The neighborhood has changed a lot since the time when the mythical stripper attracted Montrealers there en masse. It is in this old Red Light that The duty meet the creator of Lili St-Cyr. Musical theater. Approached by the directors of the Grands Chênes theater — since renamed the Kingsey room —, where it was created in 2018 amsterdam, her celebrated show based on songs by Jacques Brel, Mélissa Cardona had the idea of writing about this historical figure. The era fascinates her. And the author had been intrigued by reading an article wondering if Lili St-Cyr was “the first Kim Kardashian”…
“It interested me to see the journey of these girls who exposed themselves first,” she said. And there is still a big talk about nudity today: it’s a statement, an acceptance of the body; Oh no, we sexualize women too much… There are so many elements in there. »
A Francophile American, Lili St-Cyr played in Montreal cabarets from 1944 to 1951. And especially at the Gayety (building of the current New World theater). Very strong on a technical level, the theater gave the burlesque artist “everything she wanted, was able to serve what she had in mind as stagings, explains Cardona. This is what also gave him the desire to stay. Because she said: “I don’t do like all the girls, I don’t just take off my peels, there’s a story. And nudity is inherent in the dramatic stories I tell.
By digging the sulphurous figure, Mélissa Cardona did not however find the substance she expected. “In his autobiography [Ma vie de stripteaseuse, parue en 1982], there is something very empty. “Instead of introspection, she discovered there a desire to leave “the image she wanted us to have of her”, after a less than stellar end to her career: the former celebrity opened a boutique of erotic objects and ended her days, in 1999, “relatively alone”. “So, in her autobiography, she only bet on the beautiful things, the scintillating, without measuring what she did,” thinks the playwright.
An insistence on appearance in accordance, ultimately, “with what she said: ‘I am a beautiful girl, why not use it?’ It was her avant-garde side that I found interesting: realizing who she was, understanding her own limits and being a businesswoman. Because she was in charge of it all. She was one of the first women to wear the pants, too.
For Mélissa Cardona, Lili St-Cyr has “constructed an image so much that she lost her own identity. Young, she discovered very early that the one she believed to be her mother was in fact her grandmother and that the one she believed to be her big sister was her mother. And around 8 or 10 years old, she learned that Marie Van Schaack was not her name”. There is a wound there, believes the designer. She changed her name over the course of her life, until she adopted Lili St-Cyr – which sounded “chic” and French. “She chose her own name and she made a mark of it, basically. Pretty soon, she was charging people to eat with her, because she was like, “I’m working all the time, I’m this all the time.” Who was the real person behind it? Did she know it herself? »
First disturbed by this superficiality (“it confronted me because it was not the musical that I was thinking of writing”), Cardona understood that she had to add in her play “other strong female characters, having their own vision of self-affirmation which clashes with that which Lili St-Cyr proposes”. She discovered, at the same time, the first elected to the town hall, Jessie Fisher. “She was the first woman to sit with men. In her fiction, the author made this councilor a kind of precursor of Pax Plante, “advocating the cleaning” of the city, of the Red Light, and campaigning against the free Lili St-Cyr.
The story also includes a young cabaret singer who wants the Gayety to hire “real” artists instead. “The idea was to show that these women all have clear identities, which are completely different, but equally valid. They are in confrontation, but something connects them: the need to assert themselves. Even if the others do not agree with how they can express it”, specifies Mélissa Cardona.
Montreal, an open city
The story is set in 1944. It was a time when the metropolis had “the appearance of Las Vegas”, where blind pigs (slanderous bars) where you could play, drink and party until late at night. A kind of libertine bubble between a Quebec imprisoned by the clergy and the United States of prohibition. “There was a lot of corruption and like a war between cabarets. A lot of money was also at stake in sports betting. And during the Second World War, a kind of consensus emerged: the importance of “keeping the morale of French Canadians intact”, and therefore of entertaining them. “So we didn’t force the popular hockey players of the time, like Maurice Richard, to go to the front. Even there was a controversy: would the Montreal Canadiens have won as many Stanley Cups if they had to go, as the American players have been there? »
From this real setting, but cheating a bit with temporality, the play relates the arrival at Gayety of the flamboyant artist, her tumultuous love affair with Jimmy Orlando, owner of the rival bar El Morocco. And the way the stripper managed to get around the rule that a performer should not leave the stage with less clothes than they had when they arrived…
“It was there that she found her famous transparent bath number, in which she appears naked, dressed in a few bubbles. And she gets dressed slowly. It was clever! (laughs) “One evening with too much alcohol, she flouts this rule and is arrested. Hence a trial, which will cause his departure. “It was like a betrayal for her. It hurt him very badly. »
The creator is thrilled by the fine cast who carry her play — which will probably be presented next summer in Montreal: Marie-Pier Labrecque, “extraordinary” in the title role, the great Kathleen Fortin, as a slayer of vice, Lunou Zucchini , Maxime Denommée, Roger La Rue and Stéphane Brulotte.
Music
Mélissa Cardona talks about her collaboration with Kevin Houle, the composer of Lili St-Cyr (an album is planned), like writing “hand in hand”. “And I wish every creator of musicals to meet their soul mate at the composition level. The actor-singer of many musical shows — currently in Hate — grabbed the sound color she wanted.
” For amsterdamI wanted to do musical theatre, not a musical too bubbly. » Lili St-Cyrlodges halfway between these styles, she judges. “Since there are cabaret numbers, we are in the signature of the musical, because it is our subject, too, in a certain way. But there is also a more buoyant dimension of the curves of the characters, of their introspective side. [Kevin] has found the right balance between what can entertain and what has substance. »
The duo is also preparing another musical which, she hopes, will see the light of day in 2025. “We had fun: we made a show Broadway, a real real one. Cardona also took advantage of the confinement to revisit amsterdam. The hit show was bought by Atomas Productions, which expressed the wish that there be “a little more Jacques Brel”. She therefore wanted to bring out her poetry more in the dialogue exchanges. A second life is taking shape for its creation.
The author, fond of musical shows, is not surprised by the current popularity of the genre, which is very popular on Quebec stages. “There is something so unifying in the musical, she believes. And maybe after the pandemic, we need this moment of collective unity. The music provides that. »