Great Idea for a Film Veers off Course Fabrice Luchini, playing actor Serge Tanneur, wears his Alceste costume to a party. It is easy to imagine actor Fabrice Luchini and director Philippe Le Guay sitting down to hatch a brilliant idea … Read More
On the right: real-life Amélie Nothomb. On the left: book-jacket Amélie Nothomb. Certain aspects of novelist Amélie Nothomb’s work are utterly predictable: for example, every fall a new novel (usually around 150 pages long) appears without fail, with a portrait … Read More
Paris Update Art Notes BURNT BAR BLUES A Nana Mouskouri album cover amid the debris. A much-loved institution in Paris’s ninth arrondissement, the corner bar Chez Sylvain, went up in flames last week. Although Sylvain himself got out safely, his … Read More
A Pleasant Evening in Sartrean Hell The Théâtre du Nord-Ouest on the busy Rue du Faubourg Montmartre, just off Paris’s Grands Boulevards, has definitely seen better days. The peeling paint and dilapidated Favorite
BRIDGE OF SIGHS Scene from “Le Pont des Soupirs.” Photo © Gilles Plagnol for Les Tréteaux Lyriques. For an entertaining if intellectually undemanding experience, you could do far worse than go to the 150th anniversary staging of Jacques Offenbach’s … Read More
Pianist Bojan Zulfikarpasic. Julien Lourau and Bojan Z at Salle Pleyel: Pianist Bojan Zulfikarpasic and saxophonist Julien Loureau and their respective bands, Tetraband and Quartet Saigon, will each play a set, then the two musicians will perform as a … … Read More
Three rather unusual witches in Serge Poncelet’s production of Macbeth. Shakespeare appears to be ever-present in one form or another on the Paris stage. Two very different current productions – one a recital of a selection of the Bard’s sonnets … Read More
Anitya at Studio de l’Ermitage: The Anitya ensemble, led by Christophe Cagnolari, comprises musicians, dancers and actors, and uses the soundpainting technique of structured improvisation, in which the leader communicates what type of improvisation is called for via a language … Read More
SERAPHINE ON SHOW The success of the biopic Séraphine, winner of this year’s César award for best film and six other prizes, has aroused curiosity about the work of the painter it is based on, a housemaid named Séraphine Louis. … Read More
Klezmer Madness at Salle Pleyel: Clarinetist David Krakauer’s Klezmer Madness! adds elements of many kinds of jazz, funk, rock and hip-hop – producer/rapper Socalled will be in the house for this … Favorite
