"In Paris"...We're not in Santa Cruz anymore...

We'd had our noses to the grindstone, and it had been too long since we'd escaped this land of tie-dye and tofu to, well, another land of tie-dye and tofu - Berkeley. But on Saturday night, it wasn't Berkeley we were in, we were In Paris via Berkeley. First up, a mind-blowing French dinner at Bistro Liaison, then Mikhail Baryshnikov at the Berkeley Rep Theater - In Paris.

Bistro Liaison, aptly described as "French food for the soul," was lively, yet warm and intimate, and exotic, yet the menu and waitstaff somehow make you feel right at home (or maybe it was leading off with an exquisite cocktail of gin, lavender, and grapefruit juice that did it).

I was feeling adventurous, and tried the escargot, which were amazingly good - poached snails in garlic parsley butter with Pastis - and user-friendly, unassumingly bedded in their marinade/tapenade rather than hiding in their shells.

Next came the pièce de résistance, an other-worldly seafood dish called Sole Farcie - a Petrale sole filled with Dungeness crab baked in a shrimp & Cognac cream sauce. This was one of those times that you discover a food that tastes nothing like you've ever had before, and you don't want it to end. Stacy was almost as enthralled with her Salmon Paillard - Grilled salmon topped with tapenade on a bed of roasted beets, saffron aioli & toasted fennel powder.

After sharing each other's entrees, we figured it would be hard to follow these acts, but the Profiteroles were literally the icing on the cake.

And so we strolled a few blocks and got to the theater with time to spare and enjoyed the photo displays in the lobby, books in the shop, and diverse and lively mix of theater-goers about to be treated to this epic performance.

In Paris uses a nuanced, complex theatrical vocabulary of music, film, mime, video, even an actress flying dreamily suspended by wires, and exerpts of Russian and French to explore the relationship between an older man and a younger woman and its larger theme of profound loneliness.

The story focuses on Baryshnikov's general, who moved to Paris years ago, after his wife left him following the war for a younger man in Constantinople. While in the City of Lights, he meets a beautiful waitress (Anna Sinyakina) whose husband is away at war in Yugoslavia, and we see their relationship blossom. The story is one of loneliness and despair and eventual happiness and acceptance as two foreigners with a common bond find each other in a not-so-new city.

By play's end, the audience was mezmerized, thrilled, and thoroughly satisfied and showed our appreciation with a standing ovation lasting 4 or 5 curtain calls. We learned that the company is headed to Italy, and then Lincoln Center in New York City to no doubt thrill audiences there as well. What great fortune that we were able to experience such a getaway right here, in our own backyard...

“Spectacular but also intimate…An ephemeral dream of last romance, which floats from lovely to surreal [and] keenly captures the ache of solitude and the fleeting bliss of romance…Mikhail Baryshnikov scarcely dances at all until the haunting finale of In Paris. But the ballet legend shows such a genius for movement that his body language is an art unto itself in this fearlessly inventive theatrical adventure. The dancer has such a striking physical presence, even at 64, that he elevates the smallest movements into epic moments of truth. He is mezmerizing.”—San Jose Mercury News / Bay Area News Group