“Bernadette, The Musical” at Athenaeum Center

You don’t see a show in Lakeview like “Bernadette, The Musical” every day. In fact, I’ve never seen a show quite like “Bernadette” in Lakeview, or most anywhere else on Chicago’s North Side. For one thing, most everyone involved not named Kelsey Grammer (who’s a producer) is French. For another, it’s a show that was first seen in Lourdes, the town in southwestern France known for pilgrimages, but not exactly the seat of your Broadway-style musicals.

In recent months, Chicago’s Athenaeum Center, a lively multi-space arts venue for many years, has moved toward presenting material more in line with the faith-based mission of the Catholic Church; fair enough, the historic former opera house is controlled by the St. Alphonsus Catholic Church next door. The current European attraction, which has chosen Chicago as the opener of a U.S. tour planned for a dozen cities in total, comes with huge production values for a venue of this size, not to mention a cast of 25 performers under the direction of writer-director Serge Denoncourt.

“Bernadette” tells the story of a saint.

That would be Bernadette Soubirous, also known as Bernadette of Lourdes. As the 14-year-old child of a poor family in 1858, Saint Bernadette experienced numerous apparitions of a young woman in a cave or grotto, seemingly the Virgin Mary, asking for a chapel to be built on the site. Bernadette’s visions caused a sensation within her community, which did not know whether to believe her, condemn her or commit her to an asylum. But in 1862, the church confirmed the authenticity of the apparitions. Bernadette’s apparition became Our Lady of Lourdes and the grotto is now a site of Catholic pilgrimage.

If none of that is of interest to you, or you would view it merely with secular cynicism, then most likely, neither will be this show. The plot is not complex, to say the least. But as a faith-based, pageant-like musical, a tradition with longstanding roots, it’s an arresting experience that clearly moved very many of my fellow theatergoers on Thursday night, a group that included several nuns.

The lush, melodic, chorally oriented score, with music by the composer Grégoire and lyrics by Lionel Florence and Patrice Guirao, occupies a lane somewhere between Frank Wildhorn’s “Jekyll & Hyde” (one song reminded me of “Beyond the Facade”) and the musicals of Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg. And while I wouldn’t call all of the performances subtle, the lead role is very honestly played, and quite beautifully sung, by the young French singer Eyma, who is a Broadway-level talent and apparently has been essaying Bernadette in Europe since Eyma was in her teens. The other performance of genuine note is from Jérémie Roy, a French-Canadian with a sensational voice and genuine acting skills. He plays François, Bernadette’s confused but loving dad.

I worried about the seriousness of whole shebang when it began with a tableau of Bernadette herding some digital replicas of sheep, kind of like an AI version of a medieval pageant play, but that feeling dissipated as Stephane Roy showed what else his cool stage design could do for the eye. This has to be among the biggest productions ever seen at the Athenaeum, at least since its days as an opera house.

The cast of “Bernadette, The Musical” at Chicago’s Athenaeum Center. (Provided by Bernadette The Musical)

Eyma as Bernadette Soubirous, Jérémie Roy as François Soubirous and the cast of “Bernadette, The Musical” at Chicago’s Athenaeum Center. (Provided by Bernadette The Musical)

The cast of “Bernadette, The Musical” at Chicago’s Athenaeum Center. (Provided by Bernadette The Musical)

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The cast of “Bernadette, The Musical” at Chicago’s Athenaeum Center. (Provided by Bernadette The Musical)

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