A so lovely little theatre

VR Sweet Mode / Tales

Do you like children’s stories?
For my part, I’m sad to admit it – well, I’m losing all my street-credibility – but yes, I still love children’s stories.

The one I’m offering you today is an adaptation of a story that amazed my childhood.

We are in Paris, in this Paris that no longer exists and that I never knew, the Paris of the green buses where you could stand outside in the back – the Paris of the time of Coco Chanel and Juliette Greco – in short, the Paris that tourists from all over the world come to look for when Paris is open.

This Paris is a Paris that is rife with the desire to relive, at last, after the War – to start creating, playing, inventing again.
And here we go behind the walls of “La Grande Maison”: Molière’s house – within its walls, to meet a costume designer as it still exists: Mme Lalouette – and my lovely real Catherine in l’Archipel is quite this great lady there-, in love with stage clothes and the artists who wore them, guardian of the stories of each room.

Under these prestigious walls: skinny kids like street cats, and an old actor/teacher who would like to make “his’ kids dream. He takes them to his old girlfriend Lalouette, the costume designer – he would like to sting them with the stage virus – this virus is magnificent and transforms a monster into a stage monster adored by all.
She allows them everything, the kids. They try on all the costumes, and here they are, musketeers of the King, Harlequin, sailors, kings, hunchbacks, young firsts, and… and for the last dress… ah the last dress has a strange story… it is Mademoiselle‘s dress. Mademoiselle, a theatre star who had time to be born – to shine – and to die, just like that, just as she had come.

And the little girl who tries on this dress, Marie-Bé, called Bé, has the same angelic face, the same blonde curls that fall on her shoulders, the same look that makes you fall into heaven.

So the costume designer does what she has never done before: she gives the dress of Mademoiselle to the kid from Paris.

The old actor is delighted: his kids have been stung – and here they all are, all winter long, under the roofs of Paris, rehearsing the great scenes of the repertoire.
Being Agnès, from the Ecole des Femmes, and saying: the little cat is dead – without doing too much, without doing too little – was the ultimate test and Bé, in the beautiful dress of Mademoiselle, ends up passing.

So for the summer vacations, their old actor sold everything and gave his kids an old Parisian bus – those green flatbed buses…. The bus was refurbished, so it could cross France and become a “real troupe”.

And here they go, with texts in their heads & with the costumes piously donated by the costume designer. And then, little by little, we will understand the mystery of Mademoiselle’s dress.

Mademoiselle was a lover of theatre – and she had been given a very precious jewel, hidden in the heat of our South: a very, very, small Italian theatre – and …. ? and…

I won’t tell you the end… but it will take all the intelligence of the children, all their love of the theatre, to save this jewel, the dress and the memory of Mademoiselle.

I announced this show for VR sweet mode – because it is for children – because it is for several children at the same time – because it plays on all the springs of the theatre: and that there is therefore everything to be done by oneself, everything to be assembled, to be built, to be taken down, to be coordinated, to climb up to the heights, to make the curtains go up. … and you can also add some nice visits of Paris perched on the platform of the old bus. And there — that’s the dream.

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Featured Image : Old Parisian Bus / freely adapted from the novel of Saint Marcoux 1962