Private Debut

Rear Admiral Samuel Eliot Morison, famed naval historian, was present, bewigged, buttoned and bowed in the fashion of the court of Louis XV. Harvard President Nathan Pusey turned up, sedate in white tie and tails. Of the 60 guests, 40 were in 18th century costume, and their names made a roll call of Boston's social top drawer. Occasion: a performance of selections from French Composer Jean-Philippe Rameau's comic ballet Platee (1745), with French Tenor Michel Senechal in his U.S. debut. Place: the 60-seat, century-old Varieties Theater in the Brookline mansion of Boston Socialite Mrs. George Shattuck, one of the few surviving private stages in the U.S.

The pale green Varieties, 25 ft. by 20 ft., was originally built by Samuel Cabot, Mrs. Shattuck's great-grandfather, as a place for staging amateur theatricals. The first important performance, a family diarist noted, took place on a "clear moonlight evening" on the day after Christmas in 1855, and was marred only by the fact that "some of our actors were delayed by a faithless hackman." Generation after generation, family actors staged everything from Henry IV and She Stoops to Conquer to melodramas such as The Brigands of Lodi and The Dead Shot. Famed Actress Fanny Kemble appeared at the Varieties as Mrs. Malaprop in The Rivals, but was so disturbed by the closeness of the audience that she never returned. Rarely used in recent years, the little theater, with its gilt chairs, roll-down curtain (a Nile landscape) and flaming torches, seemed an ideal setting for Rameau's wispily amusing farce about an old-maidish nymph in frantic pursuit of Jupiter's favors.

In the title role, Tenor Senechal, in green tufted wig and high-heeled green shoes, made his way down the aisle to a spattering of applause. (For reasons best known to the French, the foolish old nymph in Platee was written for a tenor.) As Senechal launched into the music, he quickly demonstrated why he is one of France's most courted lyric tenors. The smooth, light-textured voice moved with ease from falsetto to full voice, changing shading and color as it kept pace with Tenor Senechal's brilliant comic miming.

At concert's end, the audience crowded forward to congratulate Senechal, one fan pausing to extract a pack of Camels from beneath his powdered wig. At 28, Tenor Senechal, who will tour the U.S. after his private debut, is so much in demand that opera or concerts keep him busy five nights a week. Platee, he confessed last week over a post-performance glass of warm milk, is his favorite role, and the Varieties one of his favorite theaters. Unlike Fanny Kemble, he was delighted to be rubbing elbows with his audience. "One can whisper," said he, "just in their ears."

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