Puccini - Manon Lescaut, at the Théâtre des Champs Elysées in Paris

Théâtre des Champs Elysées, Paris, Thursday November 5 2026

Conductor: Lorenzo Passerini. Production: Oliver Mears. Choreography: Sarah Fahie. Sets, Costumes: Annemarie Woods. Sets: Ricardo Pardo. Lighting: Fabiana Piccioli. Manon Lescaut: Ailyn Pérez. Chevalier des Grieux: Roberto Alagna. Lescaut: Lionel Lhote. Geronte di Ravoir: Nicola Ulivieri. Edmondo, Dance Master, Lamplighter: Léo Vermot-Desroches. Singer: Mathilde Ortscheidt. Innkeeper, Sergeant: Maurel Endong. Orchestre National de France. accentus.

Photos: © Vincent Pontet

After a concert in Brussels, where I missed Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette in September because I was still in Greece, my first opera of the new season was Manon Lescaut, at the Théâtre des Champs Elysées (TCE). Not something I’d normally have leapt at, but you can take it as a sign of the times: as houses everywhere seem to be avoiding risk, I struggled to put an exciting 2026/2027 season together. Apparently I wasn’t alone in turning once more to the TCE. Reviewing this same production, Forum Opéra writes: ‘With Favart’ (i.e. the Opéra Comique) ‘undergoing renovation, the Châtelet out of the picture, and the Paris Opera mired in one of the dreariest programmes of the last twenty years, it is at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées that the heart of the Parisian opera season now beats.’

I bought seats because it was a new production (co-produced, in fact, with Covent Garden and Opéra Nice Côte d’Azur), because I’d never had a chance to hear Ailyn Pérez before, because I was interested to see where Roberto Alagna is at these days, and finally, because the friends I subscribe with like Puccini better than I do. I’m going to start this report with its two stars, then take a look at the production, before ending with a few words about the rest of the cast, the chorus, orchestra and conducting.

I feel diffident about giving my opinion on Ailyn Pérez when I’m one of the last people on planet opera to have heard her. I’ll just tip out my impressions in a little heap, pell-mell, and anyone who wants to can pick them apart and correct me. Her singing, as Manon, was less consistent than I expected. She seems to have a sweet spot in the upper medium, where the voice has a rondeur it lacks elsewhere, and she took advantage of it to sculpt some lovely messa di voce effects. Her upper range is impressively strong, but the higher she sings, the shriller the sound; the very top - i.e. in the highest notes this particular score throws at her - was a touch strident. (Her timbre often reminded me of Victoria de los Angeles, and I almost imagined I was hearing Spanish. Is that weird?) A more serious issue, I thought, was that in the opposite direction, going down, she became harder to hear, even over the ONF’s restrained playing. Overall, apart from that sweet spot, she was short on voluptuousness, and frankly I thought Manon was probably not the ideal Puccini role for her. I could more easily imagine her singing Musetta.

So, as Roberto Alagna was in very sound form, it really became his opera, not hers (nor, in fact, the director's): not Manon Lescaut, but Des Grieux (who, after all, comes first in Prévost’s novel). Alagna long seemed to have found (and taken) the elixir of youth, and his voice is still remarkable, his singing as generous and impassioned as ever. The elixir may now, like Emila Marty’s potion, be wearing off; but he can surely be forgiven at this stage in his career for having to give up some of his former youthful seductiveness and subtlety. He sang fairly forcefully - i.e. loudly - all evening, from which I surmised that that was the only way he could be certain of securing all the notes. Which he did.

The directing did Ailyn Pérez few favours. Of course I understand the concept of suspension of disbelief, but a sensible director might avoid asking a mature woman (however glamorous), when courted, to simper and giggle like a teenage ingénue (at the start of Pévost’s story, Manon is only fifteen and Des Grieux is a teenager), then bump and grind listlessly on a bar-room counter, in a low-cut, figure-hugging mini-dress - ‘ras-la-foufoune,’ as we say in French - cowboy boots and a Dolly Parton wig. Though probably not a born actress, at least for so-called ‘Regie’ productions, Pérez was admirably game and threw herself into the concept - perhaps even in the final scene, alone in a corner of the stage, to the detriment of her singing.

Maybe in a more traditional staging, making fewer or more conventional demands, issues of credibility wouldn’t have arisen. Alagna was equally committed, though committed, I suspected, to his own conception of the role: focused on the audience, he didn’t seem to be participating in the same production as everyone else. And though even at 63, again in a traditional staging, the eternally floppy-haired Alagna might pass for a student, in a putatively hard-hitting, ‘realistic’ one, it was a stretch of the imagination. In the end, he and Pérez seemed, to me, miscast in this type of show, one reason it didn't really succeed.

Director Oliver Mears has won various awards for his productions, and been Director of Opera at the UK’s Royal Ballet and Opera for ten years, but this was the first time I’d seen any of his work. Evidently, he has ideas. His Manon epitomises women’s victimisation and subjection to male fantasies - the novice nun, the dancer, the artist’s model, the fallen woman, the hooker - throughout the centuries. Each act is thus set at a different period and starts with a silent prologue, acted out in front of the curtain.

Before the curtain rises, Manon’s long hair is cropped to prepare for her novitiate. When the opera begins, we see a seedy hall, with cheaply-moulded arches on three sides that will stay with us throughout. It could be a setting for the last act of Der Rosenkavalier, and has something of the village-hall amateur play about it. In this first act, it’s a French-Hogarthian gambling den where an immense round table unaccountably takes up most of the space, awkwardly hindering the busy chorus movements. The costumes are a Tim-Burtonish take on the eighteenth-century, with black lace over dusky, carefully-coordinated autumnal shades of silk: old gold, bronze, plum… As usual, when eighteenth-century shenanigans are evoked, the players wear extravagantly peaked periwigs; the women’s are veiled and finished with ostrich feathers. Ravoir’s face is painted foppish white. Manon is, of course, easily enticed into one of the frothy outfits.

Before the second act, we realise that some sort of business with hair is set to become an ongoing feature: this time, Manon’s hairdresser is getting her ready for the day ahead. Also, when the curtain rises, we guess that the period is going to change with each act. Men in top hats and tails recall Jockey Club members visiting the dance foyer at the Palais Garnier - once condemned as the ‘lupanar national’ (the nation’s whorehouse) by the Second Empire press. The reference is reinforced by mirrors in the spaces framed by the arches, though as they’re frosted, the effect also brings to mind the brushed-steel doors of lifts in a shabby department store. Manon appears in various costumes, including a tutu but also, puzzlingly, a flapper’s glittery evening dress, and shows signs of needing more than one drink.

So far so trivial, and I toyed with the idea of leaving. But after the interval things turn shockingly grim. Manon has her head brutally shorn, like French women accused, at the Liberation, of collaborating. Once the curtain is up, the costumes are indeed post-war and the atmosphere is film noir. White torchlights cast their prying beams through smoke on a dark stage, evoking the post-war witch-hunt, and after their names are called out, the shaven-headed girls file into the back of a waiting truck.

Finally, before the last act opens, Manon, now squeezed into that scrap of a dress I mentioned above, is fitted with the Dolly Parton wig. The curtain rises on what would be a seedy speakeasy, were it not fitted out with a rather glamorous Edward Hopper bar, surrounded by chrome-based stools and lit from above. Customers wear clichéd Western gear or baseball caps, so we know where we are. When Des Grieux can’t get an answer out of Manon (‘Non mi rispondi, amore?’) it’s because she’s been dragged off to the toilets for sex, and when she’s thirsty, it isn’t water she wants: she swigs from a bottle of liquor. References in the text to arid deserts and far horizons become purely symbolic, and at the end Des Grieux can’t slump in a faint over Manon’s body, as he’s already left.

As I wrote above, Oliver Mears has ideas, and they are not necessarily bad ones. The problem is that the production, as it stands - I mean, in its first outing, before it goes on to London and Nice - is mushily directed, as if only three-quarters rehearsed so far. Some directors (admittedly not many) have an uncanny knack of sickening us to the core with human beastliness. They know how to make the acting ring true. They know how to suggest, not necessarily show, the worst - which is ultimately more effective. I found myself thinking that taking the same ideas, Warlikowski, maybe Bieito too, on one of his good days, would have known how to make them work. Here, though the potential was evident, the execution was hesitant: we still saw chorus members and extras following their instructions one step short, and (I admit I hesitate to say it again) two stars who felt out of place in a production of this kind. But again, this is my first experience of Oliver Mear’s work, and perhaps things will be adjusted and tightened up before London and Nice.

The supporting cast was good. Lionel Lhote sang Lescaut with his usual elegance and raw-silk timbre, contrasting well, when they were together, with the edgier bass-baritone sound of Nicola Ulivieri as Geronte di Ravoir. Whether his elegance and timbre were right for such a shady character as Lescaut is another matter. New to me, as Edmondo, the Dance Master and the Lamplighter, was Léo Vermot-Desroches. He seemed to develop as the evening went on, so, intrigued, I looked him up and found he’s already stood in, as Hoffmann, for Benjamin Bernheim. Possibly one to keep an eye on. 

The accentus (sic, no capital A, don’t ask me why) chorus do quite a lot of opera of various periods and have their supporters, but I’m not yet fully convinced they’re in their element bustling about on stage, trying to keep together. Oddly, last Thursday, they often seemed quite faint. Perhaps it was due to an acoustic quirk of the seat I was in, just under the edge of a balcony.

Under Lorenzo Passerini, the Orchestre National de France, after a briefly chaotic start, settled into playing of great delicacy, sensitivity and restraint, sedulously avoiding outbursts of tear-jerking sentimentality or bodice-ripping passion. The famous Intermezzo was beautifully done. Very commendable, no doubt, but my neighbour, a Puccini fan, could have done with less fastidious good taste and more trashy emotiveness. He hadn’t, he said at the end, felt moved all evening.

So, not an outstanding start to a new season I’m not particularly excited about anyway, overall. But this Friday’s Theodora, in concert, appears to have a super cast, so my hopes for that are high. We’ll see.

Manon Lescaut will, by the way, presumably turn up on video one way or another, as cameras were there last week. In the meantime, here's a couple of clips of Alagna in the Champs Elysées production:

And finally, not Ailyn Pérez, but Maestro Wenarto, alone, lost and abandoned: