27^th Festival Season - 2005

A Friend of Napoleon

(World Première)

By: James Stuart & Robert Ward

Papa Chibou has come to Paris from the south of France with the idea of planting asparagus along its beautiful boulevards. Finding that such a practice is forbidden, he takes a job as watchman in a wax museum. He becomes particularly attached to a miserable statue of a man (one of his ears had come into contact with a steam radiator) wearing a three-cornered cocked hat and with his left hand shoved into his bosom. He knows nothing about this forsaken creature other than that his name is Napoleon. One spring day, Nina, a young American girl who is chaperoned by her aunt Alice, encounters at the museum the handsome Georges Dufayel, a young attorney with an extremely promising future. Papa Chibou becomes involved in their clandestine love-at-first-sight affair. What will happen when the World of Wax becomes bankrupt and Papa Chibou tries to save the statue of Napoleon from the auction block?