The building was tall and narrow, making the most of precious Shanghai 
real estate, so the proscenium had a nearly square aspect ratio, like an 
old-fashioned television. Above it was the bust of some forgotten French 
actress, supported on gilt wings, flanked by angels brandishing trumpets and 
laurel wreaths. The ceiling was a circular fresco depicting Muses disporting 
themselves in flimsy robes. A chandelier hung from the center; its incandescent 
bulbs had been replaced by new things that didn't burn out, and now it cast 
light evenly onto the rows of tiny, creaking seats closely packed together on 
the main floor. There were three balconies and three stories of private boxes, 
two on the left side and two on the right side of each level. The fronts of the 
boxes and balconies were all painted with tableaux from classical mythology, 
the predominant color there as elsewhere being a highly French robin's-egg 
blue. The theatre was crammed with plasterwork, so that the faces of cherubs, 
overwrought Roman gods, impassioned Trojans, and such were always poking out of 
columns and soffits and cornices, catching you by surprise. Much of this work 
was
spalled from bullets fired by high-spirited Red Guards during Cultural 
Revolution times. Other than the bullet holes, the Parnasse was in decent 
shape, though sometime in the twentieth century great black-iron pipes had been 
anchored vertically alongside the boxes and horizontally before the balconies 
so that spotlights could be bolted on. Nowadays the spotlights were coin-size 
disks—phased-array devices that carried their own batteries—and 
could be stuck up anywhere and controlled by radio. But the pipes were still 
there and always required a lot of explaining when tourists came through.