Faust

On Sunday, March 1, Dawn and I saw another Opera here in Montpellier. Faust was really great! There have been a lot of articles on this performance in the Montpellier Plus (the local newspaper) actually. After reading the synopsis, I was really excited to see the French incarnation. The show was 4 acts with one intermission. The whole setup was really interesting. The characters were dressed in 50's rock and roll style with very bright colors. There was a huge stage with walls that moved on and off. A huge long couch that was used all the time to wheel people in and out. The lighting was impressive. There was a lot of symbolic random dancing throughout the show as well.

The beginning was really frustrating because they had a scrim in front of the stage to create great shadow looks but it was lit on the side so you could barely see what was happening and I couldn't see anything! I was so frustrated for those 10 minutes of overture and action. Though we couldn't really see the action of the beginning, the devil character was really great! His 2 little cronies wore super tight red spandex bodysuits and had tails. They were really silly since one of them was kinda fat and his belly was really ridiculous. The devil character himself had horns and everything and a painted red face.

This show was really, really symbolic. It was difficult to really follow what was happening in general. Thankfully I read the synopsis beforehand because the show was laced with so much seemingly random imagery that I had a hard time actually understanding the plot. Basically, the guy who sold his soul to the devil to regain his youth fell in love with a woman who at first wanted to be with him. She seemed really interested but she wanted to wait until the next day to either consumate or declare her love for him. It was a little weird. Then at the end of the first act, I guess the guy didn't want to wait the one day and raped/kissed this girl. We guessed it was rape because the 2nd act opened with her being pregnant.

Then she said she was in love with the guy even though she was pregnant and seemingly confused. She ended up going to jail, we think, because it was very symbolic and a bit confusing. There was this really odd dance number in the middle of this act where the entire company came out and danced. The company was huge. I am guessing there were about 80 people in the cast. I think the dance number was showing the people of the city's reaction to the devil in the city or the death of the pregnant woman's brother. Like I said, everything was a little confusing. In jail, the woman gave birth and killed her child in the same instant (that was interesting staging since she pulled a plastic baby doll from under her shirt and stabbed it. Then attached it to a hanging column of plastic babies). The 4th act was the most interesting and confusing.

The 4th act was the girl going to hell and the devil arriving with his cronies. Now I wish I had watched more of what was actually happening but there was a really distracting archbishop type character all the way upstage. This archbishop spent almost the entire 4th act painting with a paintbrush attached to a long pole. He was painting on a back wall that was hanging from the fly space. The first wall/panel he painted an upside down red cross. Then that was pulled up into the fly space. The second wall/panel he painted was this weird drawing/sketch of a devil that turned into a woman. It was really, really impressive and confusing. The third wall/panel was a guillotine. What I did see of the 4th act was a random dance number showing that they were in hell with a bunch of scantily clad girls who decided that topless was the way to go for some of the erotic dancing. At some point of the final act, the guy joined the girl in hell but I couldn't figure out why he was there and what he was trying to accomplish because he never got with the girl. At the very end of the show, I guess the woman went to heaven (we're not sure how or why) because the show ended with a very bright white light on the back wall.

There was a couple of random female dancers that would randomly dance across the stage at random intervals in different outfits. It was really weird and Dawn and I looked at each other a couple times when that happened. I guess I wasn't the only confused person there. A lot of the write-ups in the newspaper are people criticizing the staging and director choices. Not that the show is bad, just that many people didn't like how it was presented (costume choices, design choices, general staging choices). I really enjoyed it, even if I was a little confused.