October 27, 2014
The Toronto StarOctober 26, 2014
By Richard Ouzounian
Read the review
MONTREAL—“I want it all!” is the message that Astrid Van Wieren belted to the rafters in the first number of Belles Soeurs, which opened at the Segal Centre Thursday night and it’s a dream that the people behind this highly entertaining musical have a very good chance of seeing realized.
Once you get past the idea that the savage satire on Quebec society that Michel Tremblay penned as Les Belles-soeurs nearly 50 years ago has been turned into an ingratiating musical comedy not likely to bring a blush to anyone’s cheek, you’ll be able to sit back and enjoy the show’s numerous delights.
First among them is a cast of 12 knockout women, many of them familiar to Toronto audiences, who sing with gusto, act with panache and provide the jet propulsion that keeps moving the show forward, even when director René Richard Cyr seems to have nodded off at the helm. Cyr is also responsible for the show’s book and original French lyrics. The script keeps the bones of Tremblay’s original notion of a greedy woman named Germaine Lauzon, who forces all her neighbours and friends to come over and paste the one million trading stamps she has won into the appropriate books so she can redeem them for a horde of ultimately worthless gifts.
Although most people under the age of 50 won’t remember trading stamps, they were the loyalty points of their day and they provide a brilliant metaphor for the bogus dreams of bourgeois society that these ladies have all bought into.
Tremblay used this forced meeting of the dozen women to make his points about the social, sexual and religious hypocrisy of the day, but Cyr has pulled a lot of punches in his script. The messages remain but not the searing venom that were originally behind them.
Brian Hill’s English adaptation moves smoothly and falls pleasingly on the ear but — taking its cue from Cyr’s original — lacks the necessary grit. One wishes the language had tried to capture the raunchier side of joual that was one of the great revelations of Tremblay’s script.
Daniel Bélanger’s music is almost invariably tuneful but better on the uptempo numbers than the lachrymose ballads the Quebecois are fond of. Neil Bartram has adapted the music and added some material, but the program gives no clue who wrote what.
Bartram’s English lyrics fit the music so well you’d never know they were translations and, except for the odd mistake (Why would they sing “A to Zee” instead of “A to Zed” in Canada?), they’re full of snappy local references, appropriate and witty. Are they raunchy enough? Alas, no. But that’s part of the whole PG13 tone of the evening
. Still, while the material sometimes falters, the cast never do. Van Wieren is an absolute life force as Germaine, holding the evening together and making this tyrannical woman somehow likable without sugar-coating her.
Stephanie McNamara has the perfect slatternly yet appealing quality that Germaine’s sister Rose needs to bring to the party and Genevieve Leclerc is a knockout as the “fallen” sister, Pierrette, bringing the one true touch of trash from The Main that electrifies the proceedings.
Lisa Horner drips disdain as the snootiest of the bunch; Valerie Boyle is perfection as the bore with an endless description of her daughter’s wedding and Paula Wolfson charms us all with her portrait of an uptight woman who finds happiness sipping ginger ale at a club one night a week.
The cast are all good and the songs they sing head and shoulders above what we normally get in our national musical theatre. All the show needs at this point is the nerve to put back in a bit more of the bite of Tremblay’s original and to allow author Cyr to pass the staging baton to someone who could invigorate the proceedings. Then maybe this potential rocket ship of a musical could blast off into the thinly populated stratosphere of truly s