Over the past 14 years, San Diego audiences have gotten very familiar with Hershey Felder, the Canadian playwright, pianist and actor who has presented his composer-inspired plays with music at the Old Globe, La Jolla Playhouse and, most recently, San Diego Repertory Theatre.
But as much as Felder’s large local fans feel they know him — thanks to audience Q&A sessions after every performance — they’ll likely be surprised by his personal revelations in “A Paris Love Story,” a music-filled play about French composer Claude Debussy. This play, which began a four-night run of livestreamed performances on Sunday, is as much about its subject as its storyteller.
In “A Paris Love Story,” Felder portrays Debussy and performs many of his works on the piano, while also unveiling some of his own personal and tragic connections to the composer’s work.
This is the fourth composer play that Felder has livestreamed since May from his home in Florence, Italy. It follows on the heels of Felder’s very first play, about George Gershwin, which premiered in 1999, 20 years before “Paris Love Story” debuted in the Bay area last year.
Side by side, the two plays show how much Felder has evolved as a playwright. “Paris Love Story” is a subtler and far superior play, and among the best, and most moving, of his work seen in San Diego to date.
Debussy is the main narrator, telling the story of his musical journey from child pianist to acclaimed composer and the many women he loved and lost along the way. Debussy is also a time-traveling spirit of Paris who one day in 1988 observes the arrival of a nervous and music-loving young tourist in the City of Lights. That never-named “young man” is Felder.
Felder, the audience gradually learns, had a childhood obsession with Debussy and his music because Debussy was his mother’s favorite composer. Before she died at age 35 when Felder was just 13 years old, Eva Surek Felder dreamed of one day visiting Paris. On the sixth anniversary of her death, he went to Paris in her honor to soak up the scenery that inspired Debussy and tour the home where the composer lived until his death in 1918.
Hershey Felder stars in the livestreamed “A Paris Love Story,” a play with music about French composer Claude Debussy, for San Diego Repertory Theatre.
(Courtesy photo)
The play seamlessly weaves the threads of these two stories together while featuring nearly a dozen of Debussy’s best-known works, including “Ballade,” “Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun,” “L’isle Joyeuse,” “La Neige Danse,” “La Mer” and “Fireworks.” It concludes with the haunting “Claire de Lune,” which is best watched with a box of tissues close by.
Depending on the composer he plays, Felder embodies each man with wit, bombast, anger, anxiety or other appropriate emotions. As Debussy, he is gentle and soft-spoken with a mellifluous word delivery very much in keeping with the composer’s music, which is known for its dreamy, ear-pleasing quality. In the play, Debussy rejects being called an “impressionist” composer, instead saying he painted in sound what he felt when he engaged with the gentle raw beauty of nature.
Although Debussy’s music was serene, his personal life was anything but. His romantic entanglements included two jilted women who shot themselves when he left them for someone else. The true love of Debussy’s life was his daughter, Claude-Emma, known as “ChouChou.” A sweet section of the play has Debussy playing a section of “Children’s Corner,” which he wrote for ChouChou. More bittersweet is how Debussy fought a long battle with colon cancer, staying alive as long as he could to enjoy time his young child, which parallels the the story of Eva Felder’s long cancer battle.
With so much music and two stories to tell, “A Paris Love Story” runs almost two hours. The description of the young Felder’s street-by-street travels through Paris feel a little repetitive, and Debussy’s description of creating the new composing style of augmented fourths and a whole tonal scale were over my head as a non-musician. But the piano-playing and performance are masterful, and I was entertained to the end.
“A Paris Love Story” is directed by Stefano De Carli from the original direction by Trevor Hay. Eric Carstensen designed the impeccable sound and Tracey Nezda created the period costumes. The pre-filmed segments include a non-speaking role by Anki Eriksson Graves, who plays Debussy’s first lover, Mme. Vasnier.
Felder had also planned to pre-film parts of the play in Paris, but the recent lockdown prohibited that, so it was created with props, projections and green screen technology in a sound-proofed studio at his home. It’s the most polished and cinematic-looking of the four composer plays so far this year. Coming up next on Dec. 20, Felder will present a reworked holiday version of his “Our Great Tchaikovsky” play.
Hershey Felder: “A Paris Love Story”
What: Livestreamed show, plus 1-hour post-show audience talk-back
When: 7:30 p.m. Nov. 23, 24 and 25
Tickets: $55
Online: sdrep.org
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Review: San Diego Rep's 'Love Story' a touching, personal look at subject and storyteller - The San Diego Union-Tribune
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