Bizet - L'Arlésienne and Le Docteur Miracle, at the Châtelet in Paris

Théâtre du Châtelet, Paris, Tuesday May 27 2025

Conductor: Sora Elisabeth Lee. Production, sets and costumes: Pierre Lebon. Lighting: Bertrand Killy. Orchestre de Chambre de Paris.

L’Arlésienne

Balthazar: Eddie Chignara. L’Innocent: Pierre Lebon. Mitifio/Frédéri (dancer): Aurélien Bednarek. Rose/Vivette (dancer): Iris Florentiny. Soprano: Dima Bawab. Mezzo-soprano: Héloïse Mas. Tenor: Marc Mauillon. Baritone: Thomas Dolié.

Le Docteur Miracle

Laurette: Dima Bawab. Véronique: Héloïse Mas. Silvio: Marc Mauillon. Le podestat de Padoue: Thomas Dolié. L’assistant du Docteur Miracle (spoken role): Pierre Lebon.

Photos: © Thomas Amouroux

This production was scheduled as part of the ‘Festival Palazzetto Bru Zane Paris’, to mark the 150th anniversary of Bizet’s death. It brings together one late and one early work: the complete incidental music to Alphonse Daudet’s play L'Arlésienne (1872), and Le Docteur Miracle, an opéra bouffe composed for Offenbach’s Théâtre des Bouffes-Parisiens (1857).

Both are directed and designed by Pierre Lebon. He is a spirited young enthusiast, an ‘enfant de la balle’ (i.e. born, more or less, on the stage), who can apparently turn his hand to anything theatrical: writing, directing, singing and acting, but also joinery, upholstery, locksmithing, painting and stage machinery... and generally leaping around like a one-man herd of goats on an alp. I saw him in Hervé’s madcap Mam’zelle Nitouche and V'lan dans l'oeil, and in 2019 he directed and designed, also for Bru Zane, not Bizet’s but Charles Lecocq’s Le Docteur Miracle.

But for now, the Bizet…

In the summer of 1856, with a view to enlarging the repertoire of his Théâtre des Bouffes-Parisiens, Jacques Offenbach organised a competition. The challenge was to set to music, as Le Docteur Miracle, a libretto by Léon Battu and Ludovic Halévy loosely based on a 1775 farce by Sheridan, called St Patrick's Day, or, The Scheming Lieutenant, a work curiously not without some similarities, in terms of plot, to Beaumarchais’ Le Barbier de Séville, which premiered earlier the very same year.

Seventy-eight composers took part. A shortlist of twelve was whittled down to six finalists, who were then invited to set the text. In the end, the jury, presided by Auber and including Halévy, Ambroise Thomas and Gounod, awarded the prize ex-aequo to Charles Lecocq and Bizet, then still in his teens and a freshly-minted 'second Prix de Rome' (his first prize would come the following year). Both works were premiered in April 1857, starting with Lecoq’s, after lots were drawn. Neither was a huge hit: each ran for just eleven performances, and Bizet’s score gathered dust on library shelves until the 1950s.

Lecocq’s Le Docteur Miracle, which I saw in 2019 in Lebon’s production at the Studio Marigny (300 seats, housed in the summer venue of Offenbach’s own Bouffes-Parisiens), and Bizet’s thus follow exactly the same text and plot, summarised as follows on the Palazzetto Bru Zane’s website (translated from French):

‘Captain Silvio’ (Sheridan’s Lieutenant O'Connor) ‘enters the household of the Podestà of Padua’ (originally Justice Credulous, in an unnamed English village) ‘under the disguise of a foolish servant, makes him swallow an indigestible omelette’ (Sheridan's play is an egg-free zone) ‘and then extorts his daughter's hand in exchange for a cure.’

For this reason, it was decided now to stage Bizet’s version in the same Lebon production: set, costumes, makeup and all, expanded somewhat in scale for the much bigger Châtelet (over 2,000 seats). This seemed like a good idea, as it would help anyone with enough memory (not necessarily me) to compare the two prizewinning scores. It turned out to be what the French call a 'fausse bonne idée,' i.e. not such a great one after all.

For a start, the Châtelet - where I once saw Die Frau ohne Schatten with the Philharmonia in the pit - is too big for such a slight musical farce, with only four singers.

And then…

After Le Docteur Miracle, Lecocq would go on to be seen, eventually, as the heir to Offenbach. His best-known work, La Fille de Mme Angot, is only twentieth in a long list of opéra bouffe and operettas stretching to 70-odd in all.

Bizet, as we know, turned instead to opera, with varying success in his brief lifetime. His competition score was composed only a year after his lovely Symphony in C, often described as Mozartian and Schubertian. Much of his Docteur Miracle is, as we might expect, in a similar, well-made, amiable vein, here with obvious nods to Offenbach and Rossini, and cheeky parodies of Italian bel canto conventions. The nearest it gets to the outright bouffe style of, say, Hervé is in the ‘omelette’ quartet (see plot, above). The wild, perpetuum-mobile staging Lebon devised for Lecocq’s Miracle somehow doesn't work so well with Bizet’s. (For a fuller account of that staging, see my post on the Lecocq.)

Nor does it really suit a cast chosen specifically for Bizet's score, rather than Lecocq’s.

Mezzo soprano Héloïse Mas has sung roles such as Soeur Mathilde, Dorabella, Mercédès and Carmen, but also quite a lot of Offenbach (Barbe Bleue, Le roi Carotte, La Périchole…). So she was perhaps the most at home here, playing the batty, gangling, thrice-widowed nag with Arletty-like gusto, while yanking her plummy voice this way and that, to suit the action, in a way that makes her performance hard to write up as ‘straight’ singing. To give her a bit more to do in this slapstick vein, the one outrageously bouffe song of the evening, ‘Ça n’est pas visible à l’œil nu’, was actually (so I read online) borrowed from Hervé.

Dima Bawab, a sweet-voiced soprano, has appeared in Mozart, Grétry, Ravel, Rossini… I’d only seen her twice before, myself, both times as Yniold. She sings with charm and enthusiasm, but was somewhat swallowed up by the Châtelet.

Both Thomas Dolié and Marc Mauillon are probably most closely associated with baroque and Mozartian roles, under the likes of Christie, Pichon, Vashegyi, Minkowski, Haïm, Niquet or Rousset. I’ve seen Dolié in Les Boréades and Platée, Mauillon most recently, as you may recall, as Pollux, and - nailing one of Jélyotte’s dazzling ‘fireworks’ arias - as Momus/Mercure (Les Fêtes d'Hébé) in Paris.

Dolié didn’t seem wholly at ease bumbling about in his spherical red fat-suit, though his singing was distinguished; he is, after all, one of today’s most prominent French baritones. Nor did Mauillon, in any case not the most natural of actors in my experience, look especially comfortable as a kind of male-Despina-on-steroids, leaping through trapdoors, swapping disguises or stripping to his kaleidoscopically-coloured boxers, however much he might or might not in fact have been enjoying it. Still, his sonorous, edgy tenor sound rang out unimpaired.

It was fun to watch, but perhaps not the right production for the work and cast. The point was, though, to hear Bizet’s score, a remarkably knowing, varied and witty one for a lad in his teens. I was glad I'd gone.

Bru Zane’s double bill begins with the complete score to L’Arlésienne (1872), here staged not as a play with incidental music, but as a ‘musical tale’ told by a narrator, with a couple of dancers, the four-singer cast of Le Docteur as the chorus… and Pierre Lebon. This is definitely not an opera, so feel free to stop reading here if not interested.

L’Arlésienne started out as one of Alphonse Daudet’s Lettres de mon moulin (Letters from My Windmill). Based on a true story, in just three pages it recounted the suicide of a lovesick youth - in real life, Frédéric Mistral’s nephew. The three-act play Daudet made of it was not an immediate success, though Zola admired it. It would probably have been forgotten by now, had not (a) ‘Arlésienne’ become a household word in French, meaning anyone much-talked-of but never seen: in the play, the object of the young suicide’s love is only mentioned; and (b) Bizet and (it’s assumed) his friend Ernest Guiraud drawn two popular suites from the incidental music. 

Evoking a troupe of travelling players, drawing a tentative link to the notion of the travelling quack in Le Docteur Miracle, and in a nod to Daudet’s letters, Lebon centres his staging on a dilapidated wooden windmill-cum-farmhouse, the epitome of a ‘contraption’. It is hauled in (despite its size) on creaking wheels by the narrator, the shepherd Balthazar. The sails, at the back, turn slowly, activating wooden cogs, while facing us, under an attic storey (Mistral’s nephew threw himself from an attic), a kind of magic-lantern slideshow, crank-operated, displays a selection of evocative paintings, from Millet’s L’Angélus to a not-wholly-expected Turner sunset. The cyclorama changes colour depending on the mood or time of day, the ‘Provençal’ lighting is gorgeous throughout, and the traditional costumes are undeniably pretty. 

Perhaps because, as is quite likely, he’s fond of mime or the circus, perhaps (with those pretty costumes) also hoping to recall Provence’s ‘Santon’ dolls, Lebon has nearly everybody’s face smeared white; the exception is the narrator, Balthazar. This, and the jerky, repetitive, expressionistic choreography, which in fact adds little to the story, distanced the characters from us, weakening their dramatic impact. Fortunately, Eddie Chignara’s acting skills staved off any boredom that might have ensued.

In any case, the main point was, again, to experience Bizet’s score in full and in context. It was certainly interesting and pleasant to hear not only the numbers familiar from the suites, but also the linking and melodrama passages (i.e. those played while the actors spoke), all beautifully crafted and reminding us what a talent the mature Bizet had for local colour, evoking a particular place - and for the theatre. It was surprising, though, to discover how little we actually miss by hearing the suites. In fact, the full musical material available wasn’t enough to make two suites: Guiraud (if it was indeed he) borrowed his Menuetto from La Jolie Fille de Perth. So in the end, it was a bit tout ça pour ça? I’m not sure it’s something any of us needs to do more than once.

Under Sora Elisabeth Lee, the Orchestre de Chambre de Paris, one I don’t normally feel an irresistible urge to hear, was perhaps more vigorous and incisive than meltingly lyrical, sounding better when playing together than during solos. I think you get my drift.

This video shows a different cast:

 

Note: an edited version of this post may be published on Parterre.com.