Old-Fashioned Insouciance

"We're theater people," says Roland Petit. "So instead of hunting up an ordinary gift, I decided to offer my wife the Casino de Paris." The French choreographer made a lovely choice; since his wife is Singer-Dancer Zizi Jeanmaire, his gift is now one of the delights of Paris. For the first time in decades, the legendary Casino boasts a show that puts the Lido and the Folies-Bergere to shame. Nowhere on the Continent these days is there a revue to match the Casino's lively, naughty, insouciant offering. It is lavish testimony that oldfashioned, star-spangled sex has not entirely given way to the new eroticism.

Petit's extravaganza is a lush mixture of Now and Then. His dancers, tricked out in crushed-velvet pantsuits by Yves St. Laurent, open with the springy "L'Amour du Metier" (The Love of Show Business). As they sing, they flit in and out of a flashing construction of steel tubes designed by the Venezuelan painter Jesus Raphael Soto. Then the Tiller Girls, 16 bright British birds whose forebears were the original inspiration for the Radio City Rockettes, descend from the ceiling in sentinel boxes. Their number is followed by blonde-wigged nudes and a sleekly sophisticated pas de deux executed by a pair of Petit's dancers. Finally, following a flurry of furs, sequins and extravagant nudes, the inimitable Zizi appears. Her ink black hair is clipped into a skull cap, and her raspy, pushcart-vendor voice keeps the audience in thrall for two solid hours.

It is mainly Zizi's show, and although it is the most expensive in Paris ($13 top), it has played before a packed house for four straight months.

Luxurious Playground. The Casino's heritage is as glorious as the tricolor itself. It was originally founded on the estate of the Due de Richelieu (grand nephew of the cardinal) two centuries ago. For the libertine duke's pleasure, the loveliest courtesans of France performed voluptuous charades. Between the Franco-Prussian War and World War I, France's Belle Epoque, the Casino was the luxurious playground of continental nobility. Between the world wars, it went into decline under Director Henri Varna. "Give the public nudes, feathers and spangles. That's all they want," he once said, and the Casino became a second-rate tourist trap until it closed in 1969.

Varna died last year, and the Casino went up for sale. Petit, a journeyman choreographer (and Zizi's husband for 16 years), could not afford to buy the 1,500-seat music hall, but worked out a rental agreement with an option to buy in two years if all goes well. It certainly should. Says Petit: "Our success is fantastic. Everything I have dreamed of has finally come true." Zizi is pleased, of course, but she is too much the Parisian sophisticate to be overly rhapsodic. Pointing to the set's shimmering black St. Laurent curtains, she says, "If we don't break even, at least I'll have enough material to keep me in black sequined dresses for the rest of my life."

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