DIRECTOR'S NOTE
Amelie was a very successful 2001 French film that was nominated for 5 Academy Awards. It has been praised for being "a beautiful film for introverts"- however, as Amelie learns, while improving the lives of others is noble and great, you can't use it as a crutch to hide from life and love and your own happiness.
SYNOPSIS
We begin withAmelie’s lonely childhood. Her father, a quiet former army doctor, who gives Amélie monthly medical check-ups, prescribes Amélie with a heart condition. However she was, in fact, only excited because her father rarely hugged his daughter. Her mother teaches her at school where she has no contact with other children.
Amelie’s mother dies in a freak accident when a tourist jumps from the top of the Notre Dame. Her father, in his mourning, becomes more and more sheltered, along with Amélie.
Amelie is now an adult and waitress at a Café Shocked by the breaking news of Princess Diana’s death, Amélie drops her perfume stopper that rolls next to the spot of her bathroom wall where an old box full of a child’s treasures is hidden.
She has the idea to find the owner of this box and return his treasure to him. This idea leads her to meet her neighbours — an old artist with brittle bone disease, Raymond Dufayel
Dufayel tells Amelie she has been searching for the wrong person, as the last name of the owner of the child’s box is Bretodeau and not Bredoteau.
Finally, leading Bretodeau back to the treasure and secretly watching his exhilaration, Amelie feels renewed and in perfect harmony with herself
She decides to secretly help the lives around her. This includes helping a blind man across the street and describing in vivid detail what is going on around them.
At the Cafe she sets up her hypochondriac colleague, Georgette, with a regular at the cafe, Joseph and they have a passionate but short-lived romance.
Amélie also steals a gnome from her father’s garden in a plot to pull him out of his reclusion; she gets her friend and air hostess, Philomène, to take pictures of the gnome in different countries and mail them to Amélie’s father.
In the midst of her plots and schemes, she meets a young man, Nino Quincampoix, at the Metro Station. Nino is obsessed with the strange appearance of a mysterious man in many of the photographs discarded in the photo-booths around the city.
Amélie picks up Nino’s photo album of discarded photographs that he drops. Amélie instantly becomes infatuated with him, but rather than approaching him, she devises various games of hide-and-seek for Nino to come retrieve his album.
What makes this musical special is the theme of combating lonliness with compassion. Amelie has a sad and lonely childhood- but she finds the rippling effects of kindness and although times are hard for dreamers, "though they do not see me, I am reaching out my hand."
The musical appeared on Broadway in 2015 but went on to find greater success in the West End in 2021.
