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 …
Gaspare Spontini (1774-1851) was an Italian opera composer who spent many years in Paris and later in Berlin. His best-known opera, La Vestale, was first performed in Paris in 1807. In this opera Licinius, a victorious Roman general, returns to Rome in triumph only to discover that his fiancée, Julia, 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 …
The Théâtre des Nouveautés (Theater of Novelties or News or Innovations) is one of the many theaters along the Grands Boulevards in Paris. Most of these theaters specialize in contemporary French comedies, which are notoriously difficult for us poor foreigners to understand, even those of us who have some acquaintance 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 …
This lovely little theater is tucked away at the end of a courtyard on the Île Saint-Louis, the smaller of the two islands in the Seine in the center of Paris. One of my bicycle maps claimed that there was a Vélib’ station on the Île Saint-Louis near Pont Marie, Read More …
In June 2012 I went back to the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées on Avenue Montaigne in Paris, this time to attend a benefit concert with the Ensemble Matheus, conducted by Jean-Christophe Spinosi, featuring six prominent singers who often perform in French opera houses. The ladies in this photo are, from left Read More …
Le Lucernaire is a “national center for the arts and experimentation” in the 6th arrondissement of Paris, between Saint-Germain-des-Prés and Montparnasse. It includes three theaters, three cinemas, a bookshop, a restaurant, a bar and an art gallery. I first heard of the Lucernaire when I attended a play at the Read More …
Founded in 1690 by Louis XIV, the Comédie Française is still going strong as the world’s oldest theater troupe. Their repertoire consists mainly of classic French plays from the 17th and 18th centuries, but they also perform plays by more modern authors. For instance, I once saw them perform what Read More …
In Paris back in 2011 I saw an insightful theatrical revue about the Second Empire, the eighteen-year period from 1852 to 1870 when Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte ruled France as Emperor Napoléon III. The musical spectacle “Hugoffenbach” combined texts by Victor Hugo (1802-1885), expressing his outrage at Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte’s seizure of power, Read More …