←Recommendations of IMPRESSIONS OF PARIS

Art and history and music! It is all here! What a fabulous play for students (or anyone!), combining the Impressionists with their context and inspiration. In addition to being entertained, you learn things along the way - always a wonderful combination.

[11/1/2024] In IMPRESSIONS OF PARIS, it is so clear through this play how much knowledge and love Nora Louise Syran has for the city of Paris and its rich art and music history. I appreciate Syran's modern approach to interpreting of all the various French Impressionists, packaged in kind of a dream-like vignette style, which I couldn't help but feel was a love letter to Paris itself. Anyone part of a production of this play would learn a lot and have a great experience every step of the way!

Syran’s marvelously theatrical full-length play with music, set in 1890s Paris, explores the revolutionary Impressionism art movement and centers Suzanne Valadon, an artists’ model, muse and eventual artist, who refuses to be “boxed in” merely because she's a woman. Syran brings to life a plethora of fascinating characters including Monet, Manet, Renoir, Van Gogh, Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec and many others, as well women painters Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt who struggle for the same opportunities their male contemporaries receive. The play offers flexible casting and provides a unique theatrical experience that I would love to see on stage!

Syran’s full-length play with music about Impressionism, the 19th century French art movement, is grand, epic, and beautiful! What’s particularly brilliant about Syran’s piece is the various ways we are introduced to these famous artists. I especially appreciated the insights offered on the women artists and the ways they did - and didn’t - fit into their time. Really smart and well written. What a delicious spectacle to see this play produced to its fullest glory. Let’s hope we see this on stage soon! We need more of this kind of beauty in our lives.

In "Impressions of Paris" Syran explores the world of French Impressionist painting through the career of Suzanne Valadon. Syran is not content to present the lives and aesthetic debates of her colleagues, but situates them in the relationship between their counter-cultural movement and the world of commerce and respectability: Where they showed, and where they wished to be seen; The hiring of models; the laundresses and seamstresses that made and cleaned the costumes; and the barriers of sexism and classism. It's a world richly recreated in words, song, images, and shadows.

The writer's ability to present a large ensemble cast and keep every character distinct and fully realized is simply astonishing. The dialogue makes them so lived-in that one quickly forgets that these are historical figures and simply follows them and their journeys in a time of creative ferment in the art world. Centering everything is Valadon's story, a compelling through-line character whose hopes and ambitions become our own. The word-painting is also compelling as Paris comes alive through dialogue and song. A truly impressive achievement.

Grounded by the life of Suzanne Valadon (someone we would today refer to as a "multi-hyphenate"), Syran's epic script transports us straight into the middle of Montmartre during the height of Impressionism. I literally feel more French after reading this play. Am I allowed to say that? You can smell the café pastries and coffee and hear the train stations from the page. Mostover, the interweaving story brushes us, just like Valadon, against giants of artists, delving deep into the oldest age questions: “Why do we paint?” “And what does the choice to make art demand of us?” Beautifully human.

Plays seldom do justice to the painterly life but IMPRESSIONS OF PARIS by Nora Louise Syran is an immersive wonder of art history, period song and dance, and lucid conversations between French Impressionists. I admire the positioning of the play’s very lovable and fabulous painter-hero Suzanne Valadon on the outskirts of relevance (beginning as a child drawing on the sidewalk) and her coming within the orbits of legends (Cassatt, Morisot, Manet, Monet, Renoir, Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec). And I'm in awe of NLS for everything that went into this sensually majestic theatrical composition and would thrill to behold it staged.

An amazing feat, to bring all these artists to life, capturing each distinctly, and their relationships with each other. All sorts of fun, juicy tidbits about them all - and especially Valadon, whose name I knew but nothing else. And once you add in the period music, the paintings themselves - transporting!

This play evokes a romantic era of Paris seen through gauzy, loving eyes. Syran offers us an art movement that changed the rules of what a painting can say and do. Seen through the eyes of Suzanne Valadon, we are offered a feast of color that is both lush and street savvy. But make no mistake - this is theatre - packed with action, music and the jealousies of geniuses who love their work. I am appreciative that Syran did not forget the ladies - and places them center stage. Designers and directors will gobble this up.