Column | A grand vision guides unprecedented Opening Ceremonies down the Seine (2024)

But the main reason I like the Opening Ceremonies so much is simple. I’m an opera fan.

Certainly, the Opening Ceremonies aren’t opera — but they’re also not not opera. Pull out the checklist: There’s music (and lots of it). There’s a cast of hundreds (or in this case, thousands) of performers. There’s grand spectacle (courtesy of director Thomas Jolly). There are fabulous costumes. There’s a narrative arc de triumph. There’s the ambient promise of tragedy, comedy, agony and victory. There are fanfares, themes and anthemic leitmotifs. There are divas (Celine Dion, Lady Gaga and Aya Nakamura among them). They take, like, four hours. And, most of the time, they make you feel good.

Like opera, the Opening Ceremonies are everything at once — a grand collision of aesthetics and athletics.

This year’s Opening Ceremonies — billed as the largest in the history of the Games — are helmed by 42-year-old actor and director Jolly, whom French newspaper Le Monde has referred to as “the Peter Pan of theater” for a career ranging from Shakespearean drama (“Henry VI”) to high-energy musicals (“Starmania”).

In interviews, Jolly has described France as “a long story — a story that keeps expanding and rewriting itself and is very much alive,” a reticent reference to the nation’s history of protest, its “constant questioning” of its own identity, and its most recent swerve into political violence. Jolly’s production aims to identify the “bigger us” — an operatic endeavor if ever there was one.

This long story demanded a grander venue than the Stade de France, so Jolly opted to send the whole show down the Seine: A procession of nearly 100 boats traveled 3.8 miles from east to west down the river, starting at the Austerlitz Bridge and ending at the Trocadéro (originally constructed for the 1878 World’s Fair).

This employment of the Seine as a narrative device twisted together two typically distinct elements of the Opening Ceremonies — the show itself and the Parade of Nations, which boat by boat introduces the over 10,000 waving athletes to the world.

As the alphabetized nations floated by, performances broke out along the banks: A black-plumed Lady Gaga made a leggy entrance behind a heart of pink feathers to sing a jaunty take on Zizi Jeanmaire’s “Mon truc en plumes.” On the Pont des Arts, the French-Malian singer Aya Nakamura led the orchestra of the French Republican Guard and 36 choristers from the French Army in a medley of her hits “Pookie” and “Djadja” as well as Charles Aznavour’s “For Me … Formidable.” The Polish countertenor and breakdancer Jakub Józef Orliński appeared for a sizable solo that indulged both of his talents (and inspired dozens of confused tweets).

And while Jolly’s musical program was a box-checking jukebox of every genre imaginable, an understated through-line paid tribute to a lineage of French composers.

A line of dancers kicked and twirled to a hyped-up version of the cancan from Jacques Offenbach’s “Orpheus in the Underworld.” Heavy metal band Gojira accompanied the mezzo-soprano Marina Viotti in a pyrotechnic “Habanera” from Georges Bizet’s “Carmen.” Camille Saint-Saens’s “Danse Macabre” accompanied a segment trailing a masked torchbearer through the Louvre.

Under pouring rain, pianist Alexandre Kantorow performed Maurice Ravel’s “Jeux d’eau.” Paul Dukas’s “L’Apprenti sorcier” scored a fantastical section that winked at Georges Méliès’s “Le Voyage Dans la Lun” (or “A Trip to the Moon”). And mezzo-soprano Axelle Saint-Cirel offered a soaring version of Claude Joseph Rouget De Lisle’s “La Marseillaise” — a.k.a. the French national anthem.

By the time the United States appeared — in the penultimate spot in accordance with Los Angeles hosting the 2028 games — the City of Light was plunged into darkness. Once the parade was complete, over lowing trombones, Floriane Issert of the National Gendarmerie rode a robotic silver steed down the surface of the Seine, bearing the Olympic Flags and lighting 37 giant pairs of dove wings fixed to the bridges.

It was a striking visual, but also one of several times Jolly’s liberation of the ceremony conveyed more about his own outsize ambitions than his nation’s identity.

Several gestures hinted at making larger, possibly poignant statements: Bleary-eyed dancers clubbing indifferently atop an LED volcano. Juliette Armanet singing “Imagine” from a drifting dystopian barge with accompanist Sofiane Pamart playing a flaming piano. The French flag formed from tufts of colored smoke slowly pulling itself apart in the rain.

Still, Jolly’s staging was at its best in its final act (“Eternite”): The Radio France Choir and 90 musicians from the French National Orchestra lending heartfelt oomph to Spyridon Samaras’s “Olympic Anthem”; the athletes gathered beneath the Eiffel Tower, which put on a techno-charged light show; and the surprise U-turn taken by the torch back up the Seine (in a speedboat with Carl Lewis, Serena Williams, Rafael Nadal and Nadia Comăneci).

His parting vision — removed from the crowds, relying only on the beauty of Paris for spectacle — was simple, sweet and satisfying. Generations of French Olympians passing the torch in quick succession and pouring rain before lighting the strangest cauldron I’ve ever seen at the Games. (I’ll leave it to the French to determine the precise significance of a hot-air balloon on fire.)

If Jolly’s production ultimately felt too diffuse and thin on substance to satisfy my operatic appetites, nearly all was forgiven by his big finish: The surprise return of Celine Dion — a steely, defiant take on Édith Piaf’s “L’Hymne à L’Amour,” and her first performance since revealing her diagnosis with stiff person syndrome — made for the grandest of finales, and an icon for the ceremony itself: art as Olympian feat.