A Gypsy in Paris

I flew to Paris from the West Coast Thursday afternoon, arriving at Charles de Gualle early Easter Friday morning - at the same time as what felt all of the Eastern Seaboard's French immersion classes on field trips. It took almost 2 hours to get through the automated boarder controls set aside for US/UK/Canadian arrivals. Just scan your passport, look in a camera, and you're in - none of the extra screening the passengers from flights arriving from Africa & Asia were all diverted to. But still a few thousand passengers all had to get through those computers & they were like those self-serve checkouts at a Walmart where for each person they work for, for another it would glitch, and attendant would come over & say oh just redo that step. How the heck is this better than just having a border guard check your passport?



Anyways, I had booked my room for an early arrival, so was able to crash & take a little nap. But not too much. I made myself get up & confront the time difference with some easy sight seeing. I had booked one of the big Seine River tours. Here also I hadn't realized how popular this would be on a long weekend. Arriving at 2:45 I was fortunate to only have about a 45 minute wait - with a ticket I had booked a week ahead of time. Getting off the boat sometime after 4 it is not exaggerating to say the lineup had swelled to easily 2-3000 people with more buses full of Chinese tourists gridlocking the parking lot along the river. I then sleepwalked up the Champs Elysees to the Arc de Triomphe. The crowds were close to Times Square on a busy Saturday. I pulled over to a Cafe where I saw an open single seat & got a couple espressos in me to keep me going before the 45 minute Metro trip up to the theatre where the Philharmonie de Paris performs - to finally get to the whole point of both this post & my trip...



I attended the third of the four performances they are giving this weekend of the French language premiere of Gypsy starring opera star Natalie Dessay as Rose, with her real life daughter Neïma Naouri as Louise. The book has been translated to French, but the songs performed in English. There were French surtitles projected during the songs. I don't speak French, but I know the play well, so had little trouble following along. It had been billed as a concert performance, but was actually semi-staged with black platforms behind & in front of the orchestra used for scenes and dance numbers. No sets, but the essentials were all there like the strobing transition between the child & adult performers in the first act, and a big light up surprise during the final number. The score sounded fabulous performed by the Paris Chamber Orchestra sat center stage, conducted by Gareth Valentine.

Soprano Dessay did not use her operatic voice for this but attempted a belt. It has been over 10 years since she retired from operatic works. She was well known during her career for her mesmerizing acting performances of some of the greatest "mad scenes" in Opera such as in Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor.

So I did feel her voice sounded strained for some numbers, but her acting - especially of the final number - was fantastic. There was an article in the Times a couple days ago where she mentions being influenced by seeing Lupone's performance on Broadway. I didn't read the article until this morning, but last night definitely thought she'd seen Lupone. But she gave it her own French spin - maybe there was a touch of Edith Piaf to it. The French audience was very enthusiastic, giving long applause, but without the NY style hysteria of everyone rushing to their feet.



Naouri has a very pretty musical theater voice & carried her numbers with aplomb; and I think did a very fine job acting Louise's transformation into Gypsy Rose Lee. Medya Zana was good as June, without getting too cartoonish. Other roles were all good as well. Overall a very satisfactory evening.



Tonight I see a concert by African legend Youssou N'Dour, Sunday Don Carlos at the Paris Opera, and Monday Macbeth in French with some sort of English surtitles on "smart glasses" at the Comedie Francaise.

An update as I leave Paris for Amsterdam, the start glasses at the Comedie Francaise worked really well. A bit cumbersome to wear, but you see surtitles in whichever language you choose, and can move them to wear it feels comfortable to read them, and change the size. The production of Macbeth is very modernish with symbolic sets that don't always make sense. No intermission, played straight through with probably some cuts. The people in front of me left after maybe 35 minutes.

In Amsterdam seeing Straus' Die Frau at the Opera, Angels in America, & some random classical music concerts.

I'm feeling like I could have spent the whole trip in Paris, but when I planned this I thought I should go somewhere I've never been before.

The Hockney retrospective at the Fondation Louis Vuitton right now is fantastic. It is on until the end of August.

I'm almost thinking that Paris is a better destination than NYC. Hotels can be so much cheaper, with breakfast available at the hotel included. That's not common in New York. But even simple meals are more expensive. It's hard to get away under 30-35€ for lunch or dinner in a sit down restaurant. But they don't expect 20% on top of that.

Easter weekend is a terrible time to come though because there are huge crowds at every major tourist sight or museum. I went to the Louvre yesterday with the earliest arrival possible, so had the less popular galleries to myself early on. But as I entered I heard a guard tell someone else that all tickets for the museum yesterday were completely sold out. When I left at 1pm, there was a line still about a mile long of people waiting to go through security and enter.

Last night I attended a performance of the International Theatre Amsterdam's currently running revival of Ivo Van Hove's production of Angels in America. Serendipitously it was one of the few nights where it was being performed with English subtitles projected. So much of the itinerary for my trip this week came together from serendipitous events.

This Dutch translation presents the two parts as a single play, with each part running approximately 2 hours. I'm not sure how much was cut, but the timing is aided by a zippy performance by the actors who are continually charging out onto the mostly bare stage as scenes constantly overlap. Simple projections suggest a change of location; for example the shadow of the Bethsaida Fountain angel let's us know we're moved to Central Park from the previous scene in someone's apartment or office. It worked very well for me, and makes the play feel like something written more recently than 30 some years ago. The play runs at a pace that feels like you are scrolling through an Instagram feed. And today that works for me.

The politics of the piece - it is f-ing scary how much of Cohn's speeches foretold the attitudes we are seeing among leaders today

I had also forgotten just how funny this play is. I was cracking up non-stop. But I'm not sure if some of the jokes don't translate, or if it they simply went over the heads of some of the very young audience members who didn't understand so many of the references to American events and history. For example the big joke near the very end - something like I wanted to see if I could finally make Ethel Rosenberg sing - none of the 20 somethings sitting around me understood that at all. The girls beside me were Dutch & told me they were only 21 when I spoke to them at intermission. They were missing lot. Unfortunately I found myself Dad-splaining.

At the intermission I overheard someone else say that the subtitles were not a 100% accurate translation of what the actors were saying. I don't speak Dutch, but I think perhaps it was more a difference in the the way sentences are structured with verb & noun placement etc. If the translated text was presented exactly as how the Dutch was being spoken it may have read like gobbledygook in English.

I found the actors phenomenal. They made the characters their own, and I completely forgot how I had seen them played before. The theatre only seems to use digital programs, so will need to look that up to find any names... The Harper, Eefje Paddenburg, has her photo currently on the homepage of the theatre website (at https://ita.nl/en/ ) and she just broke my heart. She was mesmerizing. Marieke Heebink as Ethel Rosenberg/Mrs. Pitt was also fantastic. These two were the stand outs for me.

A bit of culture shock at the theatre for me here in Amsterdam is there are no ushers to be found - here, and at the National Opera the night before, & also at the Royal Concertgebouw the night before that. Audiences are just expected to be intelligent enough to find their seat numbers on their own; and responsible enough to not need policing of their behaviour at the theatre. It definitely feels very different.

I've written too much already, but I wanted to mention the production I saw at the National Opera in which British director Katie Mitchell places Strauss' Die Frau Ohne Schatten in a modern world of meth dealers & gangsters. It almost all worked for me and was pretty sensational. Maybe a bit too much of rolling out an ultrasound machine and women being put up on gurneys at gunpoint to search for their "shadows." Once was enough, we got the metaphor.

Overall this has been a pretty great week of theatre going. Going back to the regular daily grind in an artistically dead city next week will be tough.