Seth Rozin's new musical about the man who became Paris' nightclub "fartiste" during the 19th century -- his entire performance was based on his ability to tunefully pass wind -- lasts through Sunday (April 17) at Innovation Studio, in the basement of Kimmel Center. Although the Kimmel has underproduced it and the musical seems smaller in scale than it deserves to be, it's clever and fun. It lacked oomph when I saw it last week at its opening, but my guess is that the cast has picked up the pace and is delivering the piece by now with more brio.

Our hero, Joseph Pujol, was a baker in the countryside when he decided to follow his dream: performing in Paris. The curious show traces his ascent in the theater and, after a brief period of great popularity, his decline as tastes and national focus changed.

It seems that outre performances like Pujol's find their audiences every so often. For the past several years, a show called Puppetry of the Penis has toured nationally. It consists of guys whose talents are solely focused on their penises, which they manipulate every which way to become hamburger sandwiches and Liberty Bells, for instance. (Yes, it's a whole show and it played well in Philly a few years ago.)

In the '70s, a performer with the stage name of Honeysuckle Devine played in spots in Center City. Among other tricks, she shot ping-pong balls into the audience from parts of her body below her navel. (In the movie Priscilla Queen of the Desert, and the new Broadway musical adapted from that movie, a female performer in the Australian outback imitates that part of Honeysuckle's act.) In a less graphic but equally strange vein, Souvenir is a stage musical about a real singer whose only claim to fame was her inability to sing on key. She played Carnegie Hall, badly, to the delight of her audience.

So Pujol was an early outre artist, but certainly not the last. You can read my review of A Passing Wind at http://is.gd/nGkCcv

Since PIFA went to the trouble and expense of building an Eiffel Tower replica in the lobby of the Kimmel Center, there must be a certain amount of pressure to stage events around it. But Thursday night's light and sound show started even before the applause died down inside Verizon Hall, where the Philadelphia Orchestra was giving one of its regular subscription concerts. Huge booming sounds bled from the plaza to the concert hall - an odd way to end the Mahler Symphony No. 4, whose concluding movement is a child's fanciful vision of heaven. Arriving in the plaza, listeners were greeted with a lot of blinking lights and what sounded like a mash-up version of the Debussy String Quartet. Let's be honest here: Such events in France can be just as meaningless, but at least there's a sense of their having the right time and place - unlike Thursday night. Couldn't the show have waited five minutes before beginning? Okay, I'd take three minutes....

Natural phenomena - trees, waterfalls and other organic things that constantly move - stand frozen in a moment of formal stylization. That’s one of the hallmarks of the Japanese art that had such a fateful impact on the French Impressionists, whether painters or composers, that big PIFA presences. And that’s also what filled video artist Gene Coleman’s laptop at a Tuesday night rehearsal with Network for New Music.
The Network concert uses Debussy’s most Asian-influenced piece - his late-period Sonata for Flute, Viola and Harp - as the centerpiece for the 8 p.m. Friday concert at International House Philadelphia, 3701 Chestnut St. with a visual element full of the kind of 19th century Japanese woodblock prints that Debussy would’ve known and no doubt took to heart as a significant artistic influence.
However, what Coleman has going looks to be something well beyond appropriately atmospheric paintings. Sometimes, focusing on the minute details “makes a new frame of reference.”
Also on the program is works that show how Debussy helped give 20th century Japanese composers a more westernized voice. Toro Takemitsu is represented by Toward the Sea III and the young Dai Fujikura has two new works, Halcyon and Okeanos. The biggest logistical problem was keeping conductor Jan Kryzwicki from blocking the video screen. Is it possible to conduct while sitting cross legged? - David Patrick Stearns

Relache's sneak preview of The Mystery of the Rocks of Kador,  a 1912 Léonce Perret-directed mystery with a newly commissioned score, was delayed because Regis Huby, the French composer and jazz violinist who wrote the score, was held up Kennedy Airport.  Details aren't available - and if they were, they might not be understandable anyway. You may recall that the venerable Pierre Boulez was detained in Switzerland a few years ago because he had been on record as wanting to do away with opera houses. And in the 21st century, that can be interpreted as a terrorist threat. Whatever the case, all concerned parties are in Philadelphia for performances that will take place at 3 and 7 p.m. Sunday at the Mandell Theater at 3141 Chestnut St.  

Philadelphia's Relache Ensemble has long specialized in accompanying silent films. Well, it's happening again on Sunday, though I'm popping into a sneak preview Tuesday afternoon and will report back later. In the meantime, I've been preparing with a newly released set of Gaumont Treasures - early films from France - in an effort to figure out what was going on there....

As part of Friday night's PIFA Fashion Show Festivities, designer Ralph Rucci was awarded PIFA's  Visionary Award for Fashion, and who is more deserving? Rucci is pictured here next to the flaming red dresses that were a part of his New York Fashion Week Fall 2011 collection. As usual, Rucci, who was born in Philadelphia and is the first American designer to be invited to Paris' couture fashion shows, was completely gracious thanking fashion and Philadelphia for his success. Kudos goes to the designer for spending most of his day on Friday working with students at area universities.

Rucci's clothing goes beyond the ladies who lunch sect because a single Ralph Rucci item can cost tens of thousands of dollars. He designs for women who are recession proof. Thus, he's a household name among the rich and famous. The rest of us can enjoy Rucci's impeccable use of sumptuous fabrics, bold colors and beautiful lines that make his clothing, especially his day dresses, delectable pieces of art.

The Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts - PIFA - hosted a dynamite fashion show Friday night featuring the work of local designers on Friday. This dress by Carmelita Martel - of Old City's Carmelita Couture - is marvelous, isn't it?  Martel, who is known for her sexy leather ensembles - switched it up to strapless, floor-grazing striped prints like this one, for the show.  So pretty. Pleated. Sumptuous. Flowing.  Beautiful. For more on the PIFA Fashion show, check out Style & Soul on Wednesday and the Mirror Image blog this week.  And while you are logged on the to our Facebook page, don't forget to "like" us.

If the crepes, mimes and erection of a presumably expensive and possibly ephemeral 81-foot homage to the Eiffel Tower gnawed at the idea that a serious artistic thread could be seen or heard in the Kimmel Center’s Francophilia festival, reassurance could be found Saturday morning at the Perelman - in a children’s concert.

For the last performance of its season, Astral Artists took on the French theme – and some Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts funding – to produce three works. The big ambition, certainly, was in the premiere of Who Stole the Mona Lisa?, a specially commissioned 20-minute animated film by Micah Chambers-Goldberg, inspired (very loosely) by the theft of the painting from the Louvre a century ago in which Picasso and Apollinaire were briefly and wrongly implicated.

But in a concert of a little more than an hour, great substance came in concentrated form. Astral’s take on Martinu’s La Revue de Cuisine didn’t follow the plotline of the ballet, premiered in Paris in 1930 – a love story in which the marriage of a pot and lid is threatened by a stick and, possibly, a dish cloth. Astral used only four of the original movements (and three kitchen utensils), and added to the pantomime a thief, who steals the Mona Lisa. A thin narrative on which to hang a story, to be sure, but the instrumental sextet – especially violinist Kristen Lee and bassoonist Natalya Rose Vrbsky - was operating on such a high level that the music carried the day.

Adults may feel children need this kind of antic visual stimulation to maintain interest, but an unadorned performance of Poulenc’s The Story of Babar cast a spell of unquestionable power. Rather than the instrumental version, Astral presented it with pianist Alexandre Moutouzkine and, as narrator, Charlotte Blake Alston. Some of the Jean de Brunhoff plot points to changing philosophies in what we want children to hear – Babar’s mother is killed, the king dies of mushroom poisoning – but Alston’s pacing and nearly operatic vocal range granted humanity and comedy to the text. The score, tinged with Stravinsky and among Poulenc’s most emotionally sophisticated, is a solid gem.

Moutouzkine treated it like Ravel, eliciting a fully orchestral palette from his keyboard, which connected nicely to his canny transcription of music from Stravinsky’s The Firebird – the score to Who Stole the Mona Lisa? The Russian pianist, sitting beneath the large screen, had to track the animation closely to match his playing to the action – a feat that caused no apparent challenges; he is one of those pianists whose command is so natural and comfortable there seems to be no space between player and instrument.

And who knew Stravinsky’s music would fit so snugly with a completely different story? There’s a musical alarm in The Firebird Moutouzkine appropriated for the moment the theft of the Mona Lisa is discovered, and a balky inspector for whom Stravinsky could easily have been writing. A nice stroke of humor comes when Picasso is caught painting the Guernica – as graffiti.

The moving music of The Firebird’s “Berceuse” is repurposed to give meaning to the scene in which the thief has second thoughts. Visited by an apparition of Leonardo, with bells tolling and luminous particles floating around her, the thief extends her hand to the painting to reveal her best motives and, in tandem, a universal truth dearly held by lovers of this repertoire: sometimes the art is so powerful you just can’t get close enough.

- Peter Dobrin

Terry Adams is one of the great rock and roll piano players, a wildly proficient combination of Jerry Lee Lewis and Thelonius Monk who spent decades as one quarter of the elegantly masterful bar band NRBQ. Adams is calling his new band - which features Pete Donnelly of The Figgs on bass - the new NRBQ. Today, Adams and the new Q play a WXPN Free at Noon show, relocated from the World Cafe Live to the Kimmel Center in conjunction with the Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts.  The next three Free at Noons will also be at the Kimmel - Eilen Jewell is next week - and XPN is also putting on free Wednesday night at 5 shows at the Kimmel during PIFA, with none of the three - Bobby Long, Franz Nicolay and John Wesley Harding - having any apparent French connection. More info on that here.  

-- Dan DeLuca