Folies Bergère

Folies Bergère, French theatre of the 19th and early 20th century, famous for its exotic cabaret perfomances. The Folies Bergère was built in Paris in 1869 on the site of a livery stable. The hall was unashamedly modelled on the London Alhambra with tables and an immense promenade where people could loiter between the variety acts. It opened as a café-spectacle with a mixed bill of light opera and pantomime in which Paul Legrand for many years played Pierrot. From 1885 it was managed by Léon Sari who indulged the courtesans who haunted its promenade. He presented exotic revues with scantily clad girls who became one of the main attractions with singers like Maurice Chevalier, Mistinguett, and Yvette Guibert, and speciality acts like Little Tich.

The fame of the Folies Bergère spread as a rendezvous for fashionable young men-about-town and it attracted hordes of French and foreign visitors with its spectacular productions. Paul Derval took over in 1918 and endowed it with a style that made it world famous for lavish spectacle, with cohorts of naked girls alongside acrobats, singers, trapeze artists, comics, dancers, and clowns. The Folies included exotic tableaux, monumental staircases, and acres of sequins and ostrich plumes. The titles, always of 13 letters, had to include the word “folie”. Some twenty years after the Folies Bergère opened, the nearby Moulin Rouge became another Parisian attraction with the cancan dance and artists immortalized by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.

According to a contemporary description, the Folies Bergère was “a theatre which is not a theatre, a promenade where you remain seated, a spectacle that you are not obliged to watch, with two thousand men all smoking, drinking, and joking, and seven or eight hundred women all laughing, drinking, and offering themselves as happily as you could wish”. It was a great success and some of its productions were presented in theatres on Broadway, New York, and London's West End.