“When I love once, I love forever,” sings Richard Desjardins. So it was twice rather than once that I went to see Starmaniathis rock opera by Luc Plamondon and Michel Berger, whose libretto was brought back to the forefront and up to date by Thomas Jolly, this brilliant French director (and multidisciplinary artist) who also provided artistic direction for each of the ceremonies of the Paris Olympic Games.
Let’s be clear: going to see a rock opera by forty artists and musicians once is already a luxury. Going to see it twice is madness (mild madness, but still), a madness perhaps inherited from the time when Diane Dufresne — whose fortieth anniversary of the show was being celebrated, incidentally Pink magicgiven at the Olympic Stadium — invited her audience to be as extravagant and creative as she is herself. Art dazzles, fascinates, inspires, shakes up. And the money you invest in it is, in my opinion, an investment for life.
So last Sunday, the Place Bell spotlights went out on the fourth version of this megacity imagined by two people who lived their era to the fullest and deeply felt the spirit of the times.
So much so that they ended up giving birth to a work that, 45 years later, we still call “futuristic”. A work in the form of a giant (and barely distorting) mirror held out to us, in which they mixed and magnified our doubts, our fears, our fantasies, our violence, our desires, punctuated by a bunch of existential questions that culminate in this one: “Is there anyone in the universe who can answer our questions, our prayers?”
Universe
It’s crazy how current events meet fiction. Just as this mega-production was ending, the American Democratic Party was beginning the grand political mass of its convention, in the wake of which Americans may end up giving the presidency to a woman, for the first time in their history.
Thus, the billionaire Zero January of the booklet of Starmania (which the priceless Donald Trump inevitably brings to mind) could well be eclipsed by a black woman who, for barely four weeks, has been breathing a wind of “joy” and optimism that was previously thought unthinkable and whose meteoric rise bears the stamp of “Kamalamania”.
When we think that France recently escaped the extreme right-wing wind that some feared, we can affirm, just as the Obama couple did brilliantly, that hope is back. At least, a “wind of”, a breeze just strong enough to rally leftist Bernie Sanders as much as former presidents mainstream to a movement that aims to block the path of a (slightly too) free electron, more bitter and unpredictable than ever.
Or, to quote Stevie Wonder, who added his voice to the concert, contribute to a ” higher ground “. Perhaps this is what we call a vision, after all. This fabulous ingredient that we sometimes drop into a black hole, which has allowed Starmania to cross time and which makes Plamondon and Berger today considered visionaries. You could not have said it better, gentlemen: “Something is happening in Monopolis…”