When Gabrielle Fontaine was approached to play Rose Ouellette for the Théâtre de l’oeil ouvert, she wasn’t sure who it was. Then, when she was told that Rose Ouellette was La Poune, she remembered the elderly person with the mischievous smile who played, in the Bye end-of-year party, dressed as the alien ET, or who appeared in the Molson red beer ad.
Through the texts written by Geneviève Beaudet, Rose Ouellette revealed herself behind La Poune, a woman more discreet than her comic character, a businesswoman too, the first woman to direct two theatres in North America. Rose Ouellette also popularized the art of improvisation in Quebec. It is this woman that the public will be able to discover in The giantessthe musical play presented by the Théâtre de l’oeil ouvert, premiering this summer, with Gabrielle Fontaine in the lead role.
The idea came from Geneviève Beaudet. “I had the mandate, with Jade Bruneau, the director of the Théâtre de l’oeil ouvert, to write a musical theatre, with an important woman from Quebec as the main character,” she said in an interview. “I came across La Poune by chance. I discovered that I knew La Poune a little, but that I didn’t know the extraordinary woman, the businesswoman that she was throughout her youth.” This woman is the one that Geneviève Beaudet undertook to introduce to the youngest “in a bright and also young light, cool and accessible”.
“Making people laugh even when hearts want to cry; Rose Ouellette makes it her life’s work. She defies the prejudices of an era that has a slight tendency to prefer women at home, well-behaved, busy doing something other than shining on stage. She creates a timeless character, full of audacity and candor, a character who, beneath her airs of a mischievous little sailor, is much deeper and more feminist than she seems,” writes Geneviève Beaudet, in a text introducing the show.
Actually, The giantess will go back in time, starting with Rose Ouellette’s youth, in the Faubourg à m’lasse of Montreal marked by the war, then by the crisis, and ending when she was about 40 years old, just before she started working on television. “She came from a poor background,” says Gabrielle Fontaine. “She had 14 brothers and sisters who died when they were under 2 years old. So we are, in the Faubourg à m’lasse, in a period of great precariousness, great poverty. It is a dramatic charge, it is showing the post-war period. But it is also showing the other side. That is to say that Rose wanted to make people laugh in this very sad time. There is tragedy, but also burlesque.”
“What we say, for example, is that at that time, there were people who lent their wives to foremen so that they could work,” says Geneviève Beaudet.
Theater and soup
In this context, Rose Ouellette, who runs the Théâtre Cartier, then the Théâtre National, puts on “up to fifteen shows a week, very politicized shows, about what was happening in the news. Her goal is to make theatre accessible, in politics, but also in humour, always,” continues Gabrielle Fontaine. To get people from working-class backgrounds to come to the theatre, Rose Ouellette welcomed them with hot soup, kept the prices as low as possible. And people came.
The story of Rose Ouellette is also that of a great love story between two women: Rose herself and Gertrude Bellerive, who was also her secretary. On stage, Jade Bruneau will play Gertrude.
Behind La Poune, it is Rose Ouellette who reveals herself. “She was a businesswoman who had character, who had ambition, who had the inner strength to lead a team,” says Gabrielle Fontaine. But we will also see La Poune on stage, in a number that Geneviève Beaudet invented for the show.
Small and red-haired, like Rose Ouellette, Gabrielle Fontaine still had to work on her accent, to adopt a more typical Faubourg à m’lasse style of speech. The fact remains that the woman she will play was luminous, “very positive” according to the testimonies of those who knew her, notably her granddaughter Kathleen Verdon.
Musical theater, L’oeil ouvert makes you sing as much as you dance. This time it will be to original music by Audrey Thériault.