Ideas still drench Legrand, 75

NEW YORK —  At a recent club performance, Michel Legrand decided to have a little fun by “destroying” his familiar tune “I Will Wait for You,” the theme from a Jacques Demy film that turned Catherine Deneuve into a star and earned the French pianist-composer his first Oscar nominations.

So Legrand turned the melancholy romantic ballad from the 1964 film “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg” into an adventurous romp, playing the melody in a potpourri of styles, including ragtime, waltz, tango and even a boisterous Russian dance.

“You know, in life nothing is serious, so I can’t stand serious people,” said Legrand, interviewed between sets during a six-night run at Birdland jazz club celebrating his 75th birthday. “The privilege of improvisation is to take anything and to try to do something with it ... anything which comes up in your stupid mind,” said Legrand, speaking in French-accented English.

Legrand has been working on the score for a new musical, “Marguerite,” which he is doing in collaboration with “Les Miserables” and “Miss Saigon” creators Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schonberg and British director Jonathan Kent.

The musical, targeted to open in London in spring 2008, is set during Germany’s World War II occupation of France with a plot based on the Alexandre Dumas Jr. play “The Lady of the Camellias,” about a man’s tragic affair with a courtesan, the source for the Verdi opera “La Traviata.”