Weird, ambitious, ultimately wonderful, and extremely French, the kickoff to Paris 2024 was the first great Opening Ceremony in years.
. The City of Lights and its many world-famous landmarks will take center stage at this year’s Games. While equestrians will compete at, race in the Seine. But it’s hard to imagine that any one event will offer as magnificent a tribute to Paris as Friday’s, which eschewed the confines of a stadium and made the entire city its stage.
Lady Gaga performs at Square Barye during the athletes parade on the River Seine during the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games Paris 2024 on July 26, 2024 in Paris, France.’s surprise-but-not-really appearance, during which she sang flawlessly in French, surrounded by dancers with feathery fans, to the unexpectedly moving sight of a pianist Alexandre Kantorow playing Ravel in the rain—was situated in an iconic Parisian setting.
As is often the case for events freighted with tradition, the most enjoyable moments tended to be the strangest—and the most idiosyncratically French—ones. Dozens of dancers in hot pink doing the can-can?. Marie Antoinette holding her freshly decapitated, singing head, as the introduction to a set piece that would pair opera singer Marina Viotti with French metal stalwarts Gojira?.
But no false note could spoil the city-spanning spectacle that Jolly and his team pulled off, with rain adding another major obstacle to the event’s execution. Especially after two Opening Ceremonies,, that were relatively anticlimactic and impersonal due to COVID-19 restrictions, the Paris edition felt both grand and human. When it was cheesy , it was endearingly so.
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