.
The bigger problem is the story, which is framed around Colette’s recruitment by a Japanese writer manqué named Sakae (Marc Delacruz) to record her thoughts about her life and work in hopes that he can turn it into a novel that will justify his Paris sojourn before he completely burns through his inheritance. When he reads Colette’s first draft midway through the show, he dismisses it as “cliché! Nothing new! A tale as old as time!” He’s not wrong. Even the brothel workers’ discussion about how much “agency” they have under a mostly benevolent madame who lets them “refuse violent customers” smacks of a very 21st-century effort to whitewash the reality of women working in the margins of society out of desperation rather than desire.
Borrowing a bit from the biography of the best-selling early-20th-century French author Colette, best known for the novella that inspired the 1958 MGM musical Gigi, Anno suggests an escape route for her heroine as a writer. But it’s hard to imagine how this Colette, so easily duped by the cad Leon and clinging to the hope for his return long past reason, could morph into a self-actualized heroine. It doesn’t help that she’s upstaged in her big epiphany scene by a bare-chested customer (Michael Starr) who adorably struts and pants about the stage pretending to be a dog. (He teaches her that sharing her writing, like him sharing his canine kink, allows their imagined reality to become “bigger than the one you want to escape.”)
There’s a stylish gloss to the overall production, from the red-tinted café table lamps to the billowy red bunting around the auditorium, that helps mask the thinness of the material. While Memoirs of Amorous Gentlemen captures the look of underground naughtiness, there’s nothing particularly sexy on display. The show is more interested in the quirky than the kinky, and in romanticizing a profession that in real life is rife with violence and exploitation. ★★☆☆☆
MEMOIRS OF AN AMOROUS GENTLEMAN
The Culture Club, Off Broadway
Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes (no intermission)
Tickets on sale through January 3 for $49 to $210