Memoirs of Amorous Gentlemen is officially open. The new Duncan Sheik musical took its opening bow Thursday night at the Night Egg at the Culture Club in New York, closing out a preview run that began September 25, and the first critics’ notices are landing exactly where the audience word has been pointing since those previews started: squarely on Sophia Anne Caruso.
In its opening review, TheWrap compares Caruso to Édith Piaf, the French icon known as “the little sparrow,” a tiny figure who produced an enormous sound. Critic Robert Hofler writes that Caruso holds that same contradiction, a small frame giving way to a huge voice, using it “to magnificent effect” as Colette. It is the kind of comparison reviewers do not hand out lightly, and it caps the arc TDN readers have watched build through previews, where early audiences were already singling her out.
Caruso plays Colette, a young writer in Belle Époque Paris who works at the Night Egg, the maison close that gives the brand-new venue its name, and begins turning the lives confided to her into writing of her own. In the process she shifts from being observed to being the observer, all while caught in a destructive attachment to Léon, her childhood love, played by Cory Jeacoma. The production, directed and choreographed by Rob Ashford, is the first manga ever adapted into an English-language American musical, with a book by Leah Nanako Winkler drawn from Moyoco Anno’s manga of the same name.
Opening night also carried a weight no one in the building could miss. Sheik, the Tony and Grammy-winning composer of Spring Awakening, died on September 17 at 56, eight days before the first preview, which makes Memoirs his final musical and this production both a premiere and a farewell. Caruso leads a company that includes Nkeki Obi-Melekwe as Nana and Jenny Powers as Madame.
The opening caps a remarkable fall for Caruso, whose debut album On Ecstatic arrived September 18, one week before previews began. Memoirs of Amorous Gentlemen runs through January 3, 2027 at the Night Egg at the Culture Club, 530 W. 27th Street in New York. Tickets are available at MemoirsMusical.com.