Among the various celebrations accompanying the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Georges Brassens (1921-1981), the Hall de la Chanson, in Paris, is making its contribution with two shows performed in October, rescheduled in November due to extensions: Prof de Brassens (until November 6, 2021) and The Weed (November 7-21). The opportunity was too good not to sneak up to the first of them, Prof de Brassens, on October 30 at La Villette.
Prof de Brassens, it is a thematic show dedicated to Alphonse Bonnafé, the college professor who turned Georges Brassens’ life upside down. The brawling teenager, rather distracted and dreamy in class, was in third grade in Sète when this French “teacher” came into his life. Nicknamed “the Boxer” because he had been university champion of the sport, the then thirty-something teacher accomplished the miracle of instilling a taste for poetry in the teenager. For Brassens, poetry will not only arouse wonder, but it will also represent a refuge, his salvation, and ultimately the sesame to achievement and fame.
Georges Brassens will retain immense gratitude towards the teacher. To the point of asking him to write him a preface when, in 1963, he entered the collection Poets of today by Seghers. The show is inspired by this text.
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It is the miracle of this meeting that Prof de Brassens brings us back to life, with a distribution and staging that is as simple as it is effective. The cast: two singer-actors, Olivier Hussenet to play Bonnafé, and Alban Losseroy in the role of the future legend of French song. Hussenet, deputy director of the Hall de la Chanson, wrote the show and co-directed its direction with Serge Hureau, director of the institution. Losseroy, artist-student, takes care of the arrangements. Equipped with two guitars – one acoustic, one electric – and a djembe, he sings, speaks and sometimes slides sound illustrations with his instruments, while Bonnafé expresses himself …
Because between two songs interpreted by one or the other of the protagonists, we listen to Alphonse Bonnafé unveil the secrets of poetry and songs. And for good reason: we are invited to its course. The main element of the decor is a blackboard where a lot of vocabulary, names of historical figures, medieval jargon, are revealed as the teacher’s presentations progress.
The pupils of this very special class are the public itself, installed close to the artists. And this course allows you to decipher the songs in which Brassens revealed his first fascinations. First of all, there are those inspired by his passion for the poet François Villon that Bonnafé introduced him to (Ballad of the Ladies of Yesteryear, song composed on a poem by Villon, or The Middle Ages).
During the show, sometimes advancing in the middle of the spectators, Bonnafé and Brassens tell and sing the songs and memories inspired by the tumultuous youth of the poet, in particular his arrest with a group of petty criminals for a series of thefts (a slip occurred two years after his meeting with Bonnafé), the mob unleashed when he left the court, the house arrest that Brassens’ mother will impose on her son (The Four Bachelors, The Weed)… There are songs that express his respect for the most modest people (Lamentation of the maidens of joy), his taste for swear words, his disgust with taboos, his scathing irony towards the well-meaning (Bad reputation…).
All presented with as much sobriety as finesse. In the voices of Hussenet and Losseroy, we completely rediscover the songs. Freed from the monumental aura of their creator, interpreted without a microphone (like the whole show), they offer themselves a new youth, a new lightness, even for the most serious of them. The show ends with a splendid a cappella version, in two voices, of Auvergnat. A moving conclusion to a show on a human scale, of freshness and elegance.
After Prof de Brassens, the Hall de la Chanson program, between November 7 and December 7, five new performances of The Weed, his other show dedicated to the father of Friends first. A different approach, which promises a lot of fantasy and poetry, of the work and words of the poet, with male and female voices and a group of musicians that we could see at work in the spring on the excellent Trenet, the ghost (rescheduled at the Hall in November and December 2021).