The slowly ascending curtain reveals 70s-ish high heels, then some leg, then high hemlines, then fourteen garishly attired members of the Chorus, some of indeterminate gender. These are whores and cross-dressers of every sexual persona, a loud bunch of aggressively conceived types imbued with despairing lifelessness. “My shoes are killing me” complains one, “I didn’t turn a trick “ frets another, and the bra of the tall guy is level with the forehead of a short whore. But salvation is at hand, for they announce “This morning the sun rose at the end of St. Catherine Street.”
The “sun” turns out to be Carmen, a surprisingly diminutive presence. She too is garishly attired, not in blood red like the chorus, but in tacky, shiny silver. Sporting a wig of long and straight blond hair, she walks on pin-point high heels. Her whiney voice is one of limited expression, one that finds emphasis either in volume or physical gesture, an everyday voice one hears in city streets. We don’t sense the dynamic force we are told that she is; we can’t imagine her handling a rowdy crowd in a bar and being an inspiration to them.
To be sure, Carmen, in the writing of playwright Michel Tremblay, is as much a cause, the expression of Quebec’s spirit of its humanity, as a socially pivotal entertainer of Montreal’s seedy streets who can change lives as she sings. Be it Peter Hinton’s direction of the play’s central character or Laara Sadiq’s unimposing performance, it is hard to imagine what all the fuss is about. At times one feels unreached by this Carmen, at other times moved, but abstractly. She does seem appropriately sacrificial, but not all that fated.
The production, however, is theatrically gripping for the most part, with several stunning performances in this disturbingly red setting. The chorus charms, each one with an individualized humanity, each one ablaze with pain and palpable sadness for which there is little remedy. These people are touching in their hope, they are fun as they keep their lives above water in their grubby milieu. Most striking of all is their tightly grouped scene in which the Chorus chants what sounds like a hybrid of a rain dance on the Great Plains and Stockhausen’s works for voices. Because Tremblay’s inspiration is Greek tragedy, the chorus effectively provides, throughout, the production’s underpinning of fate doing its thing with human lives.
Among individual performances, Diane D’Aquila, dressed convincingly –or is it ambiguously- male in a suit, makes a fully conceived and realized Hairlip. This Hairlip is an individual of complex psychology revealed in subtle shadings of the voice, in deeply rooted nuances of facial expression, and telling bodily gestures. Thus D’Aquila’s performance provides the human core of the production and proves that one can be of both human and epic dimension at one go.
Jean Leclerc’s Maurice represents humanity’s unprincipled underbelly. He’s a scowly surly, cynical, implicitly aggressive, boorish , ungiving hustler of a business man. As one who has only a dollar sign as his guiding light, Maurice takes dim view of Carmen’s desire to sing the lives of her audience and be their “sun.” “You’re here to provide entertainment and get the guys all hot,” he says. “You’re just another cunt.”. Leclerc’s brutally realized performance makes one feel dirty in his presence.
As does Joey Tremblay’s Toothpick, a hit man who is ironically creepy and cowardly, a man who hates Carmen because she found much amusement in “ his tiny little cock”. The genitalially-challenged Toothpick eventually kills Carmen, offstage of course, tries to defame her as well, and we don’t like this character either. But Tremblay, via the pointed and extroverted translation of Linda Gaboriau, certainly makes the crucial point that those whom one would save are sometimes soon one’s deadly enemies. And that’s archetypal stuff again.
An imposing Jackie Richardson, made huger in her bountiful dress, plays Gloria who was once Carmen’s mentor and is now her envious competition on the Main. She remembers her prime in the good old days before the Main was “a large French fry stand” and is blunt, deeply unkind and decidedly mocking of Carmen’s existential claim to purpose as a saviour-entertainer. She can’t realize that Carmen’s destiny is not merely to entertain, but to save the lost souls of what Maurice calls “lowlifes, drunks and drug addicts” around her.
Carmen’s return to the Main has immense impact on the characters of this play, so we are told. “It feels like someone is taking me down the river, washing me clean” says the chorus. Why? Because Carmen, newly returned from Nashville and freed from its clichéd schtick, now sings in her own words, and not Nashville’s, the lives of her own people. One hooker responds with “Carmen said things in her songs that were actually my life”. Another says, “ She said that my story was beautiful.” But we are not shown the causal origin of this impact.
As a symbolic ritual of Quebec finding its voice, this play, when first produced, no doubt gave recognition and celebration to a people long demeaned for the unique individuality of their culture and spirit. The lives of a whole province, just like those of a seedy Montreal street, could claim inherent dignity and worth. Naturally, even in Hinton’s dynamic and concictently entertaining production, Tremblay’s passionate assertion of Quebec’s soul now resonates more in retrospect, at least in Toronto. Nevertheless Canadian Stage has again offered rich theatricality in a production of a work not often mounted locally. Thus, as a result, one has the pleasure of both (re)discovery and escaping the tried and true.