Powdered wigs, Phrygian hats and… frenetic electric guitars: fifty years after its creation, La Révolution française, a 1973 musical considered the first French rock opera, returns to the stages of Paris and will be on tour next year.
Hailed as a triumphant success, the first version brought together Alain Bashung (Robespierre), Daniel Balavoine (Deputy of the Clergy), Gérard Blanc (Danton), Jean Schulteis (Fouquier-Tinville), Les Charlots and the Martin Circus (Tiers-State) .
The musical is performed for the first time since its creation on the occasion of its anniversary on the stage of the Parisian theater 13e Art until June 8. The work of Claude-Michel Schönberg, Alain Boublil, Jean-Max Rivière and Raymond Jeannot embarks this time without a headliner.
Twenty-five singers, dancers and musicians perform the complete original version, in a new production by Ned Grujic (Notre Dame de Paris, Oliver Twist, Fame, Hate, we will Rock You).
“Like many, I performed this rock opera in high school, never imagining that one day I would be asked to reinterpret it in a real theater,” Ned Grujic, who chose a stage with theatrical machinery, enthusiastically told AFP.
Rock, lyrical and pop
“An artistic phenomenon in its origin, this show is not Manichean and allows the viewer to defend both the cause of the revolutionaries and that of the king and queen, in the face of events stronger than them and beyond their control,” he says. “The program remains relevant by questioning the values of freedom, civility, respect, listening and mutual help.”
“By mixing rock, lyrical and pop, the music offers a lot of contrast. It was revolutionary in the 70s,” he adds.
For producer Pierre-Ammar Chalal, this recreation “is addressed both to those who experienced this musical phenomenon at the Sports Palace in October 1973 or in Mogador in 1974, and to today’s young French people who are said to “already They do not know how to situate the Revolution, nor define its meaning and the values that were born from it.’
This rock opera created six years before “Starmania” recounts this period of history in 36 songs and two acts, with the romantic love story between a revolutionary deputy and a young aristocrat as a backdrop.
This double album is one of the great hits of the French phonographic edition of the “seventies”. Among the hits, the song “Chouans”: “Forward!/For Saint Denis, for Saint John/Pattering heart/Forward, Chouans!”
Claude-Michel Schönberg, 79, and Alain Boublil, 83, will also be the protagonists next fall at the Théâtre du Châtelet, in Paris, with the recreation of their second equally famous rock opera, The Miserables (1979).
Source: BFM TV
