The Can-Can Man

Jacques Offenbach wrote dozens of operettas, but the only work that is well-known 150 years later is actually an opera: the very sad Tales of Hoffman.  One of the characters is an amazing wind-up doll, but the rest is unhappy stuff.  Even with Kate Lindsey wearing her hat and negligee in New York’s 2015 production, Hoffman barely gets above “hopelessly sober”.

Beyond that, there are several bars of his Orpheus in the Underworld which are extraordinarily popular, known to anyone who can recite the tune to the “can-can music”.

But he has a few others that are worth watching, or at least listening to.  La Périchole and Les Brigands are both lightweight, funny, and full of tunes as lively as the can-can.  They are hardly ever performed.

La Perichole

La Périchole (1868) takes place in Peru, and the story is about a street singer and her boyfriend, who are swindled by the local political honchos, but end up together and happy.  Offenbach has packed most of it with exciting, driving music, and the soundtrack would be fun to listen to all by itself, if it weren’t interrupted so frequently with spoken lines.  (It’s an operetta, not really an opera, so we have to put up with that.)

Offenbach had his friends Meilhac and Halévy do the libretto, and this is kind of interesting because this pair also worked with Bizet, writing the script for Carmen.  They took the street singer story from a play by one Prosper Mérimée, from 40 years earlier.  (The historic Périchole was a woman named Micaela Villegas, who lived in Peru in the late 1700s.  Even she did not know exactly what her nickname means.)  So the story goes back quite a long way. 

The way to see La Périchole is to subscribe to Medici.tv, and pull up the Opéra-Comique’s 2022 recording.  Aside from that, there is a concert/recital version moving through Europe in early 2024, but that’s all.  Again, this is a pretty rare production.

Wardrobe Riot

The 2022 version from Paris has a great cast and performance, but the big credit goes to someone named Vanessa Sannino, who made the costumes.  Wow, this is stunning.  The nutty city officials’ pants.  The beehive dresses.  Périchole’s “I am a very fancy lampshade” wedding headpiece.  The Spanish guys’ ridiculous hats and shaggy epaulets.  (Offenbach clearly thought the Spanish were fops; just watch how he skewers them in Les Brigands, also with a Medici subscription.)

So you have energetic music and the lead soprano’s smile (Stéphanie d'Oustrac), and an earnest country boy portrayal by the tenor.   Yeah, it’s a goofy story, and it has too much talking, but it goes down pretty well, a good two hours of fun.

Songbird

And then we have the new transformation, Songbird, making the rounds in 2024.  I missed it in Milwaukee, but I went out of my way to see it in Washington DC.  Not sure I should have. 

“The carefree Parisian nightlife of Offenbach’s La Périchole finds its match—Prohibition-Era New Orleans—in this reimagined, jazz-infused comedy” says the program.

No it doesn’t.  First of all, the original features Peruvian, not Parisian, nightlife.  Second, Washington keeps calling this an opera, but it is exactly like a Broadway stage musical, and not very much like an opera. 

A Broadway musical is usually not a reason for me to sit in a chair for two hours, because most of these things are too happy, too distant from grim reality for me.  Dancing and singing in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade – go for it, but it’s not my cup of foamy syrup.

These characters are all over-confident extroverts, with wide smiles, huge arm motions, fancy kicking and stepping, and big dramatic poses at the end of every song, so you’re obligated to clap a lot – that’s what they are waiting for up there!

Well Done!  Show This to Somebody Else!

For sure, they have taken the Périchole story, and replicated it well, or possibly they took the 1829 play by P Mérimée and replicated that.

And I have to admit, in setting it up as a 21st century musical, they succeeded in making it lively in every scene, paced very fast from beginning to end, and engagingly varied in tone and mood.  This script is pretty good!   Those are catchy songs!  Did they use any of Offenbach’s music?  I couldn’t tell!

Further, Songbird fits the New Orleans jazz theme perfectly.  The trombone and the muted trumpet are up there on the stage, right behind the performers, and they keep things moving.  New Orleans political chicanery has always been easier for me to relate to than Peruvian political chicanery, so, great!  The re-setting is not bad at all.

Finally, the singing is in clear English and French, intertwined so well that you don’t miss anything.  Nice job with the complex bilingual lyrics here.

Too bad, but I just don’t love New Orleans jazz, or the flapper prohibition era theme, or the dancers, or the over-acting.  Broadway bound, maybe.  So let’s not keep calling Songbird an opera; put it over on 42nd Street so those people can enjoy it.