Offenbach - Les Brigands, at the Paris Opera's Palais Garnier

ONP Garnier, Thursday June 26 2025

Conductor: Michele Spotti. Production: Barrie Kosky. Sets: Rufus Didwiszus. Costumes: Victoria Behr. Lighting: Ulrich Eh. Choreography: Otto Pichler. Falsacappa: Marcel Beekman. Fiorella: Marie Perbost. Fragoletto: Antoinette Dennefeld. Le Baron de Campo-Tasso: Yann Beuron. Le Chef des carabiniers: Laurent Naouri. Le Duc de Mantoue: Mathias Vidal. Le Comte de Gloria-Cassis: Philippe Talbot. La Princesse de Grenade: Eugénie Joneau. Carmagnola: Leonardo Cortellazzi. Domino: Éric Huchet. Barbavano: Franck Leguérinel. Pietro: Rodolphe Briand. Zerlina: Héloïse Poulet. Fiametta: Clara Guillon. Bianca: Maria Warenberg. La Marquise: Doris Lamprecht. La Duchesse: Helene Schneiderman. Le Précepteur: Luis-Felipe Sousa. Cicinella: Marine Chagnon. Adolphe de Valladolid: Seray Pinar. Antonio: Sandrine Sarroche. Sangrietta/Pipa: Manon Barthélémy. Tortilla: Francesca Lo Bue. Burratina: Cécile L’Heureux. Castagnetta/Pipetta: Corinne Martin. Pizzaiolo: Victorien Bonnet. Flamenco: Nicolas Jean-Brianchon. Zucchini / Pipo: Jules Robin. Siestasubito: Hédi Tarkani. Orchestra and Chorus of the Opéra National de Paris.

Photos: © Agathe Poupeney/ONP

I seem to be constitutionally incapable of keeping these posts short. I thought I’d manage it this time, but I was wrong. However, during the first run of Les Brigands, at the start of the season, someone on the French forum ODB Opéra published a beautifully brief report in French, so I’ll sum that up in English and post it at the end of this article. If you don’t want to waste time on my rambling version, just jump straight to the end and read theirs.

*****

The Paris Opera’s 2024-2025 season opened and now closes, for me at least, with Offenbach’s Les Brigands. As I was still in Greece last September and October, I bought tickets for the reprise, in June.

Since the 80s, Offenbach hasn’t been well represented at the OnP, with one exception: Les Contes d’Hoffmann, in productions by Chéreau, Ponnelle, Polanski (scandalously, in my view) and - in nine seasons so far since the year 2000 - Carsen. The only other work of Offenbach’s presented, already more than 30 years ago, was… Les Brigands, in a production from Amsterdam by Jérôme Deschamps and Macha Makeieff, at the Bastille of all places. As Offenbach composed his opéras bouffes, with their spoken dialogues, for houses with 600 to 800 seats, it’s probably not such a bad thing if the Opéra National, where even Garnier seats over 1,900, sticks mainly to Les Contes. Paris has other houses, of various sizes, for the bouffe repertoire. Come to think of it, Laurent Pelly’s famous Offenbach series, with Minkowski in the pit, might have been better still at the Opéra Comique, not the Châtelet, where, though we were all having a whale of a time, some of the voices struggled to make themselves heard.

When Barrie Kosky was asked to direct one of Offenbach’s works here, it seemed a pity he should set his sights on another version of Les Brigands. But he’d already staged Orphée aux Enfers in Salzburg and La Belle Hélène at the Komische Oper; and while we might have liked a Grande Duchesse (two decades have now elapsed since Pelly’s with Dame Felicity Lott), Les Brigands is what we got. My own experience of Kosky’s work is minimal. I saw his production of Les Boréades - in Dijon’s dreadful Auditorium - in 2019, and liked it: ‘... a simple, intelligent, respectful but wholly contemporary production, one of the best Rameau stagings I’ve seen.’ I was delighted by his Covent Garden staging of The Nose, which I watched on video during lockdown. So I was looking forward to seeing how he dealt with the Offenbach.

In the event, I struggled to persuade my companions to stay on even after the first act, so we could at least see the Spanish delegation’s spectacular entrance, of which I'd seen enticing pictures: read on… 

There’s a certain kind of production tradition for Offenbach in France (no doubt elsewhere, too, but I don’t get out much) that leaves me stonily unamused. We had a famous director here, called Jérôme Savary, a larger-than-life, cigar-chomping character committed to accessible, ‘people’s’ theatre. He even ended up in charge of the Opéra Comique for a while, dubbing it, improbably, a ‘Théâtre Populaire.’ (I remember him, one night, teasing the Minister of Culture, in an unexpected speech from the stage, for being the only person in the house not to have paid for his seat.) He admired what Dario Fo, in his Nobel speech, called the ‘multitude of mummers, jesters, clowns, tumblers and storytellers’ of theatrical tradition, found in street theatre, circus, the music hall, cabaret, and so on. Savary directed quite a lot of Offenbach, and you could be fairly sure that there would be topless showgirls, bare-chested young men, naughty nuns, drag queens and leather-men, lots of agitation, lots of shouting, and lots of corny choreography. It never worked for me (though it worked very well for thousands of others), because the fun remained stubbornly fabricated. It was well managed, but somehow lacked the cheeky charm, the wink of complicity, across the pit, with the audience, that brings this kind of business to life. It felt too stagy, too strenuous, too much like hard work. Which I don’t doubt it was, but ars est…

Savary, a provocative figure himself, might well have applauded Kosky’s stated intention - fine by me too, for what that’s worth - to put the subversiveness back into opéra bouffe. But what Kosky actually delivered, at Garnier, was basically warmed-up Savary, thirty years on, with a much bigger budget, on the Paris Opera’s lavish scale, and directed in greater detail.

As nearly everyone has probably already seen, Kosky’s Falsacappa is Dutch tenor Marcel Beekman (Platée in Carsen’s ‘Chanel’ production at the Opéra Comique) disguised as Divine, initially in the famous red dress from Pink Flamingos, complete with pistol, then in a variety of bulging, sequinned numbers. His henchman, Pietro, is a middle-aged, pot-bellied leather-man in black military cap, string vest and harness. They and their brigands - that theatrical multitude of mummers, jesters and clowns, a variegated, gender-fluid crowd in dyed wigs and, if dressed at all, a rainbow assortment of tacky, tinselly hand-me-downs - appear to have squatted a vast, once-grand Second Empire saloon with elaborately panelled but blackened, and tagged, walls.

I wondered if this was a nod to Peter Brook’s dilapidated Bouffes du Nord house, and its history as café-concert and music hall. Kosky’s production certainly deals with all the themes raised by Les Brigands: theatrical representation v. the actual; real and assumed identities, not limited to gender, with all the disguises and (cross-)dressing up involved; the staging of social hierarchies; Second-Empire money-grabbing and the hypocrisies entailed (all the world’s a thief); the honesty and efficiency (or not) of government and its forces of order, and so on… It is also expertly managed. There are huge numbers of people swarming about on stage - soloists, chorus, dancers, extras - but everyone, at every moment, has something specific to do, even if it’s only wiggling his or her scantily-clad bum at the audience, and all those frantic, swarming crowd movements, back and forth, while pulling on new disguises are minutely choreographed in their feigned raggedness.

The overall result was cleverly summed up in two words by an expert on a well-known opera blog as ‘Manic and camp’. Too manic at times, noisy and repetitive: how many times was the deafening crowd chatter silenced by a shout and a fist on the table, or a pistol shot? The inn scenes in act two work relatively well, in a bon-enfant way. Perhaps the exaggerated contrast between the august grandeur of the sets and props, the beautifully painted still-life and landscape canvases supplied by the Paris Opera workshops, and the humble action they house is a deliberate comment on the public opulence and private squalor of the age - then and now. Other scenes just fall flat. The arrival of the carabiniers, for example, a highlight of other productions, here just a handful of doltish gendarmes in képis and sunglasses, stuffed into ill-fitting uniforms. A ballet of nuns and priests: old hat (or old beretta and old wimple). A long, supposedly comic, monologue by the undeniably charismatic actress playing Antonio - here, budget minister - mocking contemporary French politicians: tedious.

The great, wow-factor success of the evening, visually at least, is the arrival of the Spanish. Here, Kosky pulls out all the Paris Opera’s stops to put on a spectacular pageant, one worthy of a particularly lavish production of, say, Don Carlos, in which members of the Spanish court, as portrayed by Velazquez, front a Holy Week procession. The princess heads the cortège, in a wide, stiff gown almost certainly inspired by the painter’s Infanta Maria-Theresa in Vienna, only here in fifty shades of gold. Her ladies-in waiting all have individually-designed, couture costumes. The men, including Gloria-Cassis, arrive on wheeled hobby-horses in gold doublets, ruffs and pantaloons. The dancers wear toreadors’ gold-embroidered trajes de luces. Everybody has vivid orange hair (can anyone tell me why?). At the rear, swaying slowly, Semana Santa style, a larger-than-life Christ in majesty, near-naked and fresh from the gym, is flanked by two virgins of sorrows in black, on gold pedestals, one surrounded by candles, the other by lilies. The whole tableau is, while not original in conception, stunning in its realisation. Probably one of the Paris Opera’s most expensive jokes ever, but, overacted to death, not actually funny.

Les Brigands isn’t really a work designed to show off particular voices, even if various characters have big comic numbers. Some of the most familiar singers in the cast, veterans of those old Pelly/Minkowski productions, though still charismatic, have precious little to do. Of course, Yann Beuron brought his usual verve and charm and elegant phrasing and diction to Le Baron de Campo-Tasso, Laurent Naouri blustered his way through the part of the police chief with gusto, Franck Leguérinel let off a few gruff notes that signalled he was still Franck Leguérinel - a great bouffe performer, as is Eric Huchet, who was his usual, reliable character-tenor self. Luxury casting for tiny parts. Rodolphe Briand (Pietro) is another solid Offenbach trouper, though I’ve also seen him around in supporting roles in Puccini and Berlioz.

Among the more substantial roles, Marcel Beekman combined audibility with baroque-trained agility and good diction. If that sounds like meagre praise, it’s because I couldn’t come to terms with his strange, adenoidal sound, the chesty buzz, it seemed to me, of a high tenor singing a bit too low.

Marie Perbost’s voice, as Fiorella, took a while to settle. It is round and liquid, but somehow patchy and blowzy - perhaps the frantic staging contributed to this - though with strong, columnar high notes. I preferred the more straightforward, firmer line, as Fragoletto, of Antoinette Dennefeld, someone whose glamour, vivacity and vocal suppleness I’ve already admired in productions of Cavalleria Rusticana, La Périchole (in which she starred), and Carmen.

As Le Comte de Gloria-Cassis, Philippe Talbot threw himself unsparingly into Kosky’s exasperatingly corny parody of Spanish swagger, which sinks as low as to use supposedly comical but potentially insulting cod Spanish, but sounded tired and stretched. Vocally, the star of the evening was, to me, Matthias Vidal as Le Duc de Mantou, near-equal in style and charisma to the ever-excellent Beuron.

The orchestra was in sprightly form under Michele Spotti, who incidentally conducted Laurent Pelly’s lovely production of Offenbach’s Barbe-Bleue from Lyon, starring Beuron, one I’ve sadly only seen on video. The chorus was also in fine fettle, though understandably with all the madcap kerfuffle on stage, there were times when it was all hard to keep together. Wearied by much of this relentlessly unfunny action - ‘Ça ne marche pas’ (it isn’t working) was my neighbour’s comment, more than once, while I tried to persuade him to stay on - there were times, too, I must admit, when I just focused on the music and ignored the kerfuffle.

***** 

From 'raph13' on ODB Opéra:

'Barrie Kosky's madcap production, with its wild costumes, is a kind of gigantic, wacky, juvenile farce. However, the almost constant hysteria becomes tiresome, as does the screaming and shouting at every turn. The rewriting of the dialogues gives the opportunity for a few jabs at the government, but at times it feels like the Théâtre des Deux Ânes* (particularly during the cashier's long monologue, which is also badly amplified) (...) Above all, I wonder what this work is doing at Garnier, given that the vast majority of the cast have a vocal make-up more suited to the Opéra-Comique; you often have to strain your ears. However, the energy displayed and the lively choreography are a hit with the young audience, who give the artists a warm standing ovation.’

*A 300-seat theatre on the boulevard de Clichy where the old Montmartre tradition of satirical cabaret lives on.

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