When Americans are asked to name French musicals, their go-to is “Les Misérables,” which opened in Paris in 1980 before an extensively revised English version took the world by storm a few years later.
That, or some of the films Jacques Demy directed in the 1960s, such as “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg” and “The Young Girls of Rochefort.”
Usually unmentioned on our shores are the wildly popular homegrown musicals that appeared in France in the late 1990s. But now the most famous of them, “Notre Dame de Paris,” premieres in New York on Wednesday at Lincoln Center’s David H. Koch Theater and will be on display there until July 24.
However, one of the creators has issues with the terminology used to describe his work.
“I don’t think of ‘Notre Dame de Paris’ as musical theatre,” composer Richard Cocciante said on video from Rome, where he was preparing for a concert tour in Italy. “For me it is a folk opera. That’s because it’s sung all the way through. We don’t call the songs arias, though: “Belle” or “Le temps des cathédrales” stand alone as songs,” he added, citing two of the show’s many riveting ballads and biggest hits.
Based, such as “Les Misérables”, on an epic 19th century novel by Victor Hugo (which also inspired the Disney animated film “The Hunchback of Notre Dame”, to name just one of its many adaptations), “Notre Dame de Paris successfully exploited a typically French approach to modern musicals.
The lyricist Luc Plamondon already had a successful career as a writer for artists, both in his native Quebec (a certain belter released an album of his songs in 1992, “Dion chante Plamondon”,) and in France, where he wrote the lyrics for the musical wrote “Starmania” in the late 1970s. (That perennial favorite returns to the Paris stage in November.)
Looking for another long-term project two decades later, Plamondon thought “Notre Dame de Paris” would be a suitable source and called Cocciante, who happened to have a band with unusual melodies laying around.
“The first track started off by singing ‘Time…da-da-da,'” hummed Plamondon, 80, over the phone. He had thought of the scene in the 1956 film adaptation where Anthony Quinn, as the hunchback, Quasimodo, Gina Lollobrigida’s Esmeralda, the object of all the men’s attention, begs for water. “He’s chained to the wheel and he’s saying ‘Belle… belle…’,” continued Plamondon, citing the French word for beautiful. “That gave me the idea to replace ‘time’ with ‘belle’ in the song.”
And they were gone. “From that moment on, it gushed from both of us,” said Cocciante, 76. “We wrote ‘Notre Dame de Paris’ in a kind of trance.”
In the French response to a moneylender audition, he played the score on the piano and sang all the parts for the producer Charles Talar, who signed and booked a run at the Palais des Sports in Paris for the fall of 1998.
It was fitting for Talar to get that venue, which is not a traditional theater but a cavernous concert hall, because he came from the music industry: he wanted to release an album first and build on that to sell the show. It’s an approach Andrew Lloyd Webber used successfully for “Jesus Christ Superstar” and “Evita,” but it’s generally not common in the United States and Britain, where a show precedes its recording.
“He assumed he could activate the networks he built and use some of the same strategies he used to sell records,” Nicolas Talar said on Zoom, recalling his father’s game plan. (Charles Talar passed away in 2020.) “The idea was to familiarize the audience with the music before the show started. The specificity of French musicals is that we promote them as we would promote a pop record. When one or two songs become popular, you’re the star of the moment, you’re on television and people want to see you,” he added. “The only way to hear ‘Belle’ live was to see the musical. .”
That song, a trio for the three men in love with Esmeralda, was released in the spring of 1998, months before the show’s opening, and became the best-selling single of the year in France.
“There was a miracle — I don’t know how else to describe it — of ‘Belle,'” says Daniel Lavoie, 73, who played Archdeacon Frollo in the original production and is back in the cassock for the New York run. “It lasted almost 5 minutes, which was unthinkable on the radio at the time because they didn’t play more than 3 minutes. I remember on our first TV appearance we were asked to do the song again. Then we knew we were on to something.”
Another song, “Le temps des cathédrales,” was nearly as popular—many Americans may have discovered it on Josh Groban’s 2015 album “Stages”—which cemented “Notre Dame”‘s status as the It show that year. was confirmed. And unlike in the United States, where stage personalities don’t tend to make a dent in the Billboard Hot 100, it turned cast members Garou, Patrick Fiori, and Hélène Ségara into pop stars. (Lavoie already had an established career as a singer by then.)
“Notre Dame” was so big that other producers followed in Talar’s footsteps, most notably Dove Attia, who was behind the popular “Les Dix Commandements” (2000), “Le Roi Soleil” (2005) and “Mozart, l’opéra rock” said. (2009). The latter was one of the few that really, er, rock, which may partly explain why those shows haven’t had much of an impact in Anglophone countries, where the tolerance for a high ratio of power ballads seems to be lower than in France, Russia or the South. -Korea.
A decisive step by the “Notre Dame” team was to have the cast sing live on recorded songs, which are still used in productions around the world, although the New York engagement will complement them with a full orchestra. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” Lavoie said in English, before returning to French again. “‘Notre Dame de Paris’ was conceived as a show out of time.”
“Notre Dame” has been translated into eight languages and performed in 23 countries, although the producers now prefer to present it in its original French, and so the 30-strong cast will perform it in New York (with English surtitles). Still, these and similar musicals have faced an uphill battle to win over critics at home.
“Music theater in France does not receive much critical support,” said Laurent Valière, the producer and host of the weekly program “42e Rue” on French public radio and the author of a book on musicals. “The press sucks — sometimes for good reason and sometimes not.” (Full disclosure: I’ve been a guest commentator on the show.)
The French hit factory seems to have had a problem in recent years as it struggles to find successors to the blockbusters of the 2000s. There are quirks like the biomusical “Bernadette de Lourdes”, which is based on the true story of a young girl who claimed to see the Virgin Mary and plays in Lourdes, the city where it all happened.
In a different vein, “Résiste”, a jukebox musical based on France Gall’s pop songbook, took advantage of a live band playing the original arrangements and dynamic movements thanks to music video choreographer Marion Motin.
Yet “Notre Dame de Paris” continues to exist. “Another distinguishing feature is that no matter where it’s played, it’s staged the same way,” said Nicolas Talar, who now produces and co-hosts the show in New York. (He also has production credits on Broadway’s “Funny Girl” and “Moulin Rouge! The Musical.”)
“Sometimes we wonder if the show is outdated, but the themes are always green and the music is deliberately arranged to sound timeless, so we keep putting off making changes,” he added. “So far the public has not complained and the show is doing well so we are staying on track.”