The Metropolitan Opera’s French
concoction Parade, originally put together by the
director John Dexter and the set and costume designer David
Hockney in 1981, still retains the presence of Hockney, who
refurbished the inventive sets and gave the evening (March 4)
what glamour it possessed. The conceit of the production is that
the three works—Erik Satie’s Parade, Francis
Poulenc’s Mamelles de Tirésias, and
Ravel’s Enfant et les Sortilèges—are in
some sense hostages to World War I
(although this is true only of the first piece), and they are
therefore played surrounded by searchlights and barbed wire, with
a child-innocent and a harlequin as symbols. Unfortunately,
Dexter is no longer alive. I remember the production working
pretty well under Dexter; here, with Max Charruyer redoing it,
the conceit worked less well, though the unintended parallels
with September 11 gave it a tragic frisson. Dexter’s
idea for L’Enfant—to have the roles sung from
the sides of the stage and mimed by dancers—still is
effective and allowed for some really fine singing, especially by
Ruth Ann Swenson as The Princess.
Satie’s Parade, a ballet with a book by Jean Cocteau, is a very
slight work more famous for its provocativeness in the final
stages of the war than for its music. A siren wails and dance
rhythms sound, but they passed harmlessly in the choreography of
Gray Veredon. Les Mamelles, written during the First World War and
set by Poulenc during the Second,