Nine o’Clock, Eleven o’Clock

The grand revue and the late show are the same choreography in two different lights — my comparison, from the stairs where I stood.

The nine o'clock performance is the famous one — the one in the brochures, the one that fills the horseshoe to the last stool. The house is at full weight, the champagne has just arrived in silver buckets, the orchestra has the room's complete attention. If it is your first evening, this is the hour. You want the feather curtain and the full corde and the famous number with the house going up like a wave. Nothing I write here will improve on it; it simply works.

But the eleven o'clock — ah, the late show was my own hour. The house is lighter, the tourists have gone home to write their postcards, and what remains is the room as we old hands loved it: Parisians, musicians from other theatres coming off their own work, the odd regular who has seen the revue forty times and still comes. The cast plays looser at eleven. Not sloppier — freer. There is a difference that only shows if you have watched both a few hundred times.

The service rhythm changes completely. At nine the buckets arrive like clockwork in the interval between numbers; at eleven the sommeliers walk more slowly and the night stretches. I used to watch the late show from the balcony rail with my plan folded away, and sometimes the dancers glanced up and I would nod, and that was the whole conversation between the front of house and the stage in those years.

Practical matters: the eleven o'clock finishes late — properly late, after midnight — so think about the métro, which I cover on another page. The taxi rank on Place Blanche has a queue that is honest but slow on Fridays. And dress warmly for the exit; the boulevard wind at one in the morning does not care about your dinner jacket.

Which do I recommend? Both, honestly — but not the same night. Take the nine o'clock the first time, as everyone should. Come back a month later, sit somewhere different, and take the eleven. The second time you will see the machinery, and seeing the machinery is when you start to love the place rather than merely admire it.

One small confession about the eleven o'clock, because old habits keep their secrets badly. On quiet winter nights, when the house was light and the plan folded early, we who worked the room sometimes stayed after our stations were done — coats still on, standing at the very back where the service door meets the last row — to watch the final number we had seen a thousand times. Nobody made us; we simply could not leave it. If the cast saw us they never said, but I like to think they knew: their best witnesses were the ones who had seen it all and still chose to stand in the dark for the last feathered turn. When you go, and the house rises, remember that even the people paid to be there never grew tired of it. That is the truest review I can write of either show.