“Michel has the talent to be present even when he is not there”, launched Marc Messier Thursday evening during an event highlighting the donation of the archives of the play brew at the Library and National Archives of Quebec (BAnQ). He then reacted, jokingly, to a confidence from the son of his comrade Michel Côté, Maxime Le Flaguais, who assured that despite his forced absences, his father had never failed in his role as dad.
Michel Côté present even when he is not there? It’s hard to better sum up the spirit of the event, which was held at the National Archives, in the form of an interview led by BAnQ’s President and CEO, Marie Grégoire, with Marc Messier, Marcel Gauthier and Maxime Le Flaguais, Jr. of the one that his colleagues immediately described as “the pillar of this troop, the captain of the team”.
Regarding the health of his father, who suffers from bone marrow cancer, Maxime Le Flaguais soberly said during the question period following the interview that his condition is “fairly stable” and that he is ” in isolation in the hospital”, awaiting a transplant. “He’s in high spirits, we’re hopeful, we’re keeping our fingers crossed and you should be too. »
Maxime Le Flaguais was not only there to represent his father, but also as an authentic fan of the popular show, which he knows by heart. As a child, the actor often listened to the audio cassettes to which his father and his partners relied, them, in order to refresh his memory after a vacation.
Since I missed my father when he left to play brew, in the evening, I listened to the play before going to sleep and I was a bit with him. I heard my people laughing all those years, falling asleep, and it put me in a good mood for life.
Maxime Le Flaguais
These cassettes are among the 400 audiovisual documents bequeathed to BAnQ, to which are added 5 linear meters of textual documents (different versions of the text, notes, correspondence, calendars) and 800 photos. Most of the collection is already accessible to researchers, students and the general public.
It was none other than Marc Messier who, last summer, took it upon himself to collect the boxes in question from the warehouse where they were waiting. “I had to bring it all to my garage,” the actor said earlier in the day in a phone interview with The Press.
And he obviously couldn’t resist the urge to take a look at what was in those boxes. Report ? “Seeing all the newspaper articles, I realized how popular it had been,” he replies most seriously. “No, but it’s true! It didn’t make any damn sense how popular it was. We forget it over time. »
It actually happened
Created on March 21, 1979 at the Théâtre des Voyagements, located at 5145, boulevard Saint-Laurent in Montreal, brew was almost written not by Claude Meunier, Jean-Pierre Plante, Francine Ruel and Louis Saia, but by the late Michel Garneau, who had signed the three previous pieces of the troupe composed of Côté, Gauthier, Messier and Véronique Le Flaguais .
PHOTO MICHEL GRAVEL, LA PRESSE ARCHIVES
Marc Messier, Marcel Gauthier and Michel Côté in October 1985
When the actress has to leave the stage to give birth to the first son of the couple she forms with Michel Côté, the trio has the idea of an all-male play, echoing the imminent opening of the taverns to the ladies. . But Garneau, overloaded and overworked, gives up writing the text, less than a month before the premiere.
The problem is that we were in a hurry. We had set up this little theater there, we had to pay the bills, we had no money, we couldn’t go back.
Marc Messier
The three friends then proposed to several authors to lay a sketch for them, including Claude Meunier, with whom Messier had fraternized within the team of the youth program Fricassee. Several others will decline the invitation. “And maybe some are biting their fingers, laughs Messier, because if only financially, brew was an interesting experience. »
After 3322 performances, the original cast of brew drank his last drop on April 22, 2017 at the Cultural Center of the University of Sherbrooke. Benoît Brière, Martin Drainville and Luc Guérin always carry the bock high, on tour throughout Quebec.
“If these archives can be of any use, I would like them to give hope to young actors entering the profession, wishes Marc Messier. In the past, we were told: “Quebec is small, when you’ve played for a month, it’s beautiful.” Look, we played 38 years! We don’t make it up, it happened to us. And if it happened to us, it can happen to others. I tell you, these things can happen. »