Le bourgeois gentilhomme (review)

• Orchestra: Le Poème Harmonique and Musica Florea

• Conductor: Vincent Dumestre

• Director: Benjamin Lazar

• Assistant Director: Louise Moaty

• Choreographer: Cécile Roussat

• Assistant Choreographer: Julien Lubeck

• Set Design: Adeline Caron

• Costume Design: Alain Blanchot

• Lighting: Christophe Naillet

• Makeup: Mathilde Benmoussa

• Properties: Fred Jacq

• Producer: Oldiel Carlotti

• Executive Producer: Jean-Paul Combet

• Video Director: Martin Fraudreau

• Actors

• Monsieur Jourdain: Olivier Martin Salvan

• Madame Jourdain: Nicolas Vial

• Lucile: Louise Moaty

• Cléonte, Philosophy Master: Benjamin Lazar

• Dorante, Master of Arms: Lorenzo Charoy

• Nicole, Music Master: Alexandra Rübner

• Covielle, Master Tailor: Jean-Denis Monory

• Dancing Master: Julien Lubeck

• Vocalists

• Arnaud Marzorati

• Claire Lefilliâtre

• François-Nicolas Geslot

• Serge Goubioud

• Lisandro Nesis

• Bernard Arrieta

• Arnaud Richard

• Dancers

• Caroline Ducrest

• Julien Lubeck

• Cécile Roussat

• Flora Sans

• Gudrun Skamletz

• Akiko Veaux

Attendees of the 2004 Utrecht Early Music Festival experienced a rare and marvelous event—an imaginative, lively, vivid restaging of Molière and Lully's last comédie-ballet, Le bourgeois gentilhomme by Vincent Dumestre, Benjamin Lazar, and Cécile Roussat. Happily for those who were not present at the multiple performances across Europe in 2004, 2005, and 2006, one of the 2004 performances at the Théâtre Le Trianon in Paris was filmed and released in an elegantly produced DVD, accompanied by a documentary tracing the actors, singers, and dancers at work. Deliberately eschewing the performance tradition of the Comédie-Française, which has tended to ignore Lully's music and the danced interludes as mere decoration, Dumestre, Lazar, and Roussat joined their considerable skills and vision to produce a Bourgeois gentilhomme that includes all of the sung and danced interludes, bringing comedy and ballet into the balance that its original creators had devised. While each acknowledges that their project was not one of reconstruction or archaeology, their overarching goals nonetheless included seeing what was possible to achieve within the parameters of what we know about seventeenth-century staging, music, speech, gesture, dance, makeup, and costume. Thus, candles (500 plus) light the stage; the single set, an elegant tooled coppery metal backdrop (to reflect light) contains all of the action; and the actors speak in a variety of accents derived from what we know about seventeenth-century spoken French—whether of the Parisian nobility, provincial bourgeoisie, or the servant class.¹

The project of staging a seventeenth-century work of music theater in a form as close to the "original" as possible is replete with pitfalls and contradictions, especially when produced as DVD. The very elements that make the piece succeed on the stage can also be off-putting if the viewer watches this performance as a "film" rather than as a recording of a staged work in live performance. The camera's close-ups reveal the heavy makeup and penciled lines that give definition to facial features when seen from a distance; some might find the declamation too exaggerated, and the actors' consistent playing to the front—to the audience, as was conventional in the seventeenth century—strange. If, however, rather than focusing on the aspects that strike twenty-first-century eyes and ears as unusual, a viewer becomes caught up in the production's immense energy and enjoyment, the experience can be transformative.

During intensive training at the Abbaye de Royaumont, the actors, musicians, and dancers involved in this production immersed themselves in the habitus of seventeenth-century France. In the process they forged a cohesive ensemble with a common central goal: to bring the work to life, communicating its verve to a new audience. Performers and directors worked together to achieve a historically informed, not historically straitjacketed, performance that befits the comedic energy and ebullience of Molière's text and Lully's music. The players clearly enjoy themselves on the stage, and while all the pieces have been carefully planned and worked out in rehearsal, the final effect is one of unstudied ease and sprezzatura.

Dedicated to Gustav Leonhardt and Eugène Green, this production exemplifies the best of what historically informed performance practice can conjure...