Paris in the Spring

Not since long before the war had Paris had so brisk and booming a theater season. Fifty-two legitimate plays, most of them sellouts, were nightly on the boards, and there was a rash of musicals. Cracked Les Lettres Franc,aises: "The number of theaters will soon exceed les bars americains."

Amid all this bustle, it remained for a 23-year-old U.S. musicomedy to attract, fortnight ago, the season's glossiest first-night audience and its loudest cheers. Tout Paris--Marlene Dietrich, Mistinguett, Jean Gabin, Lucien Lelong, many another--swarmed to No, No, Nanette, stayed on for 18 curtain calls.

By last week Nanette was the smash hit of the season, grossing 210,000 francs ($1,763) a performance--a terrific take for present-day Paris. Entire families, from grand' mere down to ten-year-old Gabrielle, were trooping to see the show. They were seeing a spirited, shined-up Nanette. The Charleston-mad flapper of the '20s had become a Gallic jitterbug. In an atmosphere of glittering color and gorgeous chorines, Nanette (Claudine Cereda) writhed to boogie-woogie arrangements of Vincent Youmans' (see MILESTONES) I Want to Be Happy and crooned Tea for Two:

Je me vois

De j`a chez vous

Buvant du the

Sur vos genoux*

Triple Decker. Paris shows "open" on three successive nights. The first night is a dress--and dressmakers'--rehearsal. The invited audience is made up of important couturiers, stage designers, technicians, anyone who has contributed a necklace or a knickknack.* The performance is halted to smooth out wrinkles in the costumes, or (often at the most exciting moments) to take publicity shots.

The second night, la repetition generate, is the real first night. To it are invited topflight critics, big-shot editors, notables in the arts, gossip columnists, diplomats, politicians, the cream of society. Not till the third night, or premiere, can the general public buy seats, and then only the worst.

Paris theaters are spread all over the city, and each draws on a neighborhood audience as well as a wider public. But theaters very far off the beaten track have tough sledding, and some, like the Pigalle in Montmartre, have never had a hit. Many theaters, furthermore, are "typed"--the saying goes that at the Palais-Royal there is always a bed on the stage. At the Palais-Royal it used to be traditional, too, for a nude woman to dash across the stage once during the evening. That was what the regular customers came for; but they got bored waiting, and requested the management to announce the precise hour of the specialite. The management obligingly posted a timetable over the bar in the lobby; habitues would drink till the big moment, dash in for it, and then depart.

The present theater boom is as much a result of the war as a release from it. War and occupation created a new theater public: people desperately needing escape were chained to Paris but cheated of the U.S. movies they had doted on. But their war experiences bred in them more serious tastes, which accounts for such recent highbrow hits as Existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre's Huis Clos, Near-Existentialist Albert Camus' Caligula (headed for Broadway), T. S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral.

Poor pay is general in the French theater. The biggest stars earn no more than $40 a night; the star of the state-controlled Odeon earns $40 a month; bit parts fetch $2 or $3 a performance. The notorious morality of the French stage rests partly on the fact that many an actress resorts to classic means to keep alive.

* Copyright Harms, Inc.

* French productions are extremely meticulous. If the set calls for a Renoir or Picasso, an hon-est-to-God Renoir or Picasso will be on the wall.

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