Review Roundup: MEMOIRS OF AMOROUS GENTLEMEN Opens Off-Broadway

The new Off-Broadway musical Memoirs of Amorous Gentlemen officially opens tonight at The Night Egg at the Culture Club, and the reviews are coming in. Find out what critics are saying about the production below.

Featuring music and lyrics by Tony and Grammy Award winner Duncan Sheik and a book by Leah Nanako Winkler, the musical is based on Moyoco Anno’s manga of the same name. Tony, Olivier and Emmy Award winner Rob Ashford directs and choreographs the production, which marks the first English-language American musical adaptation of a manga.

The cast is led by Sophia Anne Caruso as Colette, Cory Jeacoma as Léon, Nkeki Obi-Melekwe as Nana, Marc delaCruz as Sakae and Jenny Powers as Madame. The company also includes Leanne Antonio, Kailin Brown, Alexa De Barr, Michael Everett, Elsa Keefe, Jaedynn Latter, Austin Lesch, Nika Lindsay, Caleb Marshall, Jessie Peltier, Michael Starr and Thomas Winter.

Set in 20th-century Paris, Memoirs of Amorous Gentlemen follows Colette, a young woman working at a maison close called Night Egg, where she begins documenting the fantasies, confessions and personal struggles of its clients. As she discovers her voice through writing, she must also confront her complicated relationship with Léon, a childhood love whose influence continues to shape her life.

The production features music supervision, vocal arrangements and incidental music arrangements by Or Matias.

Jackson McHenry, Vulture : You can’t get very deep if you haven’t decided where to dig, and Memoirs is aiming all over the place. I kept imagining a version of the musical that tilted all the way toward the dark and perverse, or one that stayed farcical. At one point Sakae reprimands Colette for writing stories about her life that are nothing new, and she counters by insisting that at least the ordinariness of her woe makes her relatable. It feels like the musical is trying to give itself an out. Don’t we watch stories to see something exceptional? Or at least something rendering with enough clarity to make an ordinary perversion be seen in a new light?

Gillian Russo, New York Theatre Guide: Similarly, the best of the show’s flashier moments come thanks to Nkeki Obi-Melekwe’s grounded performance as Nana, a high-end call girl who doesn’t take disrespect. Like Caruso and Jeacoma in “Somewhere in the Evening” (and unlike the third character on stage, a distracting man-dog), she exhibits a refreshing and magnetic lack of capital-P Performance that helps to smooth over Leah Nanako Winkler (book) and Duncan Sheik’s (score) oft-pedestrian writing more than any bit of glitz or shock. Memoirs of Amorous Gentlemen may be all about voyeurism, but it proves that sometimes, the best things are left to the imagination.

Thom Geier , Culture Sauce: 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.

Average Rating: 40.0%

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