Get a leg up on the Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts

IF PHILADELPHIANS were a hat, we'd be a baseball cap - definitely not a beret.

To us, salons are where you go to get your roots dyed - not brainiac forums about highbrow topics like "visionary and vernacular artists from France."

For all we know, "visionary and vernacular artists from France" could be mimes and comedian Jerry Lewis, and they both give us hives.

So what are we to make of the huge, monthlong Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts (PIFA) that launched last night with a $750-a-head black-tie gala at the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts and continues through May 1?

How does PIFA and its 135 French-themed cultural events around the city and the region - including 33 of those not-hair salons - speak with those of us whose mother tongue is Yo?

Actually, more tres bon than you might think, pal.

Along with salon fare, the festival has a street fair on the agenda late this month. There's a Kimmel Center Easter egg hunt planned for kids, French-themed trolley tours around the city and French-inspired Latin dancing on the Golden Block in North Philly.

The Kimmel Center itself is going full Epcot for the duration of the festival, with an 81-foot Eiffel Tower in the lobby (the scene of nightly light shows at 7 and 10 p.m.), free wine tastings, free mini French lessons weekdays at 5 p.m., free Wi-Fi and a Parisian-style cart serving crepes (not free, but a reasonable enough $6).

Upstairs, a French buffet line is setting up for the month in the Cadence restaurant space. (Dinner, $38 Friday-Sunday; Sunday brunch, $24; reservations, 215-670-2388.) Now, we ask you: Is there a French word nearer and dearer to the Philadelphian heart than buffet?

Across town on Philly's own "left bank," World Cafe Live is hosting a PIFA "French" food event on April 26 that our Joe Sixpack fan base can relate to (and which is already sold out). PIFA is calling it Fromage Grille Et Biere.

Grilled cheese and beer.

Certainly, PIFA includes enough highbrow theater, dance and orchestral performances to keep the Boyds Philadelphia crowd reaching into its black-tie-optional closet night after night. (The full schedule is at pifa.org.) But there are also performances geared toward Philadelphians of the Modell's persuasion.

For example, "I think the play 'A Passing Wind' is going to be a hoot," said Ed Cambron, the festival's executive director.

That's "wind" as in "fart."

"A Passing Wind" is local playwright Seth Rozin's tribute to Joseph Pujol, a "fartiste" who performed at the Moulin Rouge and was the toast of Paris during the years leading up to World War I, which is the era that PIFA sets out to recapture.

It plays at the Kimmel today through April 17 (tickets $29), with evening shows every day except Monday and matinees on Saturday and Sunday this week and next.

Rozin's play is one of several bawdy, Frenchy performances that are meant to bridge the divide between highbrow art patrons and the rest of us - the artsy and the fartsy, if you will.

Sultry dancing is also part of the mix in cabaret performances by the SHARP Dance Company (April 29-May 1 at The Fidget Space, 1714 N. Mascher St., $15-$20) and the Peek-a-Boo Revue burlesque troupe (April 30 at World Cafe Live, 8 p.m., $24).

The Green Fairy Cabaret (Kimmel Center, 10 o'clock nightly next Thursday through Sunday, with noon matinees next weekend, $16-$20) is another bridge production. Performers from the Philadelphia School of Circus Arts will dangle from a trapeze, juggle and do other circusy feats in a style that's more elegant and refined than your typical big-top act (hence circus arts).

"They do balletic work," said Barbara Silverstein, PIFA's artistic producer. "At the same time, it's very entertaining. You won't sit there and say, 'My this is arty . . . zzzzz.' "

Instead of a circus tent, the venue is the Kimmel Center's dramatic rooftop Hamilton Garden. The 10 p.m. circus shows are for grown-ups - expect racy double-entendres from the ringmaster and who knows what from the audience, since the Kimmel is serving absinthe to help replicate the French-cabaret experience. The matinees are single-entendre family events.

If you can't afford airfare to Paris this spring, the lobby of the Kimmel Center will offer a decent facsimile - or at least a place to stew in your jealousy juices for all of PIFA month.

From now to May 1, the lobby will be strewn with café tables overlooking the ersatz Eiffel Tower, with French pastries available for breakfast and crepes served for lunch and dinner.

To amp up the joie de vivre, you can taste French wines for free, under the Kimmel Eiffel Tower, during happy hours Thursdays through Saturdays, starting tomorrow (5-7 p.m.), and matinee happy hours (2-4 p.m.) every Sunday but Easter. A state-store kiosk will be selling wine by the bottle, too.

"It's going to be a great time to hang out here," Cambron said. "This is kind of PIFA central."

Free musical performances daily and a rotating slate of other free events should keep things lively even for nondrinkers.

Highlights include a gospel performance by the Enon Tabernacle Baptist Church Choir (6 p.m. April 15) and an indoor Easter Egg hunt (11 a.m. Easter Sunday) inside the grassless, shrub-free Kimmel Center. "I don't know how we're going to hide the eggs," Cambron acknowledged.

If you're willing to dip a toe into the water of high culture, consider tomorrow's Who Stole the Mona Lisa matinee (Kimmel Center, 11 a.m., $5-$20) by the esteemed but not at all stuffy classical music outfit Astral Artists.

"You know, classical music is not just stiff people in black clothes sitting onstage and people in uncomfortable clothes sitting in the audience," said Astral artistic director Julian Rodescu.

The Mona Lisa production, for example, includes an animated movie with a chase scene involving an airplane, a zeppelin and the Eiffel Tower - all accompanied by a live piano performance of Stravinsky's Firebird Suite.

And, yes, the Mona Lisa really did get stolen from the Louvre, 100 years ago this summer, although the Astral cartoon takes some historical liberties. (Picasso's actual nose, for example, did not sit sideways on his face in the manner of a cubist painting.)

Later this month, teenage rockers from the Independent School of Rock will play a Frenchy, jazz-influenced set that they wrote themselves to accompany two silent films from the early 1900s.

For Buster Keaton's comedy "Sherlock Jr.," the backup band includes a clarinet and violin, along with guitar, bass and drums. The seven-minute French sci-fi classic "A Trip to the Moon" gets a seven-minute electric guitar solo.

The rock kids are calling their event Night at the Movies (April 29, 8 p.m., $10) and giving attendees their money's worth with a finale of Cole Porter tunes in collaboration with an act called Martha Graham Cracker.

"It's a cabaret drag queen act with one of the best R&B bands in all of Philadelphia," said rock school impresario Michael Long. "The kids are doing a collaboration with a 6-foot-2 drag queen."

C'est la vie, we suppose. As Philadelphians, we've seen stranger things in the tailgating lots at the Linc.

of France-a-delphia

What would you get if you crossed a Philly duck boat with a tour guide from Versailles? For PIFA, the French language school Alliance Française is offering $20 Trolley Tours of French Philadelphia that kind of nail it. (Various times April 14, 16, 19, 21, 23 and 28; see pifa.org.)

Tour guides will dish on Ben Franklin's dalliances at the Court of Louis XVI. "He liked the ladies. He was 80 years old, but that didn't matter," said school president Diana Regan.

But you'll also get a wealth of Franco-Philadelphia history. Did you know that Napolean's brother, Joe, once lived on 9th Street, between Spruce and Locust? Or that "Philly's own" Stephen Girard, of Girard Street fame, was French?

"He was an expat," Regan said. "Came to the United States, spread his money around Philadelphia."

PIFA is also taking it to the streets with outdoor Latin dancing on the Golden Block the last Friday night of the festival. The dance party is one part of a two-part free event called Puentes/Bridges (April 29, 5:30-9:30, 2557 N. 5th St.).

Part 1 is a Taller Puertorriqueno art show celebrating a Puerto Rican painter who studied at the Louvre, among others.

Attendees will then move to a big tent set up in a parking lot across the street, where a pair of musicians from the Philadelphia Orchestra and some neighborhood collaborators - including music students from Esperanza Academy Charter High School - will play Latin dance standards.

The music is scheduled to start at 8, and it's expected that concertgoers will not stay seated for long. "How can you do Latin music without dance?" asked Udi Bar-David, a Philadelphia Orchestra cellist who'll be in the band.

The next day, a six-block-long PIFA Street Fair (April 30, 11 a.m.-8:30 p.m.) will turn South Broad Street into a French-themed carnival, with a giant Ferris wheel, a grassy park in the middle of the street and a children's maze, among other attractions.

At dusk, a construction crane parked on Spruce Street will hoist Compagnie Transe Express - 18 acrobats from France - 100 feet into the air above Broad Street for a sunset aerial performance that should be one for the ages.

"It's going to be amazing," Cambron said. "The next day, the festival closes." Then it's au revoir to the crepes and the wine and the monthlong buffet.  

Au revoir, buffet!

 But does anyone whose mother tongue is Yo! really think it's the last awesome party we'll be throwing on South Broad Street this year?