Offenbach - Les Deux Aveugles. Hervé - Le Compositeur toqué
Studio Marigny, Paris, Sunday January 20 2019
Production, sets, costumes: Lola Kirchner. Lighting: Cyril Monteil. Giraffier, Séraphin: Flannan Obé. Patachon, Fignolet: Raphaël Brémard. Piano: Christophe Manien.
In case anyone doesn’t already know:
The vocation of the Palazzetto Bru Zane – Centre de Musique Romantique Française is the rediscovery and international promotion of the French musical heritage of the long nineteenth century (1780-1920). Its interests range from chamber music to the orchestral, sacred and operatic repertories, not forgetting the lighter genres characteristic of the ‘esprit français’ of the nineteenth century (chanson, opéra-comique, operetta). The Centre was inaugurated in 2009 and has its headquarters in a Venetian palazzo dating from 1695 which was specially restored for this purpose.
[From the Bru-Zane website]
Over the past few years, I’ve enjoyed rediscovering some rare French operas through Bru Zane’s recordings, so I was glad to see they were planning a little season of Opéra Bouffe at the Studio and Théâtre Marigny. The Marigny has, I discovered on looking into it, historical associations with Offenbach, as the theatre, converted in the 1890s from a panorama built by Garnier, is on the site of Offenbach’s "Bouffes d’Eté". From now until the summer, in addition to the two short pieces I saw yesterday, Bru Zane will be staging Hervé’s Le Retour d’Ulysse and shorter works by Planquette, Henrion, Barbier and Lecocq.
This is a link to more detailed information.
If these future productions are as good as this weekend’s we’re in for some fun. The difficulty, with opéra bouffe, is to achieve the right tone, the right touch. The works may be crazy, verging on the theatre of the absurd, but they need to retain a degree of intelligent complicity with the audience and a degree of chic and chien. Updating is tricky (I don't personally think La Vie parisienne was Laurent Pelly's most successful Offenbach, for example) , and silly slapstick doesn’t work. They also need, obviously, singers who are, or can be trained to be by a skilful director, first-rate comic actors.
The two works staged at the Studio Marigny are slight, so the production, on a small black stage with a row of old-fashioned footlights, though thoroughly directed and rehearsed (see below), was simple. In Les Deux Aveugles, two not-really-blind beggars tussle over a place on a bridge. This was an arched steel structure over the upright piano, which was hidden behind red curtains. The two beggars, white-faced with rouged noses, crazy-painted eyebrows and (actual) mop wigs under their hats, sat on the bridge dangling their legs in front of the curtains and struck up their repartee. Their costumes, over ordinary black jeans and tee-shirts, were part clown, part Poulbot-type urchins. Anachronisms included plastic toy instruments and, as they fought for their place on the bridge, light swords (and a bit of Star Wars on the piano).
In Le Compositeur Toqué, the wacky composer Monsieur Fignolet calls on his even wackier manservant - a total nutcase - to help him try out his heroic symphony, notably its “sweet song of the Mississippi” and more specifically, once they eventually get round to it after a shower of awful puns, the ineffable Cri du Mississipi:
Aï, aï, aï, aï, aï !
C’est le cri du Mississipi !
The piano has been wheeled to one side so that the curtains can be tied open. As stipulated in the libretto, as well as his tête de crétin, the manservant has a red coat and an apron with large pockets for his mop-heads (the wigs from the previous work) and baccy-tin. He also has a trolley with saucepans to faire le bacchanal on cue, and a sheet of foil for thunder. As this work is even nuttier and more frantic than Offenbach’s, it ends with leeks thrown into the audience and the moving last words:
Tarrrata !
Alatchigne ! alaboum ! alachigne !
Alaboum ! alatchigne ! alaboum !
Alatchigne !
The acting yesterday at the Studio Marigny (small and intimate: we were close up and caught every inflection) was just phenomenal: fluent and rehearsed down to the last comic detail whether in intonation, facial expression, timing, gesture or movement. Not having an ounce of acting skill myself, I’m amazed at this kind of achievement. It must be exhausting to keep it up at such a pace and such intensity for an hour, non-stop, especially with taxing musical numbers (agility, patter…) to deal with at the same time. I’ve no way of telling if either of them would make a good Werther or Rodolfo or Otello, but in the bouffe repertoire it’s irrelevant: our two tenors were perfect. The pianist, for the record, played along in both senses of the word, costumed in black with dabs of white makeup.
This was my first Bru Zane production. If Hervé’s Retour d’Ulysse in March is as good, Paris is, as I said above, in for some fun. I sent an enthusiastic e-mail to a friend after the show. His reply was less enthusiastic: ‘Sorry but most Bru Zane productions are terrible. They're bound to get it right from time to time,’ adding he’d seen ‘a lot of rubbish at the Opéra Comique.’ It’s a different team doing the Hervé so I suppose there’s some risk involved, but if it turns out to be as great a success I’ll be sorry to miss it.
But miss it I sadly will: I’ll be away on business.
Production, sets, costumes: Lola Kirchner. Lighting: Cyril Monteil. Giraffier, Séraphin: Flannan Obé. Patachon, Fignolet: Raphaël Brémard. Piano: Christophe Manien.
The vocation of the Palazzetto Bru Zane – Centre de Musique Romantique Française is the rediscovery and international promotion of the French musical heritage of the long nineteenth century (1780-1920). Its interests range from chamber music to the orchestral, sacred and operatic repertories, not forgetting the lighter genres characteristic of the ‘esprit français’ of the nineteenth century (chanson, opéra-comique, operetta). The Centre was inaugurated in 2009 and has its headquarters in a Venetian palazzo dating from 1695 which was specially restored for this purpose.
[From the Bru-Zane website]
Over the past few years, I’ve enjoyed rediscovering some rare French operas through Bru Zane’s recordings, so I was glad to see they were planning a little season of Opéra Bouffe at the Studio and Théâtre Marigny. The Marigny has, I discovered on looking into it, historical associations with Offenbach, as the theatre, converted in the 1890s from a panorama built by Garnier, is on the site of Offenbach’s "Bouffes d’Eté". From now until the summer, in addition to the two short pieces I saw yesterday, Bru Zane will be staging Hervé’s Le Retour d’Ulysse and shorter works by Planquette, Henrion, Barbier and Lecocq.
This is a link to more detailed information.
If these future productions are as good as this weekend’s we’re in for some fun. The difficulty, with opéra bouffe, is to achieve the right tone, the right touch. The works may be crazy, verging on the theatre of the absurd, but they need to retain a degree of intelligent complicity with the audience and a degree of chic and chien. Updating is tricky (I don't personally think La Vie parisienne was Laurent Pelly's most successful Offenbach, for example) , and silly slapstick doesn’t work. They also need, obviously, singers who are, or can be trained to be by a skilful director, first-rate comic actors.
The two works staged at the Studio Marigny are slight, so the production, on a small black stage with a row of old-fashioned footlights, though thoroughly directed and rehearsed (see below), was simple. In Les Deux Aveugles, two not-really-blind beggars tussle over a place on a bridge. This was an arched steel structure over the upright piano, which was hidden behind red curtains. The two beggars, white-faced with rouged noses, crazy-painted eyebrows and (actual) mop wigs under their hats, sat on the bridge dangling their legs in front of the curtains and struck up their repartee. Their costumes, over ordinary black jeans and tee-shirts, were part clown, part Poulbot-type urchins. Anachronisms included plastic toy instruments and, as they fought for their place on the bridge, light swords (and a bit of Star Wars on the piano).
In Le Compositeur Toqué, the wacky composer Monsieur Fignolet calls on his even wackier manservant - a total nutcase - to help him try out his heroic symphony, notably its “sweet song of the Mississippi” and more specifically, once they eventually get round to it after a shower of awful puns, the ineffable Cri du Mississipi:
Aï, aï, aï, aï, aï !
C’est le cri du Mississipi !
The piano has been wheeled to one side so that the curtains can be tied open. As stipulated in the libretto, as well as his tête de crétin, the manservant has a red coat and an apron with large pockets for his mop-heads (the wigs from the previous work) and baccy-tin. He also has a trolley with saucepans to faire le bacchanal on cue, and a sheet of foil for thunder. As this work is even nuttier and more frantic than Offenbach’s, it ends with leeks thrown into the audience and the moving last words:
Tarrrata !
Alatchigne ! alaboum ! alachigne !
Alaboum ! alatchigne ! alaboum !
Alatchigne !
 |
| Hervé |
This was my first Bru Zane production. If Hervé’s Retour d’Ulysse in March is as good, Paris is, as I said above, in for some fun. I sent an enthusiastic e-mail to a friend after the show. His reply was less enthusiastic: ‘Sorry but most Bru Zane productions are terrible. They're bound to get it right from time to time,’ adding he’d seen ‘a lot of rubbish at the Opéra Comique.’ It’s a different team doing the Hervé so I suppose there’s some risk involved, but if it turns out to be as great a success I’ll be sorry to miss it.
But miss it I sadly will: I’ll be away on business.
Lovely report, thank you! (from the poster known as grimoaldo at parterre)
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