La Mélodie du Bonheur

A recent phenomenon in Paris are Broadway shows coming to town.

In the past few years, plays like Grease, The Lion King, and West Side Story (and, bizarrely, Anne Frank, Le Musicial) have arrived amidst a fanfare of happy-go-lucky billboards in the métro. I don’t think the words “infectious enthusiasm” or “feel-good musical” are part of the French vocabulary, but pretty soon they might be.

So don’t be surprised if you come across a Parisian whistling “Greased Lightning” or “Beauty School Dropout” on your next visit.

I love musicals as much as the next guy (well, 10% of them, anyways…) so when I saw an ad for La Mélodie du Bonheur, I immediately wanted to call Romain to see if I should get tickets.

I figured he’d ask me what the play was about, and I’d tell him it was the story of some sisters who, out of concern, decide they need to résolu une problème with Maria. She’s a hapless, but relentlessly optimistic gal who’s game for anything, and gets sent to live with a large, rich family but has to make clothes out of the drapes because dad is so stingy. When the surprisingly-talented troupe of kids aren’t singing goodnight songs to guests in their Austrian mansion, they’re serenading away and all their problems and crafting puppet shows about a wily man who has a thing for goats and a predilection for leather shorts.

After an exceptionally long pause, I’d likely hear…“Uhh?…Beh oui?”

So I’d continue…

One of the girls is sixteen, and is about to become one year older. So she sings a song in a gazebo to her potential boyfriend, who turns into a Nazi. He’s actually a dickwad (a word I probably won’t find in my dictionnaire français…) and eventually turns the family in to his superiors, forcing them to sing in an international competition where they escape one-by-one, fording every stream (anyone care to translate that one?), until they find their dream.

On second though, I think if I want to see La Mélodie du Bonheur, I’ll be seeing it alone.