Love For Three Oranges, The: Sergei Prokofiev (1989) Rating: Starring: Gabriel Bacquier, Jules Bastin, Consuelo Caroli, Catherine Dubosc, Brigitte Fournier, Georges Gautier, Didier Henry, Michele Lagrance, Vincent Le Texier, Helene Perraguin, Gregory Reinhart, Beatrice Uria-Monzon, Jean-Luc Viala Director: Jean-Pierre Brossmann Category: Music, Drama Studio: Image Ent. Subtitles: English Length: 105 mins     With neat, plain building-block designs by Jacques Rapp, Louis Erlo's energetically staged production of Prokofiev's surreal fairy tale for the Lyon Opera is full of cartoon characters and swift farce. Based on a play by Carlo Gozzi, The Love For Three Oranges tells the story of a doleful hypochondriac Prince, who can only be cured through laughter. When he breaks into hysterics at the expense of the evil witch Fata Morgana, she curses him. His fate is to fall in love with three oranges. Speed and good humor make the stage bristle with life, and Erlo's sunny conception is typified by the Prince, less an effete neurotic as Jean-Luc Viala plays him than a pure Danny DeVito figure, pear-shaped and peppery. One of Prokogiev's running jokes is the warring camps of opera-lovers who keep wanting to intervene from beyond the proscenium, and Erlo realizes this conceit very effectively, with the Lyon chorus clambering in and out of stage boxes and eventually invading the onstage action. Even the King, the great French bass Gabriel Bacquier, makes his entrance as a bumbling latecomer amid the front stalls.