January 24, 2008 (Bloomberg) -- Actress Fanny Ardant, the last muse of French filmmaker Francois Truffaut and his star in The Woman Next Door, is trying her hand at directing.

Ardant is staging "Veronique," Andre Messager's 1898 operetta, at Paris's Theatre du Chatelet.

There is a subtext to all this, a silent revolution gripping the Paris opera scene. The Chatelet, once a formidable rival of the Paris Opera, is slipping into light entertainment, while the Opera-Comique, long a temple of lowbrow fare, is shifting toward serious repertoire.

Light entertainment is not necessarily a bad thing. Messager's operetta can, in the right hands, almost pass for a masterpiece. Yet Ardant's handling of it is uninspired.

The plot is similar to the last act of "The Marriage of Figaro." Helene, a noblewoman, pretends to be a girl of the people to teach her prospective bridegroom, the heavily indebted playboy Florestan, a lesson.

Naturally, Florestan falls in love with Veronique, the charming specimen of the working class. Instead of showing up at the ball to be presented to his hitherto unknown bride, he refuses to go ahead with the marriage, which his father has forced on him in exchange for paying his debts.

In the end, all complications are sorted out. After a short contretemps, in which Florestan turns the tables on Helene, they sink into each other's arms.

Messager's music is elegant and deft, with the theatrical flair of an expert who knows every trick in the book. After all, Messager (1853-1929) was an important conductor and director at no less than three major opera houses - the Opera-Comique, the Paris Opera, and the Royal Opera House.

The most memorable numbers in the score, the Donkey Song and the Swing Song - both love duets - were popular hits at the turn of the century. Ermerance de Champ d'Azur, Helene's aunt, who, as Estelle, chaperones her niece, has a wonderfully sentimental aria about the high price of virtue, a parody of Donizetti's mad scenes. The finales are rousing.

Ardant announced at the beginning of the season that she would transpose the story from the Belle Epoque to the 1950s, "when the taboos and the dress codes of the 19th century were still in force." This may be true for some of the costumes (Dominique Borg).

The lavish sets (Ian Falconer), though, indicate that we are in operetta never-never land, with revue routines that would have been deemed passe at the time of the Ziegfeld Follies. The humor is on the coarse side, though audiences give the show hearty applause.

The Algerian-born soprano Amel Brahim-Djelloul is a chirpy Helene/Veronique, with tons of charm and a silvery voice. Dietrich Henschel, alas, is a husky-voiced Florestan with a heavy Teutonic accent.

Doris Lamprecht has a great time as the blue-blooded aunt who, to her delight, discovers that men start pinching her bottom once they think that she is a shopgirl. Jean-Christophe Spinosi conducts the Ensemble Matheus.

"Veronique'' runs at the Theatre du Chatelet through January 31.