Help with Speaking French

Cast:
If your character speaks French, please practice your accent. Click on the headline above or the link below for audio of commonly used French words. This particular link goes to the "M" page, for "monsieur" and "madame".
http://french.about.com/library/pronunciation/bl-audiodico-m.htm

The Girls' "Night Light"

An oil lamp circa 1893, like the "night lights" that Mathieu's daughters might use to create the ghost effect.

How to Curtsy Properly

Click on the headline above for a video on how to curtsy. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WvW1OolXg8g)

Rehearsals Start Monday!

Rehearsals begin Monday, Oct. 4 at 4 PM in the Don Powell Theatre with presentations by the design team. Get a sneak peak at scenic design, lighting and fun costumes (corsets, yay!). I'll be there, too, to give the actors some background info about Feydeau and La Belle Epoque. I hope to meet all of you there. -- Lauren

MONDAY

5.00 – 6.00            Act I scenes 1, 2 and 3

6.00 – 7.00            Act I scenes 4, 5 and 6

7.00 – 8.00            Act I scenes 7, 8 and 10

TUESDAY

5.00 – 6.00            Act I scene 9

6.00 – 7.00            Act II scene 6

7.00 – 8.00            Act II scene 10

WEDNESDAY

5.00 – 6.00            Act II scenes 1, 2 and 3

6.00 – 7.00            Act II scenes 4 and 5

7.00 – 8.00            Act II scenes 7, 8, 9 and 11           

THURSDAY

5.00 – 6.00             Act III scenes 1 and 2

6.00 – 7.00            Act III scenes3 and 4

7.00 – 8.00            Act III scene 5

FRIDAY

5.00 – 6.00            Act III scenes 6 and 7

6.00 – 7.00            Act III scenes 8 and 9

7.00 – 8.00            Act III scenes 10 and 11

Attention Movie Lovers

Check out the 2009 flick Cheri starring Michelle Pfeiffer, Rupert Friend, Felicity Jones and Kathy Bates for 90 minutes of entertainment that will definitely get you in the mood for Paradise Hotel. You can rent this movie, set in Paris and based on two novellas by Colette, on Netflix, or watch it on Showtime or TMC between Sep. 25 and Oct. 5. Click on the headline above for showtimes.

Say It French, See Voo Play

Actors and others who want to impress their friends, please refer to the page titled, "Who Is Checking into Paradise Hotel?" for tips on the correct pronunciation of the French names. Merci (mayr-see).

Running After Love

L'Hotel du Libre Echange (1894) was one of Feydeau’s earlier plays, and it was co-written with Maurice Desvallieres, a frequent collaborator between 1888 and 1894.

Like many of Feydeau’s other plays, Hotel is characterized by rapid movement of characters on and off stage – what scholar Leonard Pronko calls an essential condition of theatre that Feydeau learned from his predecessor Eugene Labiche. “He compared [his characters] to pieces on a chessboard, and his plays are constructed with the rigor of a well-played game,” Pronko wrote.

In moving his characters from one location to another, Hotel shifts from a bourgeois home to a disreputable hotel and back to the home again. This shift is typical of Feydeau farces and helped to establish the term “bedroom farce.”

Feydeau chose to write about love and sex (l’amour), Pronko surmised, because it offers an apparent escape from boredom (ennui), which Feydeau once said was at the root of all man’s problems. But his characters find that the pursuit of pleasure is hollow, and in the end, they are no better off than they were when their story began. As Pronko pointed out, sadly, “Lying beneath that brilliant polished mechanical surface is all the horror of contemporary life.”

Feydeau himself was a victim of the horror that lay beneath the reverie of La Belle Epoque. He contracted syphilis and died in 1921 at the young age of 58.
Source: Leonard Pronko, Eugene Labiche and Georges Feydeau, New York: Grove Press, 1982.