SACRÉ BLEU A Comedy d'Art

Euan Morton presents Christopher Moore’s vision of La Belle Époque with lighthearted insouciance. Beginning with the death of Vincent van Gogh, the story travels backward through time through the eyes of a would-be painter, Paris baker Lucien Lessard. Morton presents Moore’s very funny, mostly fictional, anecdotes of Pissarro, Toulouse-Lautrec, Renoir, and a mysterious figure known as “the Colorman,” combining moments of pathos with moments of near-farce. Moore tells us, “This is a story about the color blue. . . . You cannot get a grip on blue. . . . It’s a butterfly, a bird, a spicy joke, the saddest song, the brightest day. . . . Blue. She is like a woman.” SACRÉ BLEU is funny, informative, and ingenious, and Morton’s rendering of art, artists, and fin-de-siècle France is delightful. S.J.H. © AudioFile 2012, Portland, Maine [Published: APRIL 2012]