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Paris Theater Thrives
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20305 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
6 / 1992 |
1,948 Words |
| Author
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Cynthia Grenier
Cynthia Grenier is contributing editor to the Arts section of
The World & I. |
While Broadway may be in its death throes and London's West End suffers an anemic existence theater, in Paris appears to be enjoying the best of health. Which is not to say that great and wonderful new plays are appearing on the boards, or that successors to the likes of Racine, Molière, or Samuel Beckett are offering their works to French theatergoers. But the sheer number and variety of theatrical works available to Parisians in any given week compared with that of any other major capital city is downright prodigious.
Consider for a moment that Paris has 122 in-town theaters plus an additional 31 in the near suburbs. State theaters with repertory companies like the Comédie-Française and the Théâtre National de l'Odon (with two separate theaters: the Théâtre National de Chaillot and the Théâtre National de la Colline) regularly premiere new productions of classics--Alfred de Musset or Beckett, for instance.
Commercial theaters put on productions of everything from translations of current British and American plays--what there are of them--to original works by contemporary French dramatists. Smaller theaters may present a new mounting of a Calderon, an Aeschylus, a Chekhov, or plays by authors whose names may not be well known outside France. The café theater is another Paris institution, where people can eat and drink while watching either an experimental work or a satiric send-up of the current French political scene.
Les Misérables was originally a French production long before it made its career in the United States. A new production returned to Paris last fall and promptly proved to be as much a success as it has been in America. An unexpected theatrical success from the fall season has been a dramatization of the Gospels entitled Jesus était son nom (Jesus was his name). Produced by Robert Hossein (a popular stage and screen actor and director) in the giant Palais des Sports at the Porte de Versailles, the work is more a Son et Lumière (sound and light) show than a theatrical performance, properly speaking. The actors move about on the vast stage, taking up positions like tableaux vivants to illustrate a recorded text. The actors filmed in costume appear on a huge screen, which forms a backdrop. The text is simply that of the New Testament.
Although France is a notoriously anticleric country, particularly among its intellectual class, Jesus était son nom has been doing standing-room-only business, bringing in four to five thousand spectators every night for the better part of a year. Posters for the show figure on
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