Unbreakable chamber pots! Just what the French army needs! And Monsieur Follavoine has the corner on the market. Coincidentally, his baby son Toto is sitting on his pot and won’t get off. Based on a script by Georges Feydeau, grand master of the bedroom farce, this holiday treat for the whole family (!) is the swan song of the composer Philippe Boesmans, whose previous operatic catalogue includes adaptations of Schnitzler’s La Ronde, Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale, and Pinocchio, plus a modern orchestration of Monteverdi’s Incoronazione di Poppea. “It’s a vicious piece,” Boesmans said of On purge bébé!, “but it makes me laugh out loud when I’m composing it.” The great filmmaker Jean Renoir had a soft spot for it, too. In fact, the screen version he made of it in 1931 was his first movie with sound (watch it free on YouTube). Renoir cranked it out in just three weeks to finance more respectable titles, beginning with La Chienne. His classics La Grande Illusion and La Règle du Jeux lay some years in the future.
—Matthew Gurewitsch