Companies

“Édith Piaf – La vie en rose”
Finnish National Ballet
Opera House
Helsinki, Finland
March 15, 2025 (video)

by Ilona Landgraf
Copyright © 2025 by Ilona Landgraf

Two weeks after its world premiere, the Finnish National Ballet streamed its latest piece, Édith Piaf – La vie en rose, live on the online platform Stage 24. Sami Sykkö presented the live stream and conducted several interviews during the break. I was able to watch a recording a few days later.

Javier Torres, the company’s artistic director, assembled an entirely Finnish artistic team for Édith Piaf – La vie en rose. It is choreographer Reija Wäre’s (whose previous work stretches various genres, including opera and street dance, TV shows, and sports events) first full-length production. Composer Jukka Nykänen also has a reputation as a pianist. Jani Uljas designed the set; Erika Turunen, the costumes.

The libretto traces the biography of Édith Piaf as if reminisced by herself. Act I summarizes her life before becoming famous, and Act II her stardom and subsequent decline. Four dancers of different ages depict Piaf. Tiina Myllymäki was present in most scenes as the aged Édith who reflects upon her life, observing and interacting with the goings-on and highlighting certain contexts (the importance of a golden cross pendant, young Édith received when ill, for example). Stooped, her frizzy hair slightly unkempt, and wearing threadbare stockings, she bore a striking resemblance to the real Piaf. Sometimes, especially when smiling cunningly, she reminded me of a well-meaning witch, but she often looked helpless.
Seela Kunnari portrayed Édith as a child growing up at a bordello run by her grandmother (Sara Saviola). A plain gray, white-collard dress underscored her juvenile naivety and contrasted with the scanty satin clothing of the whores. When the girl was fascinated by a toy carousel with ballerinas given to her as a present, I presumed that Wäre had turned Piaf’s career into a dancer’s, but the melodies and musical motifs of Piaf’s songs interwoven into the score confirmed her career as a chanteuse. But first, young Édith fell seriously ill, lost her eyesight, and miraculously recovered thanks only to Saint Therese of Lisieux, to whose icon Myllymäki presented a red rose on stage.
The convalesced Édith grew into a teenager (portrayed by Hye Ji Kang) and was soon fetched by her father, Louis Alphonse Gassion (Frans Valkama), a street acrobat. Watching both on tour reminded me of Zampano and Gelsomina in La Strada, except that the Cirque Gassion seemed more reputable.
Candy-colored houses lined the streets of the post-war French city where Édith performed with her father. There, she met her lifetime companion Mômone (Yuka Masumoto)—a savvy, easy-going woman who all too easily took to the bottle—and Louis Dupont (Atte Kilpinen), who would become the father of her child. The couple’s domestic happiness crumbled when Édith joined the female workforce of a factory (whose workers sat at tables mounted to a conveyor belt that ran and ran and continued to run in the background) and shattered even before their baby daughter died.
Piaf’s life took a decisive turn when she met the seasoned nightclub owner Louis Leplée (Samuli Poutanen). A flash of light indicated that Piaf believed their encounter to be divine providence. Under Leplée’s and his staff’s wings, Piaf transformed into a self-assured singer (portrayed by Heidi Salminen) in the plain black dress that became her trademark apparel. Ready to make it to the top and full of anticipation, she opened a wide, white door (that presumably symbolized a gate into the wide world) as if it was the twenty-fourth door of an Advent calendar. To Piaf’s delight, red roses poured from behind it. The metaphor was so clumsily explicit that it took the steam out of the story as it headed for its climax.

In Act II, Piaf basked in the public’s admiration, enjoyed various lovers, and maneuvered the manipulations of people in power. But her drinking habits and demeanor got simultaneously out of control. Quite tipsy, she rolled on top of a piano at whose keys Shunsuke Arimizu played one of her songs. She begged him for more booze and persistently teased him until Arimizu—like other men—lay at her feet.
“AMERICA,” displayed in huge, light letters on the floor, announced Piaf’s first tour across the pond. Although she looked like a country woman at a loss in high society’s glamorous circles, she immediately received adulation. Her romance with the popular boxer Marcel Cerdan (Johan Pakkanen) caused much gossip. Although their romantic pas de deux was modest, the black-and-white archive film clips of the singing Piaf and the boxing Cerdan that flickered on numerous TV screens on the backdrop represented the buzz the couple created. On the same screens, the plane in which Cerdan died crashed. The spotlight that hit Piaf’s face afterward was cold and bright, and she suddenly looked aged and furrowed.
Myllymäki played Piaf in her memories of her last chapter. Grown old and unhinged, she ran after shadows, hopped into the arms of her doctor (Evaldas Bielinis) like an anxious child, and sought help from some dubious clairvoyant (Kailey Kaba). The red wine she uncontrollably consumed stained her dress. For her last concert, she stood on a podium with corner posts that likened it to a bier. While the real Piaf sang La vie en rose for the first time, the mesmerized crowd lifted the younger Piaf (Heidi Salminen) from their midst like an icon. The old Piaf (Tiina Myllymäki) sat down and became one with the shadow.

Piaf’s life was colorful and Wäre had some fine ideas to squeeze its major events into two acts. I liked, for example, how Piaf’s shadows gradually adopted a life of their own in the opening scene and how the four dancers portraying Piaf replaced one another on stage. Wäre knows when and how to create effects, even if some lack subtlety. I mainly missed expressive dances, a substantial palette of styles, and, most importantly, movements that reveal the inner mechanics of the protagonists. The soldiers visiting the bordello, for example, had not the least itch for the whores, and the whores played sexy but weren’t.
All four of Piaf`s solos mourning the baby’s death lacked emotional power, and when Piaf was seriously enamored, she and her lover walked hand in hand toward the audience, as if their emotions were too big to be expressed in dance. The corps often danced basic choreography that didn’t challenge them.

Perhaps Édith Piaf – La vie en rose lacked depth because the remembering perspective from which it was told acted as a milk glass pane that softens past emotions. That would also explain why the music (played by the Finnish National Opera orchestra under the baton of Aliisa Neige Barrière) was a pleasing accompaniment tinged with melancholy.