Féerie

Féerie was a French theatrical genre known for fantasy plots and spectacular visuals, including lavish scenery and mechanically worked stage effects.Féeries blended music, dancing, pantomime, and acrobatics, as well as magical transformations created by designers and stage technicians, to tell stories with clearly defined melodrama-like morality and an extensive use of supernatural elements. The genre developed in the early 1800s and became immensely popular in France throughout the nineteenth century, influencing the development of burlesque, musical comedy and film.

Féeries used a fairy-tale aesthetic to combine theatre with music, dances, mime, acrobatics, and especially spectacular visual effects created by innovative stage machinery, such as trap doors, smoke machines, and quickly changeable sets. Songs always appeared, usually featuring new lyrics to familiar melodies. Transformation scenes, in which a scene would change as if by magic in full view of the audience, were an important component of the style; until 1830, nearly all scene changes in féeries were full-view transformations. The last transformation in a féerie, accompanied by a flourish of music, led to the apotheosis: a grand final stage picture, usually involving beautiful supernumeraries descending from the sky or suspended on wires.

These elements, especially the spectacle and stage effects, were far more prominent than the plot. The critic Francisque Sarcey suggested that for a féerie, the crew in charge of design and stagecraft should be regarded as more important than the writers, noting that the scripts themselves were so incoherent that "one can put the beginning at the end, and vice versa."Théophile Gautier even suggested, with considerable irony, that the immensely successful féerie Les Pilules du diable could be performed as a purely mimed production, so that no spoken words would distract the audience from the spectacle they had come to enjoy. The total effect was one of a dazzling, dreamlike array of visuals, harkening back to fairy-tale traditions and a childlike sense of wonder through the use of innovative stage technology. In a review of The Blue Bird, a writer in the Journal des débats commented satirically on the spectacular frivolity of a typical féerie, but positively on the genre's vast potential for creativity:

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