Last night I watched three acts of a 1980 Opera de Lyon production of Offenbach's La Vie Parisienne. The cast is fun and the costumes are quite wonderful, but the singing is often second-rate and the direction is third-rate or lower. The operetta is essentially a French farce: Gardefeu, a man-about-town, tries to seduce Swedish baroness by pretending to be a guide; he tells the Baron and Baroness that his suite of rooms is an annex of the Grand Hotel; and since he needs other hotel guests to show up for the table d'hote, he persuades his glovemaker, bootmaker, and their friends to show up and pretend to be members of the aristocracy and high society. Meanwhile, the Swedish Baron is out to get laid by Metella, a Parisian courtesan who is the former mistress of Gardefeu and who still loves him. It should be very fast and funny. This production was not.
