Amour Perdu: Michel Legrand Musical to Shutter on November 3

After 31 previews and 17 regular performances, the Broadway musical Amour will give its final performance at The Music Box on Sunday, November 3, at 3pm.

The show has music by Michel Legrand, who composed such pop hits as “The Windmills of Your Mind” and “What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life?” as well as the scores for the films The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, The Young Girls of Rochefort, and Yentl. Based on the short story Le Passe Muraille by Marcel Aymé, Legrand’s through-sung stage musical adaptation of the tale of a man who develops the power to walk through walls was first produced successfully under that title in Paris, with French lyrics by Didier van Cauwelaert. The translation for the Broadway version is by Jeremy Sams.

Amour co-stars Malcolm Gets as M. Dusoleil and Melissa Errico as his love interest, Isabelle. The cast also includes Lewis Cleale, John Cunningham, Christopher Fitzgerald, Norm Lewis, Sarah Litszinger, Nora Mae Lyng, and Bill Nolte, under the direction of James Lapine.

Produced by The Shubert Organization, Jean Doumanian Productions, Inc., and USA Ostar Theatricals, the show opened to mixed notices on October 20. In his TheaterMania review, David Finkle wrote of “the failure of the musical’s creators to make an un-charismatic central character charismatic.” While praising the work of Gets and Errico and the rest of the cast, Finkle concluded with the opinion that, “despite its Magritte/George Tooker-like sets by Scott Pask and its Paris-moody lighting design by Jules Fisher-Peggy Eisenhauer, Amour is not affecting enough for many musical theater buffs to fall in love with.”