La Vie parisienne. Opera de Lyon. Jean-Yves Ossonce, conductor; Alain Francon, director. Helene Delavault (Metella), Claire Wauthion (Baroness de Gondremarck), Isabelle Mazin (Gabrielle), Jean-Yves Chatelais (Baron de Gondremarck), Jean-Francois Sivadier (Raoul de Gardefeu), Jacques Verzier (Bobinet). Sung in French, with English subtitles. Home Vision PAR 120 (VHS; 1 videocassette; 159 minutes). ISBN 0-7800-1323-9. Opera de Lyon's videos of La Vie Parisienne and Les Brigands restore the scenic and visual dimensions to works that have been staged primarily, if at all, in the listener's imagination. Most English-speakers know Offenbach's operettas best as orchestral excerpts the Can-can from Orphee aux Enfers has a life of its own; the potpourri ballet score, Gaite Parisienne, employs melodies from numerous works; and the overtures to La Belle Helene, La Perichole, and La Vie Parisienne have become classics. Yet the past decade has seen a quiet renewal of interest in Offenbach's operettas in their integral form: EMI Classics followed its award-winning La Belle Helene (1985) with a set of less familiar one-acts, Mesdames de la Halle, Monsieur Choufleury, and Pomme d'Api; the company has also reissued classic performances of Orphee, La Perichole, and la Vie Parisienne on compact disc. Now the Opera de Lyon, with productions of La Vie Parisienne and Les Brigands, brings Offenbach's operettas to videotape. The more successful of the two productions, La Vie Parisienne, features two dandies, temporarily out of money and bored, since their mistress, the courtesan Metella, has abandoned them for a wealthier man. They pose as tour guides to a wealthy Swedish couple who have come to Paris to experience the glamorous life. Intending to fleece the Swedish Baron and seduce his wife, they lodge the couple in a boarding-house--claiming that it is the Grand Hotel --and throw a party attended solely by servants and tradesmen posing as members of high society. The style of the production is traditional, except for a few gestures that seem designed to recuperate operetta's risque charge: the Brazilian millionaire, for example, strips off his urbane hat and coat and finishes his patter song barechested; another man gropes underneath Gabrielle's long skirt as she sings her demure aria, Je suds la veuve d'un Colonel. With the exception of Helene of Delavault, the elegant chanteuse who portrays Metella, the cast are comic actors rather than opera singers, and they serve the music well enough. Isabelle Mazin as Gabrielle has the best songs and the best delivery, and Jean-Yves Chatelais, as the Baron, successfully blends naive optimism and growing disappointment as one by one the promised joys of Paris elude him. Director Alain Francon downplays the operetta's slapstick aspects to emphasize the dark side of gaffe Parisienne, a decision that seems guided by the melancholy moments that punctuate an otherwise sparkling musical surface, such as the Act II duet in which a chambermaid (disguised as the wife of an admiral) attempts to seduce the Baron. The action is summed up in Metella's Act V rondo about the nightly progression from anticipation to bankruptcy, hangovers, and tristesse in the cold light of morning--tristesse that can only be cured by diving into the same whirl the next night. Cheerful music thus becomes a veneer over the hollowness of a society in which nothing lives up to its reputation, in which the truly elegant party and the Grand Hotel with genuinely distinguished guests are always just around the corner, and in which one can only keep drinking and repeating stoutly with the Baron, C'est tres, tres bien. How do the performers convey boredom and hypocrisy, given that gaiety and sparkle seem so intrinsic to the score? Happily, conductor Jean-Yves Ossonce does keep the tempos up. …