Féerie

[2] Féeries blended music, dancing, pantomime, and acrobatics, as well as magical transformations created by designers and stage technicians,[3] to tell stories with clearly defined melodrama-like morality and an extensive use of supernatural elements.

[2] Féeries used a fairy-tale aesthetic to combine theatre with music, dances, mime, acrobatics, and especially spectacular visual effects created by innovative stage machinery,[3] such as trap doors, smoke machines, and quickly changeable sets.

[7] The last transformation in a féerie, accompanied by a flourish of music, led to the apotheosis: a grand final stage picture, usually involving beautiful supernumeraries descending from the sky or suspended on wires.

The critic Francisque Sarcey suggested that for a féerie, the crew in charge of design and stagecraft should be regarded as more important than the writers, noting that the scripts themselves were so incoherent that "one can put the beginning at the end, and vice versa.

"[9] Théophile Gautier even suggested, with considerable irony, that the immensely successful féerie Les Pilules du diable could be performed as a purely mimed production, so that no spoken words would distract the audience from the spectacle they had come to enjoy.

The supernatural forces in the plot drove these characters through fantastic landscapes and multiple adventures, typically involving magic talismans used to transform people, things, and places.

The féerie, combining the fairground influences with the farcical style of comédie en vaudeville,[3] began as a form of melodrama, but the gap between them quickly became highly pronounced.

[4] The development of the féerie was helped along by a growing French interest in the literary qualities of classic fairy tales, and by the popularity of the One Thousand and One Nights after its first publication in France.

[5] The play, written by Alphonse Martainville in collaboration with the actor César Ribié, follows the quest of a lovesick hero, Guzman, to save his lover Leonora from the hands of a villainous rival.

With the help of a magic talisman (the mutton foot of the title) and under the watch of a fairy who espouses the value of virtue and duty, Guzman braves his way through a series of spectacular trials, spiced with music, ballet, and duels.

Thanks to stage machinery, magical events flow freely through the play: portraits move, people fly, chaperones transform into guitarists, food disappears.

[13] Technical advances in stage machinery were quickly woven into new féerie productions: gas lighting, installed in most major Paris theaters by the late 1830s, allowed for more realistic set designs and various atmospheric effects, with limelight becoming especially useful to simulate sunbeams and moonbeams.

[17] Many successful féeries were the work of the prolific Cogniard brothers; their 1843 adaptation of the One Thousand and One Nights, Les Mille et une nuits, introduced exoticism to the genre while preserving its lighthearted vaudevillian dialogue.

[19] The Théâtre de la Porte Saint-Martin, originally designed for opera productions, had a stage and machinery well suited to the demands of the féerie,[7] and flourished with the genre under the direction of Marc Fournier.

[20] Opéra-féeries, with an increased emphasis on music, first flourished in the 1820s,[13] eventually developing into a form of operetta in such works as Jacques Offenbach's 1874 Le Voyage dans la lune.

That which doesn't demand any attention and unravels without logic, like a dream that we make wide awake … [It is] a symphony of forms, of colours and of lights … The characters, brilliantly clothed, wander through a perpetually changing series of tableaux, panic-stricken, stunned, running after each other, searching to reclaim the action which goes who knows where; but what does it matter!

"[30] One of the poems in Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal, "L'Irreparable," was inspired by a féerie he had seen, La Belle aux Cheveaux d'Or, starring Marie Daubrun, an actress with whom he was smitten.

[31] Maurice Maeterlinck's 1908 play The Blue Bird was likewise described by contemporary observers as a féerie, though critics noted that it was a more overtly poetic and intellectual example of the genre than the classic Châtelet productions.

The genre was launched with Verne and d'Ennery's smash-hit 1874 dramatization of Around the World in Eighty Days, quickly followed by two further adaptations from the same team, The Children of Captain Grant and Michael Strogoff.

[35] Eventually, Around the World and Michael Strogoff, both immensely successful, codified the pièce de grand spectacle as a genre of its own, in competition with the similar but magic-based form of the "classical" féerie.