Big Ambitions for Les Belles Soeurs: The Musical

Montreal Gazette
18 Octobre 2014
Par Pat Donnelly


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The creative team behind Belles Soeurs, the Musical has this mantra in mind: First, we take Montreal, London and Toronto, then Manhattan (Broadway) - after that, the world

What have les maudits anglais done to Belles Soeurs?

When the world première of an English-language musical inspired by Michel Tremblay's 1968 play Les Belles Soeurs is officially launched at the Segal Centre on Thursday night, we will finally see the results of a complicated, tempestuous four-year bicultural collaboration.

Will this version have produced the ever-elusive Great Canadian Musical - or even the Great Quebec Musical transposed into the language of les autres?

Many are placing their bets on it. And one man, producer Alan Sandler, of Copa de Oro productions, literally defied death in order to complete the project.

Inevitably, no matter how good Belles Soeurs, the Musical is, there will be some who see it as the greatest sacrilege ever committed against a groundbreaking play in joual that once fuelled the torch of Quebec nationalism.

The fact that three of the 15 characters have been cut, bringing the all-woman cast down to 12, should be enough to cause a stir here. (Lise Paquette, Ginette Ménard and Gabrielle Jodoin have all gone missing in action.)

But the tale of Germaine Lauzon, who wins a windfall in trading stamps only to discover that good fortune breeds envy, belongs to the world, not just Quebec, as attested by the fact that the play has been produced in more than 30 languages in 25 countries.

Within the creative team of this show, the mindset is basically: First we take Montreal, London and Toronto, then Manhattan (Broadway). After that, it's the world.

Director René Richard Cyr, who also adapted and directed the French musical Belles Soeurs, made it known during a recent interview at the Segal Centre that he intends to make himself available to direct a Spanish or Japanese production, if necessary. And if he has to spend the rest of his life doing nothing but directing this musical around the globe, he's cool with that, too. Such is his devotion to Tremblay and the women of Les Belles Soeurs, who will always symbolize, for him, his mother, aunts and all the other women of his youth.

Brian Hill and Neil Bartram, the two fortysomething New Yorkbased, Ontario-raised anglo Canadians responsible for transforming Belles Soeurs into English, are well aware that the hometown audience could be tough on their creation.

"What we're really trying to do is maintain the spirit of the original," said Hill, who adapted the text and structure for the English Belles Soeurs, the Musical from the 2010 French Belles Soeurs, as well as from the original play. "The one thing we all agreed on was that we didn't want to lose the power that those two pieces had."

The process to create Belles Soeurs, the Musical began in 2009. Marie-Thérèse Fortin, artistic director of Théâtre d'Aujourd'hui at the time, proposed an idea to Cyr: Why not mark the overlapping 40th-anniversary celebrations of Les Belles Soeurs and Théâtre d'Aujourd'hui with a public reading of the play?

It just so happened that Cyr and composer/musician Daniel Bélanger had been talking about doing a musical together for a long time. So Cyr wrote one Belles Soeurs song, Bélanger added the music, and soon they were on their way to meet their one-year deadline to complete the musical for the 2010 Théâtre d'Aujourd'hui season.

The show, starring Fortin as the first singing Germaine Lauzon, became a runaway Quebec hit. It toured to Paris in 2012, presented by B 14, a commercial theatre company formed for the purpose by Michel Tremblay, Cyr and Bélanger. After a triumphant return, Belles Soeurs toured the province in 2013.

By then, the English-language production was well underway, thanks to the determination and tenacity of Sandler, who fell for the French Belles Soeurs on its 2010 opening night and began negotiations for the world English-language rights the next day. Landing them was no problem. Tremblay was all for it.

But not everything went according to plan. With musical theatre, which always requires the orchestration of many components and multiple artists, it seldom does.

The first barrier was language.

One of Quebec's top theatrical translators, Linda Gaboriau, did her best. But after a staged reading in Toronto in January 2011, the verdict landed quickly. It didn't work. A lyricist was needed. And a complete rewrite was required to bring it into the realm of what one Toronto producer called "a properly structured musical."

At a point when others might have thrown in the towel, Sandler sought advice from David Mirvish, of Toronto's Mirvish Productions, and the Stratford Festival. They suggested two possible creative teams. Sandler met with both and soon decided that Hill and Bartram, who had recently had a modest Broadway hit, The Story of My Life, seemed like "the better match."

Being Canadians, Bartram and Hill knew the value of the Tremblay name and were eager to take on the challenge.

"One of the interesting things about this piece," said Bartram, who has adapted the lyrics and music, "is that the play lends itself to musical structure because of the way the monologues sit outside, the way the women speak together, in chorus. It makes a ton of sense to turn it into musical language."

It was essential to preserve the unique elements, like the setting, he added. "We didn't want to lose anything like that. The fact that we're bringing a kind of conventional theatre voice to it means not that we're erasing the charm of the original but kind of embellishing it."

In April 2011, Cyr, Bélanger, Bartram and Hill spent a week together in a cabin in Banff to hash things out.

All agree that there were tensions during the lengthy process that followed, even "explosions" within the creative team, as Cyr put it. But that's par for the course, especially when major alterations are required - like the addition of a new song or musical bridge, or the editing out of a character. For example, Cyr said, the French version started with a spoken scene. Musical theatre usually begins with a song. "They needed more score, less dialogue," he said.

At one point, Sandler insisted - with Tremblay backing him - on having everyone sign over artistic control to him, so that he would have the referee's final say. "But I never had to use it, ever," Sandler said, proudly. "From that point on, it was magic."

Prior to that pivotal moment, however, another surprise factor temporarily brought the project to an abrupt halt.

In February 2012, Sandler called a meeting and announced that he had to drop Belles Soeurs and offered to give back the rights because he was fighting Mantle Cell Lymphoma, a rare form of cancer.

As Sandler tells it, Tremblay informed him (through his agent, Nathalie Goodwin) that he had to get better because Tremblay wasn't going to let anyone else produce the Belles Soeurs musical in English.

Sandler's treatment included chemotherapy plus a stem cell transplant. "I was in isolation for three weeks," he recalled. "I had a huge picture of my kids in my room - and a copy of Les Belles Soeurs."

He swears it's what pulled him through. He's currently in full remission. (Proceeds from a fundraising performance of Belles Soeurs on Sunday will be donated to the Segal Cancer Centre.)

Keep in mind that Sandler was the guy who had a near-fatal heart attack while co-producing another original Canadian musical, Jean le Pucelle, at Place des Arts, back in 1997.

Yet going cold turkey on show business has never been an option. "It's a passion," he said. "And it's a passion that has to be fulfilled."

There's no questioning Cyr's passion, either. The actor/director who once starred in a stunning production of Tremblay's Hosanna said he first discovered the playwright's work through a televised version of another Tremblay play, En pièces détachées, when he was a teenager. "At that moment I thought to myself, I want to do this," Cyr said. "It was really an epiphany."

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