New Play in Manhattan

Gigi (adapted by Anita Loos from Colette's novel; produced by Gilbert Miller) is the adolescent daughter--in turn-of-the-century Paris--of an established line of cocottes. Though her mother and grandmother never succeeded in being elegantly maintained, they firmly insist that the traditions of their calling must be, and that the still hoydenish Gigi (Audrey Hepburn) be launched as correctly as a debutante.

Gigi goes each week to her great-aunt Alicia (Cathleen Nesbitt)--the immensely successful grande cocotte of the family who might be its dowager duchess--for lessons in how to eat ortolans or determine the comparative value of jewels. Aunt Alicia also decides which rich young Parisian shall launch her grandniece. But the play itself decides on a prettier ending: the chosen rake (Michael Evans) offers lovestruck Gigi no proposition but a proposal.

Gigi is as French as Colette. But where Colette's Frenchness is everything meant by "Gallic," Director Raymond Rouleau's is everything called up by the Gare du Nord--bustling, clamorous, boisterous. This coarsens a play whose slightness should be equaled by its lightness, whose charm lies in the contrast between its manners and its morals. Such gentility may make the play seem more immoral, but without it Gigi is merely raffish, and less entertaining than it should be. Only such a tittle jewel of a scene as the scene of the jewels comes off completely. Otherwise, Gigi shimmers most while its scenes are being shifted, when against evocatively Parisian curtains it plays gay, rakish period tunes.

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