Search - Emmanuel Chabrier/Darius Milhaud - Une éducation manquée (An Incomplete Education) [Collection ''L'Opéra français''] on DVD

Hilarious Trifle

Ben Franklin | USA | 05/08/2006

(3 out of 5 stars)

"First the bad. You are paying for a 47 minute operetta. It sounds and looks like a movie production from the 1940s, even though it appears to have been made in the 80s or 90s. The good is that I laughed throughout, the performers are good and the music is excellent Chabrier who I rank higher than Offenbach and Arthur Sullivan. I wish we would also get GWENDOLINE and LE ROI MALGR? LUI on DVD.

Remember the old stories about what happens on a wedding night when neither the bride nor groom has been instructed about the birds and the bees? This is a cutesy French version. The best number, for me, was the patter duet between Abb? Pausanias and his pupil Gontran which rivals anything that Gilbert and Sullivan cooked up,

P: You translated at sight
Lucan, Virgil, Ovid, Horace.
Juvenal who isn't very clear.
Valerius, Flaccus and Stafus.

G: There's no denying it, Pausanias,
But... It's not enough!

Apparently the version given here is a revision by Darius Milhaud. Gontran was originally a pants role."