When the French playwright Molière (1622-1673) was twenty-three years old he was forced to leave Paris with his company of actors because of debts they had run up. They spent thirteen years as an itinerant theater company in different parts of France, for instance in Pézenas, Narbonne, Albi, Carcassonne, Toulouse, Read More …
In the Royal Opera in the north wing of Versailles Palace I saw an elaborate performance of the musical comedy Le Bourgeois gentilhomme by the playwright Molière (1622-1673) and the composer Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632-1687).
The Reims Opera House was originally called the Grand Théâtre when it was first built in 1873. It was severely damaged in World War I. After several years delay it was rebuilt by two architects named François Maille and Louis Sollier, who kept the original façade but redesigned the interior Read More …
Looking through my photos of the Lucernaire from the past few years, I see that sometime between 2014 and 2019 the wording over the entrance was changed. It used to read Centre national d’art et d’essai (National center for art and experimentation), but now it just reads Théâtre Lucernaire. This Read More …
Rue d’Auteuil was the main street of the village of Auteuil, until that village was divided up between Paris and Boulogne in 1860. At that time more than half of Auteuil was incorporated into the city of Paris. This part is now the 61st administrative quarter of Paris and is Read More …
My only disappointment with Molière’s L’Avare (The Miser) was that it doesn’t include a maid. In all the other Molière plays I have seen or read, there is a clever maid who has the funniest lines and helps prevent the daughter of the house from being married off to some older Read More …
Saint-Cyr-l’École (meaning “Saint-Cyr-the-School”) is a town just west of Versailles. In fact it borders directly on the southwest corner of the Versailles Palace Gardens. The town is called Saint-Cyr-l’École to avoid confusion with other French towns that were also named after the same saint, such as: Saint-Cyr-sur-Loire Saint-Cyr-au-Mont-d’Or Saint-Cyr-en-Val Saint-Cyr-sur-Morin Read More …
The Faubourg Saint-Antoine is a Paris neighborhood that begins at Place de la Bastille (first photo) and stretches about 2 km eastward to Place de la Nation. The word Faubourg means “outside the walls”, now usually translated as “suburb”. In the Middle Ages this neighborhood was in fact outside the Read More …
When I saw the beautiful old Théâtre des Célestins in Lyon from the year 1881 I knew I had to go and see something there, no matter what they were playing. It turned out that they were doing a seventeenth century comedy by Molière (1622-1673) called Les Femmes savantes (The Read More …