Three things I still hear when a zipper sticks
Quick changes
People imagine a dresser as a person with pins in her mouth. The job is closer to air-traffic control. A principal can leave the stage in one silhouette and must reappear ninety seconds later in another, sometimes with a headpiece that has taken a knock against a flat. I used to keep a kit on a nail: thread already waxed, spare ostrich in a labelled bag, a spare hook-and-eye sewn to a card so I did not hunt. The first house is slower because the bodies are still cold and the crew is still finding the night. The second house is tighter because everyone has already made the mistake once.
If you are in the room as a guest, you will never see this. You will only notice that the line hits the mark. That is the point. When a tourist later writes that the show “felt mechanical,” I take it as a compliment we earned the hard way.
The horses years
There was a stretch of seasons when the animals were as much a cue as the drum. Wardrobe does not dress a horse, but wardrobe lives with the consequences: dust, a different smell in the corridor, a dancer who has to hit a mark after a number that involved livestock. The young girls learned to keep a second pair of tights in a paper bag because hay and sequins are not friends. I mention this because visitors still ask whether the “animal numbers” are the heart of the night. They are a signature, yes. They are also a logistics problem that the house solved decades ago and still treats with the same seriousness as a principal’s entrance.
If you sit close to the floor you will feel the vibration. If you sit in the balcony you will see the pattern of the entrance. I preferred the balcony when I finally bought my own ticket after I retired. For twenty-six years I only saw the show in fragments, from the wing.
Opening nights
Opening nights are not better. They are louder, later, and full of people who do not yet know where the toilets are. Costumes that behaved in rehearsal develop a new opinion under a full house. I used to tell my girls: Tuesday is the truth of the show. Opening is a photograph. If you are in Paris for one night and you have a choice between a gala and an ordinary later house, take the ordinary later house. The dancers eat the same thing either way — something small, protein, never a heavy plate — but on a gala they are also managing nerves you can feel through a zipper.
None of this is a reason not to go. It is a reason to go as a guest who understands that the glamour is a factory with excellent lighting. The operator publishes the current programme on the official homepage; I do not reprint it here because it changes, and because I am not the house.