In 1925, the French went bananas for the 19-year-old St. Louis native Josephine and her danse sauvage (the banana tutu came later). Two decades on, they pinned her with the Croix de Guerre and the Rosette de la Résistance for high-yield cloak-and-dagger services against the Third Reich, rendered entirely at her substantial personal expense. But in 1969, officialdom lifted nary a finger when the new owner of her chateau in the Dordogne kicked her to the curb with her Rainbow Tribe of a dozen adopted children from around the globe. Que faire? Madame had earned and burned through a veritable fortune. In a fairy-tale ending, Princess Grace installed the unhoused diva in a spare villa on the Côte d’Azur for her remaining six years of happily ever after. A half century on, with her induction among the secular saints of the Panthéon, Baker entered the realm of myth. Was she a second Joan of Arc? The Real Thing after that fraudster train-wreck Mata Hari? Did she blaze the trail for Jessye Norman, who, draped in the Tricolore, electrified a global audience in the high hundreds of millions, projecting La Marseillaise to the heavens from the Place de la Concorde on the Bastille Day bicentennial? Baker’s relevance to issues of race, colonialism, and the objectification of the exotic Other (“too dark, too thin”) will keep hives of killer-bee polemicists on attack for decades to come. With Perle Noire, the ageless enfant terrible director Peter Sellars and the incandescent soprano Julia Bullock sublimate their understanding of her history into performance. Rather than “recreate” her signature numbers, they deconstruct them in communion with the multi-instrumentalist Tyshawn Sorey and a sextet of jazz players for whom spontaneity and improv are a way of life. There’s connective text by the poet Claudia Rankine. Since an original run at the Ojai Festival in California a decade ago, Perle Noire has continued to evolve. It’s tempting to envision this bold experiment in the cabaret intimacy of Montmartre’s Chez Michou, once the haunt of Piaf and Brel. But how it will play at that Gilded Age pantheon to operatic excess known as the Palais Garnier? And as the gala season opener yet, with the resident orchestra, ballet ensemble, and chorus off in limbo? Color us curious. —Matthew Gurewitsch