The Metropolitan Opera’s French concoction Parade, originally put together by the director John Dexter and the set and costume designer David Hockney in 1981, still retains the presence of Hockney, who refurbished the inventive sets and gave the evening (March 4) what glamour it possessed. The conceit of the production is that the three works—Erik Satie’s Parade, Francis Poulenc’s Mamelles de Tirésias, and Ravel’s Enfant et les Sortilèges—are in some sense hostages to World War I (although this is true only of the first piece), and they are therefore played surrounded by searchlights and barbed wire, with a child-innocent and a harlequin as symbols. Unfortunately, Dexter is no longer alive. I remember the production working pretty well under Dexter; here, with Max Charruyer redoing it, the conceit worked less well, though the unintended parallels with September 11 gave it a tragic < ...

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