As if proving Jerome Savary's contention that today operettas equate with musical comedies, Trois Valses is structured like the latter and ends with music that's definitely modern. Tracing the romances of three sets of lovers ( the second and third pairs descendant from the original), the Acts take place in 1867, 1900 and 1937.
In the first, Laurence Janot not only sings credibly, indeed, but incredibly en pointe. A star in love with a soldier (handsome Jean-Baptiste Marcenak) from the nobility, she plans to leave the ballet for him. Just as he's warned by family and military officers against marrying beneath him, she's been cautioned against the alliance by a woman of experience. Excited by a passing military parade, the soldier imagines being with it and dashes off "until tomorrow." Luckily, the star has a rich suitor to turn to. A highlight of this act is a humorous "Les Sylphides," during which nymphs surround a Scot and remove his kilt, which he contrives to retrieve and, without missing a step, does.
Janot does her finest singing in 1900 at the Varieties, where she stars as her character's mother did. Backstage, amid humming activity and deep-colored lights, she's introduced to an attractive young Marquise, who thinks he has a miniature painting of her. (It was given by her mother, the ballerina, to the soldier who's the Marquise's father.) Changing scenes include a carriage, a sumptuous night club that engages professionals and attendees in a long waltz and a dressing room.
When the Marquise comes to profess his love, the singer has just been offered a lead at the Follies Bergere. Though she declares to her manager and visitors backstage that she'll quit the theater, the Marquise does not hear her. Since she's on stage when he returns, dressed for airplane flight, he writes her a farewell note. As she finds out after he's gone, he assumed she wasn't serious about leaving for and with him.
A film studio is the set of 1937's episode, where the star is making a movie musical. Chorus girls abound.
A director who recalls Erich von Stroheim welcomes an old friend (the aristocractic soldier from Waltz I), who brings his businessman grandson along. The director, impressed by the young man's voice and physique, wants him for the movie. When he sees the female lead, he accepts, smitten. Because she's not as enthusiastic, there's quite a run-around between her first shot, singing a waltz, and the wrap-up.
Didier Benetti and orchestra provide particularly good music during the filming and "backstage" and commissary scenes. This act is the funniest, since the movie is a send-up of the romance presented in Waltz I. During the filming of a climactic military-waltz scene, the hero departs from the written text to profess his real love for the star. They determine not to repeat the mistakes of their grandparents. So, as the finale of a musical comedy -- both on screen and on stage -- should, this one ends happily. Credits are well deserved.
