With seats for 570 spectators in its main auditorium, the Athénée Théâtre Louis-Jouvet is the smallest lyric theater in Paris. The nearby Garnier Opera seats three times as many people, and the Bastille Opera seats well over four times as many. Though the entrance to the Athénée is tucked away Read More …
This historic theater, the Athénée Théâtre Louis-Jouvet, was built in the 1890s and has been a subsidized public theater since 1982. It has a small orchestra pit for musical productions, and is also used for spoken drama and concerts. La Carmencita, which I saw there in 2006, is an adapted Read More …
Since the name of this theater means ‘Theatre of the Old Pigeon-House’, I used to think the theater building was just that, an old pigeon-house (dovecote) that somebody decided to re-purpose after a sharp decline in the demand for pigeon meat. Considering the size of the theatre, I thought it Read More …
If this scene looks familiar, it might be that you have seen the 1938 film Hôtel du Nord by Marcel Carné (or snippets of it on the internet) and recognize this as the place where Arletty delivered her now-famous line about “atmosphère”. Actually she didn’t say it here at all, Read More …
The novel L’Hôtel du Nord by Eugène Dabit (1898-1936) tells the story of a working-class couple — the author’s parents, in fact — who ran a small working-class hotel in the 1920s on the left bank of the Canal Saint-Martin in Paris. The author kept the real first names of Read More …
At the back end of the ground floor of the Musée d’Orsay, I was surprised to find an exhibit on the construction of the then-new 19th century opera house which was commissioned by the Emperor Napoleon III and designed by the young architect Charles Garnier (1825-1898). The model in my Read More …
The amazing thing about my visit to Paris in June 2006 was that in ten days I saw eight operas at seven different venues. As I wrote at the time, “I don’t know of any other city in the world where this would be possible.” The operas I saw on Read More …
The Théâtre du Gymnase Marie Bell is one of the many theaters on the grands boulevards in Paris — and no doubt one of the oldest, having been built in the early 19th century and inaugurated in 1820. From the outside it doesn’t show its age, particularly, but inside it Read More …