October 27, 2014
The Globe and MailOctober 26, 2014
By Robert Everett-Green
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With a song in their hearts, the friends of Germaine Lauzon settle down in her kitchen to mull over her good fortune and possibly to leave you feeling hopeful about human nature. No, this is not Les Belles Soeurs as you may have known it from countless stage productions since Michel Tremblay’s landmark play debuted in 1968. This is the Broadway-style, English-language musical version, now running at the Segal Centre in Montreal’s west end. Utter despair, the dominant feeling at Tremblay’s denouement, is not an option.
It was inevitable that the play would get an English musical rendering after a 2010 French musical version sold 30,000 tickets before it had even opened. Songwriter Daniel Bélanger and lyricist/book writer René Richard Cyr cut 60 per cent of the play and added 15 songs, in some cases setting monologues that make Tremblay’s work look like “a musical without music,” says book writer Brian Hill, who with songwriter Neil Bartram, was given the task of creating something that would set the toes of English Montreal a-tapping.
Tremblay’s two-act original shows what happens when Germaine, a working-class Montrealer who has won a million trading stamps, invites her friends over to help glue them into redemption books. Her personal windfall ends up inflaming all the resentments lurking under the women’s cameraderie.
When it was new, the play changed the terms of Quebec theatre almost overnight, with its kitchen-sink representation of ordinary women speaking in their own dialect. It has since gone through several major transformations, including versions in Scots (1989’s The Guid Sisters) and Yiddish (Di Shvegerius from 1992).
Bartram and Hill, who were both born in Ontario, adapted some of Bélanger’s songs, added extra music and consolidated characters. Their aim, Bartram says, was “to make an integrated musical with songs that move the plot forward,” and to brighten the piece somewhat. “We’ve put the bulk of the focus on Germaine, her daughter Linda, and her sister Pierrette, and in a way to mend those relationships,” he says. “That was probably the most worked element, to make it feel honest to the original, and yet put a more positive spin on the ending, as opposed to it being superdark,” he says.”
“With a musical,” says Hill, smoothly completing his long-time partner’s thought, “you want a part at the end that says that these women that we’ve just spent two hours with are going to wake up tomorrow and be able to go on with their lives, and will have learned something from this evening.”
A look at part of the rehearsal convinced me that while the sharpness and bitterness of Germaine Lauzon’s relationship with some of her friends remains, the work as a whole has become sweeter and friendlier than Tremblay’s often coarse play.br>
Hill and Bartram got a reputation for sweetness with their first original show together, The Story of My Life. The two-hander was roasted by critics during a Toronto run in 2006, rewritten by its makers, and relaunched in 2009 at Broadway’s Booth Theatre, where it attracted four Drama Desk nominations. But it was demolished in a review by The New York Times’s Ben Brantley, and closed after five performances.
“That was a painful experience, but the show became a big hit in Korea,” said Bartram. “They seem to like stories that are kind of emotional. We’ve got photos of weeping teenaged girls that would go to see the show.”
They say they never sought out the niche they’ve partly fallen into, and are at work on another original musical, this time a one-woman show, co-commissioned by Signature Theatre in Washington, and Toronto’s Acting Up Stage Company. “It’s about a late-middle-aged woman who walks out on her life,” is all Hill will say about it.
That sounds like the reverse of the original Les Belles Soeurs, in which the central character’s life more or less walks out on her. But it’s a safe bet that when the curtain comes down on Hill and Bartram’s new piece, no one will be left moaning, “There’s nothing left!”