Delegations arrive at the Trocadero as spectators watch French singer Philippe Katerine performing on a giant screen during the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games on Friday in Paris.
Commentators were divided on Paris’s wild, wooly, extremely French opening ceremony, which kicked off the Olympics on Friday in the City of Lights. The Los Angeles Times call it “unprecedented” while the Washington Post praised it as a “grand vision.” Meanwhile, the New York Times was less impressed, complaining that the spectacle, which had athletes floating down the Seine, “missed the boat.”
But if there was one thing that everyone could agree on, it was this: The drag performance that strongly evoked — despite organizers later saying it wasn’t intended to — Leonardo da Vinci’s “The Last Supper” was a bold stroke. If you missed it (or if you gave up social media for election season), the event’s most memorable moment was a full-on drag performance that played out on the Passerelle DeBilly, one of the Seine’s famous bridges. The catwalk culminated in a provocative tableau that had a dozen-odd performers pose in attitudes that, for many, looked like they were taken from da Vinci’s second-most-famous painting and not from van Biljert’s “Feast of the Gods” as organizers later claimed. (The “Mona Lisa” came creepily to life elsewhere in the evening.)
The send-up was a cheeky celebration of the vibrant Paris........