In 1670, two giants of French culture — the playwright Moliere and composer Jean Baptiste Lully — collaborated on Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, the 11th in a series of comédie-ballets they wrote for King Louis XIV. The king was said to be so delighted with the results that he ordered repeat performances for seven nights running, jumping onstage to join the dancers when his joy became too much to contain.

Though the work is considered a milestone in French artistic heritage, more than three centuries passed before it was revived in its original form with all the Baroque elements intact — right down to the stage lighting, which is provided solely by candles. By good fortune and the grace of the Muses, this production plays in Prague Friday night at the city's grandest Baroque setting, the Estates Theater.

Now considered a forerunner of opera, comédie-ballet was a unique form of its time, created specifically at Louis XIV's request. The idea was to stitch drama, singing and dancing together in a seamless fabric that incorporated elements of all three but was something unique and different unto itself. "It's a dialogue between the three arts, which are distinct but in perfect balance," says French Institute Culture Director Didier Montaigné, who has seen this production. "I was fascinated. It's exquisite."

The storyline of Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, which for many years was played as a straight theater piece sans music and dancing, is drawing-room comedy fare. Monsieur Jourdain is the epitome of a parvenu, a newly rich commoner eager to acquire the manners and bearing of nobility. A succession of teachers and scam artists attempt the transformation, with the naive Jourdain serving as a humorous foil while dealing with increasingly zany domestic complications.

While it's not inaccurate to call Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme a period piece, that hardly does justice to this production's painstaking re-creation of costumes, makeup, singing and dancing styles and stately Baroque music, packaged and presented with contemporary wit and subtext. "For the modern spectator, pronunciation, declamation and Baroque body language play on the duality between strangeness and beauty, distance and emotion, emphasizing that Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, whilst of course funny and amusing, is also open to deeper mystery and reflection," the creative team writes in the program notes.

Still, those period elements are front and center, and they are a marvel to behold: exaggerated gestures, pop-eyed expressions, overstated elocution, clownish makeup and antique sets shimmering in the candlelight. The music is provided by two groups devoted to the Baroque repertoire, France's Le Poeme Harmonique and the Czech Republic's Musica Florea.

The only element not entirely authentic is the choreography, and then only because no record of the original survives. Contemporary choreographer Cécile Roussat has created new dance pieces based on drawings and other records from the Baroque era. The creative team notes, "We have tried to keep the aesthetic feel and gestures of the interludes close to those of the times, whilst creating a world of fantasy and dream existing in its own right."

There is a dreamlike quality to the entire performance, in part because of the ethereal lighting, but also quite deliberately in the way the production is packaged and staged in a constant swirl of colors and comedy that veers from sharp verbal wit to slapstick. Thematically, it's a vivid portrayal of the new world opening before Jourdain, who is like a child discovering simple wonders — in one of the funniest parts of the play, how to correctly pronounce French vowels.