If the content you are seeing is presented as unstyled HTML your browser is an older version that cannot support cascading style sheets. If you wish to upgrade your browser you may download Mozilla or Internet Explorer for Windows.

Pied de Poule

Musical theatre in two acts by Marc Drouin premiered at La Polonaise in Montreal, Quebec, in April 1982, directed by the the author with music and musical direction by Robert Léger and additional music by Normand Brathwaite. It featured Brathwaite, Nathalie Gascon, Marc Labrèche, Geneviève Lapointe, Frédérike Bédard, André Lacoste and Mario Légaré.

A cynical, anti-establishment look at Hollywood PQ (Province de Québec), and at the music industry as well. There are inside jokes about the flash-in-the-pan stars created by the flash-in-the-pan heavily subsidized D-movie industry of the 1970-80s in Montreal, a crack about another musical along similar themes - Starmania - and some punchy questions about "innocence" and "victims."

Through his central character, François Tremblay (who becomes the mega-star François Perdu/The Lost), Drouin posits that the money and fame of the times - however fleeting - were seductive to artists here only because there was something corrupt at the core of the québécois cultural persona. The victims of the play (François and Olive Houde who are eaten alive by the industry) are not sweet and naïve - they are as greedy as the rest.

The piece provoked enthusiastic audience reaction and was subsequently revived in 1991. The press liked the work with Montreal's Le Devoir calling it, "A gem of imagination, a funny show, tight, particularly well written...absolutely everything, in Pied de Poule, is impeccable."

Commentary by Gaetan Charlebois.

Last updated 2016-10-03