(Coming up: “ Mean Girls,” adapted by Tina Fey.) It’s easy to see why these films scream out for musicalization: they already have one foot planted in fantasy, with characters whose lovingly accentuated quirks render them slightly larger than life. We’ve also seen, with varying success, musicals of “Billy Elliot,” “Little Miss Sunshine,” “Waitress,” “Big Fish,” and “Elf,” to name a few. “Amélie” is one of several recent musicals inspired by movies that Netflix might categorize as Offbeat Independent Comedies from the Aughts. The musical closes with a kiss on the lips, and it’s hard to visualize what happens next. The movie cuts to Amélie and Nino naked in bed together. As an adult, when she finally submits to Nino’s courtship, they peck each other innocently on the cheek and forehead, like two curious robins. As a youngster, she yearns for the touch of her father, a doctor, but it only comes when she gets her annual checkup. What the musical implies but doesn’t explore is Amélie’s sexual repression. Here, she’s effortless in the role immortalized by Audrey Tautou-when she can manage to override the visual noise around her. Amélie might even be a better role for her than Eliza, whose bouts of scorned rage and grief in Act II of “Hamilton” seemed to take up all the grit she could muster. And for good reason: she’s a poised, amiable performer with a crystal-clear soprano. Judging from the scores of young women waiting outside the stage door for autographs, Soo has racked up an impressive fan base since her turn as Eliza Hamilton. Amélie’s suicidal pet goldfish is now a giant puppet bobbing through billowing sheets of “water,” while Elton John jumps out of the broadcast of Princess Diana’s funeral to sing a rock number. The stage show, directed by Pam MacKinnon, overinflates every flight of fancy. At least the movie knew that part of charm is holding something back. Of course, some people find the movie cute enough, merci, and they should avoid the musical. A voice-over narrated the unlikely events in a growly deadpan, and the peculiar souls who populate Amélie’s world-like a shut-in neighbor who paints the same Renoir over and over-were filmed with clinical flatness, which served as a counterweight to cutesiness. The film, directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet (“Delicatessen”), balanced its whimsy with Gallic insouciance. But is her adult playfulness just a shield against the romantic interests of Nino (Adam Chanler-Berat), an equally wistful yet offbeat lad who spends his days collecting cast-offs from photo booths? Years later, she’s a dewy young woman (Phillipa Soo, of “Hamilton”) who still sees the world as a playground for handmade enchantment. As a girl, Amélie (played by the brassy Savvy Crawford) is denied affection by her fussy parents and uses her imagination as an escape hatch. Like the French film on which it’s based, from 2001, the musical opens on Amélie’s childhood. He’s so moved by this “miracle” that he vows to reconnect with his estranged daughter and grandchild. She tracks down the boy, now grown, and tricks him into discovering his old possessions in a phone booth. Behind a tile in her lonesome apartment, she finds a box of boyhood mementos from a long-ago tenant. The heroine of “Amélie,” the new musical at the Walter Kerr Theatre, is a dreamy Parisian café waitress who channels her childlike wonder into staging anonymous good deeds on the streets of Montmartre.
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