When we arrive in town

There are some areas where I am particularly uneducated, and musicals are one of them. It’s not my area, which explains why I had never seen Starmania of my life.

Heard, yes. But not seen. So understood as a whole.

There are cultural monuments like that, in the landscape for so long that we end up believing that we will have our whole lives to discover them, when we do not have the false impression of knowing them because we grew up with them, and more often next to them. With this excuse that any new incarnation will not be able to forgive having missed the first.

It happened to me with the coin Brewwhich I finally saw at one minute to midnight, with the actors from the start (Marcel Gauthier, Marc Messier and the late Michel Côté), during the penultimate performance in 2017… after 38 years of performances.

You can’t imagine how well-honed it was, nearly four decades later. A masterclass in burlesque and slapstick that had my jaw dropping.

I was just a child when Starmania was created in 1979 — the same year as Brewby the way. So I couldn’t see the original version, but I also didn’t see the versions that followed, which didn’t stop me from knowing by heart all the hit songs from this rock opera, which never stopped playing on the radio.

Over time, a fantasy version of Starmaniawith a jumble of voices from Nanette Workman, Claude Dubois, Diane Dufresne, Fabienne Thibeault, France Gall, Martine St-Clair, Luce Dufault and Patsy Gallant. All in a visual imagination that remains frozen in the 1980s, very close to Houndstooth.

If you had asked me how the story of StarmaniaI would have been hard pressed to answer you, a bit like some music lovers of the Spotify generation are unable to say which legendary album a famous song they love belongs to.

In short, it was time for me to arrive in town (according to the hit that opens the show) and I could not have dreamed of better than the vision of the Frenchman Thomas Jolly, for this new version of Starmaniawhich was a huge success in Europe, is finally being presented in Quebec.

In addition, during the premiere at Place Bell in Laval on Wednesday, Luc Plamondon, 82, was present and received a warm ovation, which added to the emotion.

Because it was a mountain of emotions that the public experienced during this premiere, by placing some pieces in their context.

For details of this show, read the great review by my colleague Luc Boulanger.

Read “Review of Starmania : the Plamondon constellation »

For my part, I did not expect something so poignant and spectacular, so current and so little nostalgic, with such respect for the origins of the work. Thomas Jolly, the man behind this historic opening ceremony of the Paris Olympic Games, seems to be a master of reference, wink and homage, all wrapped up in breathtaking scenography.

In an interview with TV5 Monde, he explained this: “At the time, it was a dystopia, in the future, and then this dystopia today is our reality. Reality has even caught up with fiction. It’s quite astonishing to see how Luc Plamondon made a kind of time travel, that he would have captured our future and brought it back to the end of the 1970s to tell it.”

I’m a little embarrassed to say it, but I had never thought about the very title of this rock opera: Starmania. This obsession with celebrity while the world is collapsing, heralding reality TV and political spectacle, the confrontation between megalomaniac magnates and the resistance fighters who want to preserve the human in humanity; ecological concern and megacities; gender diversity at the same time as an extreme reduction in individualism and uniformity — there will be no more foreigners, we will all be foreigners in the streets of Monopolisisn’t it… The readings are endless.

And Thomas Jolly does not deprive himself of anything and does not distort anything, making the recent history of the 21st century resonate^e century with the flashes of genius of the creators, Luc Plamondon and Michel Berger, because he went back to the source, to the archives of 1979, bringing to the surface forgotten plots and classics that I had the impression of hearing for the first time.

My good friend Marie-Christine Blais, a cultural journalist with encyclopedic experience, the one who found me the posts, has seen almost all the versions of Starmania. According to her, “this is the only one that really underlines the dramatic scope of this work. It has often been staged as a series of popular hits. Thomas Jolly staged it as a musical comedy where theatre, music and dance are supported without being afraid of the violence of the subject. It was magnificent and courageous. And the prescience of Plamondon, lord…”

These monuments that are Brew, Starmania Or The sisters-in-law (whose film adaptation of the musical is a hit in theaters this summer) need, like all monuments, to be dusted off and revisited.

Ultimately, great works are those in which readings are always possible. They are landmarks in a confusing world that seems to be skidding straight into a wall, beacons that make us change course perhaps just in time to avoid accidents.

Whether you have seen all versions of Starmania or none, don’t miss this one if you can.

The urgency of the message and the beauty of the work are still there, intact, 45 years later.