The challenge was daunting: to defend a musical inspired by Cowboys Fringants at a time when tears are still flowing to mourn their singer, Karl Tremblay, who died last week. The public will not drown their sorrows at this Royal Pub : the work, jubilant, is rather a joyful celebration of their songs.
It tells the story of a sadly ordinary guy, Jonathan Doyer (Richard Charest), who ends up in spite of himself at the Pub Royal, a stripping bar in the form of purgatory where a mosaic of cripples languish, “those whom the system has shoved “. There is Normand (Yvan Pedneault) the trucker, Yves (Christian Laporte) the unemployed, Johnny Flash (Martin Giroux) the star who no longer shines, Loulou (Émilie Josset) the tired rocker, Catherine (Alexia Gourd) the tormented waitress: so many lost sheep, even if led by Siriso (Kevin Houle), the strange master of ceremonies who looks half angel, half demon.
It is among these lost souls that Jonathan will finally find himself, the insurance broker with the cutting banality among this gallery of colorful characters. At the start of the first act, he sees his salvation in a call for a tow truck to leave this den of originals as quickly as possible. In the end, he realizes that it is the emptiness of his own life that he must instead escape – and that it is easier to “boost” a tank than an existence drowned in conformity.
Some new pearls
Royal Pub brings together 20 artists on stage, including seven dancers and six acrobats. This abundance creates a joyful atmosphere which does not allow any downtime despite a drop in pace after the intermission. The choreographies follow one another at a frantic pace, punctuated by acrobatics which put a few exclamation points on the score without ever overshadowing the rest. Circus, song and dance know how to coexist on stage without cannibalizing each other, the result of a staging that knows how to remain discreet to provide all the space necessary for this unbridled action.
The aerobatics contribute to the fantasy of the Royal Pub, a place which, from the outset, appears out of the world despite the very concrete setbacks of its regulars. They sing their drama to the songs of Cowboys Fringants. Normand, for his part, sees America crying through his rear-view mirror in a number where the lighting and a projection behind the stage transport the audience into the cabin of his truck, at night, somewhere on theInterstate 95.
In a scathing and very successful revival of Shooters, Yves the unemployed raises his “to the good workers”. Jonathan realizes the banality of his life by talking about his “5,000 square feet” in his neighborhood of identical houses. A few unreleased tracks from lyricist Jean-François Pauzé slip here and there among the originals, some like little pearls added to the group’s already well-stocked necklace.
In Of a sadnessfor example, the author dips his pen in the raw lucidity which has made his trademark to make the band of misfits who haunt the Royal Pub sing that “the world is sad and humans are unhappy”.
In The end of the show, the author envelops Johnny Flash, the former glory who has reached the end of his road, with this look of infinite tenderness that he has always known how to cast on poqués. In the room, more than one was wiping away tears when Martin Giroux sang the song, perhaps because the lyrics brought back difficult current affairs: “one day life catches up with us, like an 18-wheeler hits us. »
cowboy hat
Despite the seriousness of the subject matter in this musical – the quest for a better world in a society which creates “winners and losers”, as Siriso sums it up – lightness reigns over the hour and a half of the show. Geneviève Dorion Coupal and Olivier Kemeid sprinkled a few histrionics on their choreographies and their dialogues, less to provoke easy laughs than to avoid taking themselves too seriously – a characteristic ingredient of the Cowboys, moreover allergic to all forms of pretension and others head swelling.
A wonderful moment of dancing ends the first part and deserves mention. The choreography translates into movement the torment that grips Jonathan when he learns that the little car problem that brought him to the Royal Pub was not trivial. The krump sequence which illustrates the trauma, offered solo by the excellent Sunny Boisvert, is a feat and fully deserved the loud applause it received.
Among the seven performers, no one has to be ashamed of the vocal prowess of Bernard Drainville. Each and every one defends their songs with aplomb and emotion: Kevin Houle and Richard Charest have the lion’s share in Siriso and Jonathan, but everyone has the opportunity to shine solo. No one disappoints, particularly Yvon Pedneault, who knew how to appropriate the well-known without destroying it. America cries.
The only false note on the board: while the first act develops a ribald and bon vivant atmosphere characteristic of Les Fringants, the second gets lost in a mystical-techno story which contrasts with the beginning of the show. Complex to explain and even more complex to understand, the quantum fable, with its allusions to binary code, algorithms and artificial intelligence, fits poorly with the rest.
However, it would take more to sulk one’s pleasure. Royal Pub offers new life to songs that have united a group and its audience for more than a quarter of a century. It is a very successful musical comedy, but also a heartfelt ode to the work of four artists who knew how to sing about post-referendum Quebec in its failings and its little miseries. It took courage to tackle such a monument: the director, Sébastien Soldevila, also had the talent to understand the theatricality of these songs, often written in the form of short stories. Hat — cowboy — to him: in their dressing room, Jean-François Pauzé, Jérôme Dupras and Marie-Annick Lépine, all three present for the performance on Thursday, applauded the show wildly, the supreme sign, undoubtedly, of his success.