Abstract
The centerpiece at the Comédie Française this past season was Jean-Louis Benoit's production of Molière's Le Bourgeois gentilhomme, the acknowledged masterpiece of that "total theatre" genre of the seventeenth-century, the comédie-ballet. A forerunner of the modern musical comedy, but quickly supplanted by the Lully/Quinault operatic repertoire, the genre of comédie-ballet effectively died with its creator, leaving Le Bourgeois gentilhomme subject to scholarly and critical distortion that for centuries erroneously considered it flawed as dramatic art, while all the while acknowledging its popularity. One of the company's most produced works, the play has seen no fewer than four productions at the Comédie Française since the Second World War, those directed by Jean Meyer, Jean-Louis [End Page 647] Barrault, Jean-Laurent Cochet, and Jean-Luc Boutté. If audience reaction is any indication, Benoit's recent staging ranks among the best.
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