Tuesday, February 28, 2006
Paris street theater occupies Al-Bustan Festival
Les Grooms present an amusing brass band arrangement of 'The Magic Flute'

By Jim Quilty
Daily Star staff

BEIRUT: "Quel est votre prenom?"

"My favorite pronoun?" You blink at the small-ish woman in the bellboy's outfit who's just escorted you to your seat. "'You,' I guess. What's yours?"

She blinks back. "Je m'appelle Fany." "Indeed."

It's around 5:30 p.m., Sunday afternoon at the Al-Bustan Hotel's Crystal Garden venue. The occasion is Les Grooms (The Bellhops), who have rolled into Beit Mery with their show "La flute en chantier" ("The Flute Under Construction.")

Informality is the order of the day, with the red-clad performers ushering audience members to their seats, then lingering to chat. A hotel chambermaid fusses incongruously with her cart. Several large suitcases are arrayed against the wall the chairs are facing.

Then the chambermaid rings a front-desk bell - the thing Basil Fawlty used to bash to summon his bellboy, Manuel - and Les Grooms re-deploy at the front, open the suitcases and produce trombone, trumpets and a brace of saxophones. Fany, it turns out, plays a mean soprano sax.

A brass-band arrangement of the Overture to "The Magic Flute" ensues, performed to a close-order bellhop drill. For the next 90 minutes or so Les Grooms escort the audience of well-heeled boys and girls of all ages through some of the better-known passages of Mozart's Freemason-inflected opera, arranged here for an eight-piece brass band, two voices (the chamber maid and the trombonist) and plenty of clowning.

The Grooms formed for the 1984 European Football Championships. They were put in charge of the entertainment during a dinner organized for the then-sports minister - timed to correspond with the semi-final match between France and Portugal. The French won that one.

Since then the band members have become international street-theater celebrities. Their first crack at Mozart, "The Tragic Flute," was a collaborative effort with the Chalon dans la Rue street theater festival.

"La flute en chantier" is street theater transferred to a hotel setting, a movable feast beginning in the Crystal Garden before adjourning to Il Gardino Restaurant, then Al-Bustan's lobby. It's also an interactive one - demanding that the audience keep up and become implicated in the play.

During the second "act" - while Papagano the bird-catcher prepares to commit suicide - the mischievous trumpeters leap over Il Gardino's service counter to wreck havoc at the preparation table and flirt with the line chef. Evidently uninformed about what was in store, she seemed a little shy about the whole thing.

In the lobby's final act - during the heroes' ordeals of fire and water - one little girl's father was called upon to join the performers in performing with a black plastic bin liner on his head. "Domino Nassar," as he was dubbed, played along in good humor.

There's plenty of wit in the show, all born from street theater's inversion of classical music's usual solemnities.

When the audience applauds the chambermaid's first aria, a band-member leaps up and produces a round sign with a red line through a pair of applauding hands: "NO APPLAUSE." The soprano's second aria is performed while she's talking on her mobile telephone. Later, during Domino Nassar's five minutes of fame, one of the Grooms notices a young man talking on his mobile. He strides over, snatches the phone out of his hand apologetically, makes his excuses to the voice on the other end, then crushes the handset under his boot heel.

Who says there's no catharsis in comedy?

Al-Bustan continues tonight with Linda and JosŽ Bustani on two pianos with The St. Petersburg Chamber Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Juri Gilbo at the American University of Beirut.

Source: The Daily Star