Reviews 2013
Reviews 2013
✭✭✩✩✩
by Luc Moquin, directed by Mathieu Charette
Théâtre français de Toronto, Berkeley Street Theatre Upstairs, Toronto
October 25-November 2, 2013;
Auditorium de l’ESP De la Salle, Ottawa
November 6-9, 2013
Whoever Thought a Sci-Fi Urban Western Spy Musical Was a Good Idea?
The five-year partnership between Théâtre français de Toronto and Théâtre La Catapulte of Ottawa has been a fruitful one, culminating just earlier this year in a ground-breaking new interpretation of Michel Tremblay’s Albertine en cinq temps. What a pity then that this collaboration should conclude with such a misfire as the world premiere of Luc Moquin’s play with songs, Le fa le do.
The plot of Le fa le do – a play on two solfeggio syllables and the musical genre fado –is its main liability. The show begins inauspiciously with a chorus of singing stereo speakers making the mistaken assertion that what an audience wants in a musical is an adventure with good guys and bad guys. We then meet the archivist Albert (Raymond Accolas), who has been hired to weed out 90% of the holdings of an archive of recorded sound. Nearing the age of retirement, he is dismayed at the idea since archives are supposed to preserve information, but his supervisor (Andrée Rainville) claims the building has run out of space. In sorting through the holdings, Albert becomes enchanted with the voice of a singer of Portuguese fado music and wants to find out who she is. He employs the spy Colette (Rainville) to help him in his search.
The scene shifts to the young scientist Julien (Philip Van Martin), who is working to find an elixir of youth based on dictation by a scientist named Jerzy Bronowski and has just succeeded in rejuvenating a preserved heart. This pleases his manic boss Alice (Sasha Dominique), who is also his aunt, and only makes her demand that Julien work harder since, as we discover, she wishes to sell his discovery to a mysterious foreign government whose representatives dress rather like the Jawa traders from Star Wars. Julien’s work is impeded because the last tape of Bronowski’s notes has disappeared.
The scene shifts again to Jean-Daniel (Erick Fournier), a trader from Bay Street, who becomes fed up with his boring life and takes on the persona of an urban cowboy – hat, chaps, spurs, lasso and all. His goal as a kind of superhero without powers is to help people in need, though in practice it means helping people obtain illicit material.
Besides all this, there is Agnès (Geneviève Dufour), who sings fado at a jazz club in Toronto and is looking for the people who killed her father in an explosion in his laboratory. Julien eventually falls in love with Agnès, but she is more intrigued by the fact that he is working on the same project her late father was working on when he died.
If you think this description of the plot confusing and hard to follow, that’s because it is. The story is an uneasy mélange of elements of science fiction, the western and spy movies. If postmodernism were still in vogue, we would say that Moquin was playing with mixing up various genres. But postmodernism was big back in the 1980s, so Moquin’s enterprise comes across as silly and dated. Watching an author mix up genres is not enough since unless the mix makes some sort of sense it is simply an empty exercise. Le fa le do rather emphatically does not make sense. The ending, in particular, is dictated by Moquin’s desire for irony rather than the logic of the action.
The actors try to make the most of the paper-thin characters. If Moquin had wanted to write a serious piece, Accolas could have been quite moving in his portrayal of an elderly man whose life is renewed by the magical voice he encounters. Unfortunately, Moquin rejects that possibility in favour of schlock. The romance between the shy, sensitive Julien and the equally shy Agnès is briefly appealing until Moquin ruins that too by heaping on the plot twists instead of exploring what could have been interesting characters. Fournier is very funny and a good country-and-western singer even if his character and his presence in the show never make sense. Sasha Dominque shamelessly overacts throughout as the villain of the piece and is too over the top to be funny. Rainville is great at distinguishing the numerous roles she plays, but what the display of her numerous circus skills – juggling, hoops, contortion – has to do with anything in the story remains a mystery. It may be that Moquin or director Mathieu Charette is just trying to distract us from the vapidity of the play. In any case, Charette seems to have trouble deciding how much of the show is a send-up and how much is serious with the result that it succeeds as neither.
The TfT has reached so many highs recently I suppose we have to allow it the occasional low, but it is still disappointing to see so much talent wasted on so obviously ludicrous a project. Since there is no point to Le fa le do, there is also no point in seeing it even if you love musicals. Just wait a bit because the TFT has many better shows lined up for later this season.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: (from top) The cast in the opening number of Le fa le do; Geneviève Dufour as Agnès. ©2013 Marc LeMyre.
For tickets, visit http://theatrefrancais.com.
2013-10-27
Le fa le do