Good morning, all! I was up too late watching a DVD so I slept in this morning.
Last night I watched a curious DVD I found on the French Amazon site, and there's a little backstory here: in 1958 the Madeleine Renaud/Jean-Louis Barrault Company, after doing classic plays and contemporary works by Gide, Genet, and others, decided for a lark to do a musical comedy. They chose Offenbach's La Vie Parisienne, which is most often performed today by opera companies, but which was written for a vaudeville company of comedians whose singing talent was so limited that Offenbach asked them to import a legit soprano for a major role. Conductor Andre Girard revised the original score to accommodate the Renaud-Barrault pit for 18 players, a legit singer-actress Suzy Delair was brought in to play the courtesan Metella, and the production was a huge hit. It toured everywhere, including Manhattan where it played in rep with Beaumarchais' MARRIAGE OF FIGARO, and I discovered in the Libraire de France at Rockefeller Center the wonderful, highly theatrical but rather poorly sung recording of the production on my first trip to New York in 1966. It was a heavily cut but nearly complete recording of the score; I've always loved its vitality, and Suzy Delair is fantastic, the best Metella ever.
In 1967, 9 years after the piece was first produced, French television broadcast the production with most of the original men - Pierre Bertin, Jean Desailly, Jean-Pierre Granval, Jean Paredes, Regis Outin - and Micheline Dax, replacing Madeleine Renaud as the Baroness, joins original cast members Simone Valere, and Denise Benoit. Georges Aminel replaced Barrault in the role of the Brazilian; I suppose he figured he would photograph too old for the part.
This broadcast is now on DVD, so I finally had a chance to see it, and it's amazing: highly theatrical, quite farcical, and very funny. Comparing ths with the Opera Lyon production from about twenty years ago, my first reaction was why can no one stage a period musical these days? The Opera Lyon production is as funny as a funeral - I haven't seen the latest opera production which updates the piece to the 22nd Century - and the Renaud/Barrault production is outrageous: the comedians are grotesques in funny disguises, outrageous wigs and costumes, and over-the-top behavior. The production follows the original 1866 casting with Jean Paredes playing the bootmaker Frick in Act Two, the butler Prosper in Act Three, and the Cafe Anglais headwaiter Alfred in Act Four. He's quite funny in all three roles.
The only disadvantage is that Desailly and Granval are nine years older than when they first played the roles, so the two young men-about-town who get the plot rolling over their treatment by Metella - proverbial whore who turns out to have aheart of gold - are now rather middle-aged men-about-town, but Desailly is charming and Granval very funny.
That was my evening; I now have Jacques Offenbach dancing in my head, so I may listen to the CD of the Compagnie Renaud-Barrault production later.
More coffee!
