Paris — “This is tricky,” said Christopher Wheeldon. Robert Fairchild and Leanne Cope, the leads in his new production of “An American in Paris,” looked at him expectantly. The production team, sitting in a row in the auditorium of the Châtelet theater here, waited quietly.
Mr. Fairchild’s character, Jerry, was declaring his love for Ms. Cope’s Lise, and Mr. Wheeldon wasn’t convinced that it was working. He pushed his baseball cap farther back on his head and stared at the couple thoughtfully. “How about this?” Mr. Fairchild said, executing a perfect double pirouette. Everyone laughed. “If only that would do it,” Mr. Wheeldon said.
Mr. Wheeldon knows about pirouettes. At 41, he is one of the most important and in-demand ballet choreographers working today. But as a director, he is a newcomer, an as-yet-untested commodity in the financially hair-raising enterprise of bringing a new show to Broadway, where “An American in Paris,” a stage adaptation of the beloved 1951 Vincente Minnelli film, begins previews on March 13 at the Palace Theater.
But both here and, two months later in New York, where technical rehearsals were taking place at the Palace, Mr. Wheeldon appeared calm and in control, deftly managing the simultaneous demands of plot-point discussion with the author of the book, Craig Lucas; questions from the technical director; and anxious actors who wanted to discuss motivation and vocal inflection.
“Welcome to the crazy world of theater,” he said resignedly, as no sooner had he resolved one problem than another reared up. (“Why did no one tell me the columns couldn’t fit through the wings here?”)
A stage version of “An American in Paris,” which won best picture and five other Oscars, is both an obvious idea and a high-stakes gamble: obvious because it benefits from George and Ira Gershwin’s famous music, hummable songs (“S’Wonderful,” “I Got Rhythm,” “I’ll Build a Stairway to Paradise”) and lots of brand recognition; a gamble, because, as Mr. Wheeldon put it, “the film is perfect, and how do you live up to that?”
The British-born Mr. Wheeldon has a long history with “An American in Paris,” beginning when his parents took him to a concert of Gershwin music at the age of 7. “I went kicking and screaming, threatening to sleep though it all,” he recounted. Instead, he was captivated, later watching the movie and deciding that he, too, wanted to dance like Gene Kelly.
Mr. Wheeldon trained at the Royal Ballet School and, at 18, was accepted into the Royal Ballet. But a year later, at 19, he changed continents and joined New York City Ballet, where his choreographic talent soon became apparent. By 2001, when he became City Ballet’s first resident choreographer, it was clear that he was an important new voice in classical dance.
In 2002, he got his first taste of Broadway, when he choreographed “Sweet Smell of Success,” directed by Nicholas Hytner, who that same year invited him to take part in a reading, with Wendy Wasserstein, for a potential musical version of “An American in Paris.”
Although that project never came to fruition, Mr. Wheeldon decided to create an “American in Paris” ballet to the Gershwin score for City Ballet. “That music, its jazz influences, that American view of Paris, always fascinated me,” Mr. Wheeldon said in an interview in his office, overlooking the Seine. The ballet had its premiere in 2005, with Picasso- and Braque-inspired décor by Adrianne Lobel, but Mr. Wheeldon said he had never felt entirely happy with it and always intended to return to the score.
His golden path hit a pothole when he left Morphoses, the ballet company he had founded with much fanfare in 2006. Soon after, fate, in the shape of the producer Stuart Oken, stepped in. He invited Mr. Wheeldon to lunch in the fall of 2010, and asked him if he would like to direct “An American in Paris.”
Mr. Wheeldon said no.
“I said, ‘I’ll choreograph it, but I’ve never directed actors, and I’m really not sure about that,’ ” Mr. Wheeldon recalled. “But Stuart kept at me,” he said. Some eight months later, “reluctantly, and with quite a lot of fear,” he accepted.
The run-up to that moment was long in the making. Mr. Oken and Van Kaplan, now (with Roy Furman) the lead producers of “An American in Paris,” had each been approached by the estates of Ira and George Gershwin, hoping to follow the 1992 Broadway success of “Crazy for You.” (“Nice Work if You Can Get It,” based on the Gershwin songbook, came later.)
Both men were initially unsure about the project. “We couldn’t get our heads around how to take this iconic film to the stage,” Mr. Oken said. “The one thing we agreed on was that for this piece you needed a unified vision, not a choreographer doing one thing and a director another. The list of people who had those tools was very short.”
John Lithgow, who starred in “Sweet Smell,” said that he thought Mr. Wheeldon was in “a wonderful position” to make his Broadway directorial debut. “He is a born director,” Mr. Lithgow said in a telephone conversation. “His transitions are brilliantly paced, he has a great theatrical understanding, and I think he will bring a new sensibility to musical comedy, just as Jerome Robbins did.”
Aside from Robbins, who won plaudits both for his ballets and such legendary productions as “On the Town” and “West Side Story,” it’s hard to think of a serious dance-world choreographer who has had much success as a Broadway director. (Twyla Tharp had a big hit with “Movin’ Out,” but received a critical drubbing for “The Times They Are a-Changin’,” as did Mark Morris for “The Capeman.”)
But Mr. Oken and Mr. Kaplan said they had always been convinced that this was a risk worth taking. After seeing Mr. Wheeldon’s full-length “Alice in Wonderland,” created for the Royal Ballet in 2011, they put the question to him: Why don’t you feel ready to direct a musical?
Former collaborators say Mr. Wheeldon was selling himself short. “I’ve always been struck that he has been as interested in narrative as he has been in pure dance,” Mr. Hytner wrote in an email. “His recent ‘Winter’s Tale’ for the Royal Ballet was as probing, moving and inventive a response to that play as any I’ve seen on the spoken stage.”
Getting Mr. Wheeldon to agree was just the start. The Gershwin estate wasn’t convinced that a ballet choreographer — even a very famous ballet choreographer — was the right choice, and waited until seeing a presentation of a 60-page treatment developed by Mr. Lucas and Mr. Wheeldon before offering its blessing. “Fortunately Chris knocked their socks off,” Mr. Oken said.
Even then, Mr. Wheeldon said, he didn’t fully commit to directing the musical until after a six-week workshop, during which time he worked closely with Mr. Lucas; Rob Fisher, who adapted and arranged the Gershwin music (the estate gave permission to use almost all of the composer’s oeuvre); and with the set and costume designer Bob Crowley, who had worked with him on “Alice” and “The Winter’s Tale.”
The musical follows the rough outlines of Alan Jay Lerner’s movie script: a former G.I., Jerry Mulligan, trying to make a living as an artist in Paris, falls for the adorable Lise, who unbeknown to him is the fiancée of his friend Henri (Max von Essen). But Mr. Lucas and Mr. Wheeldon have set the story just after World War II, rather than in the early 1950s of the film, to create a more plausible context for Lise’s decisions. They’ve also turned her into an aspiring ballet dancer and have made Jerry and Henri’s composer friend, Adam (played by Brandon Uranowitz), central to the story as its narrator, who is also in love with Lise.
Casting leads who could stand eternal comparisons with Kelly and Ms. Caron was the next hurdle, and Mr. Wheeldon decided that the project made sense for him only if the characters were top-level dancers. He immediately thought of Mr. Fairchild, a tall, handsome principal at City Ballet who Mr. Wheeldon knew could sing.
“It was a risk, of course,” he said, “because he had never acted before, but his voice was good, and he has effortless charisma onstage.” Ms. Cope, a corps de ballet dancer at the Royal Ballet, was, Mr. Wheeldon said, “more of a project, because she wasn’t already a star.” But, he added, “she came into the room and immediately displayed great natural skill. I think there must have been something burning in her to be an actress.”
Both performers dance a great deal; Mr. Wheeldon has created a ballet to Gershwin’s “Second Rhapsody” at the end of Act I, as well as retaining the 16-minute “American in Paris” ballet toward the end. (There is also a marvelous pastiche midway through suggesting a bad Serge Lifar ballet.) But they also sing a great deal and have had extensive vocal training since they started to work on the show, and both said, during interviews in Paris, that they had learned an enormous amount.
“These are different tool sets and techniques,” Mr. Fairchild said. “It’s been a boot camp, and you are out of your comfort zone, but I like a challenge.”
So, clearly, does Mr. Wheeldon. “You have to keep pretty and strong and focused even when you are exhausted,” he said. “You never stop discussing, is this the right song, is this the right dialogue? It wore me down a bit at first, but now I find it exhilarating.”
The Paris run, highly unusual for a Broadway-bound production, came about when Mr. Oken heard that Jean-Luc Choplin, the director of the Châtelet theater, was separately seeking the rights. Teaming up with the nonprofit Châtelet meant, the producers said, that they could benefit from its resources (the theater built and paid for the scenery and costumes), as well as have an out-of-town tryout period at no financial risk, in an undeniably appropriate spot. (Although Mr. Oken and Mr. Kaplan wouldn’t give an exact budget number for the production, they said they had raised between $10 million and $12 million, and that advance ticket sales have been strong.)
The Paris season played to sold-out houses and drew rapturous reviews; a morale-building success for the team. But Mr. Wheeldon said he hadn’t stopped working on the show for a moment.
“It was a magical few weeks, but I think we were all realistic about what we needed to do,” he said. That included streamlining the show by some 20 minutes to a 2 1/2-hour running time, redefining the character of Milo (Jill Paice), the American heiress who falls for Jerry, and changing some of the musical choices.
Asked what he had learned over the last year, Mr. Wheeldon paused. “Patience!” he said, and laughed. Then he looked serious. “What I’ve learned is how much work, from everyone, goes into making a Broadway musical. It’s a hard business, it’s highly competitive, and everybody pours their life into the process.”
Or as Kelly told Ms. Caron before filming began: “Amusing the public is a tough job.”
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