EAST LANSING, Mich.–An American in Paris is not a ballet. But neither is it not a ballet. Rather, it might be what a ballet would be if you added singing and speech to it.

From it’s opening number to its final masterpiece, the ballet informs everything that An American in Paris does. The characters all move with leg kicks and raised arms, standing on their toes and floating through an ever-moving backdrop of Paris. In that sense, the show touring through East Lansing’s Wharton Center is beautiful, a show designed to be breath-taking.

It’s also filled with music that has long since entered the Great American Songbook. They’re the old standards, familiar and cheerful. Adam Hochberg (played by Matthew Scott) tells us he’s wanting to show the darkness of the world in his music, but there is little of it to be found in the Gershwin compositions of this show.

While everything is very beautiful, there’s a lot about this show that is just plain uncomfortable, especially when coming from today’s headlines. How many musicals, movies, songs and items from popular culture have made sexual harassment acceptable and encouraged? An American in Paris certainly falls into the realm of stories where a man doesn’t take a woman’s “No” for an answer, no matter how many times she gives it. And the book writers reward him by eventually saying that nope, she didn’t really mean it, she really was truly in love with him and her “No” didn’t mean “No.”

And the book writers double down by making it that when a man says “No” to a woman, he’s showing “spine,” and a woman who doesn’t respect that “No” is doomed to be lonely and at fault for her loneliness, portrayed in only a slightly sympathetic manner.

Nor does it help that the three male friends aren’t really very likeable. They never feel authentic as genuine people. They dance very well, but they come across as stereotypes. Scott is stilted and his pleas to Lise (Allison Walsh) feel selfish and not really coming from the place of passion that the words describe.

McGee Maddox has the good looks of a Jerry Mulligan, but he is a stock American service veteran who is scarred from witnessing his buddies die. He moves between exuberance and darkness without any real motivation. Jerry is disrespectful to Lise, never accepting her “No” or believing her when she says her life is not as simple as his. He also leads Milo Davenport (Kristen Scott) on and takes advantage of all that she has to offer. While his love for Lise is supposed to conquer all, her love for him he treats as insignificant. Perhaps there is a way that this could have been pulled off if Maddox were more sensitive to either, but he plays the role in a cavalier manner.

Ben Michael’s Henri perhaps comes a little closer to what is intended by the story. He is stiff and proper, optimistic and committed to following his heart both when it comes to love and his art. The only reason the story gives why Henri doesn’t deserve to get the girl is that he doesn’t have the bluff masculinity of Jerry, the good ol’ American boyishness. He’s too respectful, too reserved, too kind, and too caring. His love for Lise is based on years of it growing between them, tempered in hardship, based on getting to know each other. He is devoted to her. But for An American in Paris, this is not “real” love.

Scott is fantastic as Milo and she gets the most out of the part. She is the counterpart to Jerry. She is an American who is brash, wealthy and who knows what she wants. In another time period, she would be rewarded for that. Here, she is gently scolded and compared unfavorably to the more passive Lise.

If you can ignore the story and the stiff acting, the dancing is really, really good. In the style of the 50s when this story was first told, there are songs stuck into the musical simply to celebrate the dancing and the singing, simply for the spectacle. They don’t forward the story and they don’t really have any symbolic significance. They are just pure fun.

The musical also takes a risk by devoting a long sequence to the instrumental “An American in Paris.” It is the ballet that has been developed throughout the entire show and the musical lets it run as a full ballet number, fully celebrating each lift, each pirouette. Yes, it is story-based; it is meant to convince us that Lise is able to dance only because of her love for Jerry, but it is a thing of beauty in its own right.

An American in Paris might have done better if it stuck with being a ballet, leaving behind the story that promotes a culture of sexual harassment. Keep the beauty of the music and the dance and in the future, write a story that reflects the reality that when a woman says no repeatedly for weeks on end, she really does mean no.

Click here for show days, times and ticket info.