NEW SHOW RE-CREATES CITY’S NIGHTCLUB HEYDAY
Vice & Vertu immerses audience in Red Light District
Burlesque stripper Lili St. Cyr and nightclub emcee Texas Guinan provide the vice, and crusading lawyers Jean Drapeau, Pacifique (Pax) Plante along with the Morality Squad provide the virtue: The new show by the acrobatic troupe Les 7 Doigts, appropriately called Vice & Vertu, recreates Montreal’s nightclub heyday in the mid-20th century. Audience members are encouraged to dress in their best 1940s and ’50s outfits so they can feel like part of the show and better interact with performers enacting the roles of famous — and infamous — characters of the era.
“It’s not a regular show where you come in and watch it in front of you,” Samuel Tétreault, one of the founders of Les 7 Doigts and the artistic mastermind behind Vice & Vertu, said during a rehearsal in the big open space of the Verdun Auditorium. “It’s an immersive experience. You get immersed in Montreal’s Red Light District.”
Presented as part of the Montreal Complètement Cirque series and Montreal’s 375th anniversary celebrations, the show is being staged on two floors of the Société des arts technologiques (SAT) and in the small adjoining Place de la paix, both on St-Laurent Blvd. — The Main — near Ste-Catherine St., once the steamy heart of downtown Red Light activity.
“On the ground floor, we’re recreating nightclubs and cabarets like the Gayety and the Frolics. On the second floor in the Satosphere dome, with its 360-degree surround screen, the audience will be immersed in scenes from around the city — the St. Joseph Oratory, the view of the city from the Belvedere, the Jacques Cartier Bridge. You’ll feel like you’re on the bridge watching someone climbing on a lamppost.”
At the same time, other acts will be staged outdoors in front of bleachers set up in the park.
The audience of 500 will first gather indoors to watch a 20-minute prologue, then split into three groups. Each group goes to one of the three stage areas, then rotates to another area so that everyone gets to experience the whole show, though not in the same order. Everyone assembles together again for an epilogue.
From the 1930s to the early 1960s, Montreal was a roaring party town whose numerous nightclubs and cabarets featured big-name performers from the United States and Europe. If any one event signalled the start of the boom, it was probably the 1930 opening of the Cabaret Frolics with the invited emcee from New York, Texas Guinan. Born in Texas of Québécois parents, Mary Louise Cecilia Guinan grew famous during the Prohibition era as an emcee at a New York speakeasy. Her greeting to customers was “Hello, suckers!” Appearing often in Montreal, she attracted other American performers to the city and became known as the “Queen of the Main.”
“She was known for getting out there in the public, messing with people and playing with them. She liked to get people to do silly things like sing bawdy songs,” said Krin Haglund, a multidisciplinary performer who plays Guinan in the show. “I’ll be walking on bottles and I might be drinking wine with my toes.”
Even more famous than Guinan was Lili St. Cyr, whose elegantly staged strip numbers at the Gayety Burlesque, now Théâtre du Nouveau Monde, included a sensual turn in a bathtub. The bathtub act is reenacted, one reason why Virtue & Vice is restricted to audiences 18 years and up.
“Our performer, Gabrielle Côté, will be as naked as Lili was back then — pasties and micro underwear,” Tétreault said.
“Back then, stripping was made with a lot of taste. Lili considered it more of an art form than stripping in a club nowadays.”
Vice & Vertu presents the scene when St. Cyr gets arrested for immorality by the Morality Squad headed by Pacifique Plante. Plante and future mayor Jean Drapeau were also instrumental in the Caron Inquiry, which investigated police corruption.
“I play Albert Langlois, the chief of police who was charged with corruption but cleared,” said Eric Bates, a seven-year veteran of the troupe. “I’ll be juggling cigar boxes, which is actually a classic act invented back in vaudeville days and popularized by (movie comedian) W. C. Fields.”
During rehearsal, Bates and Tristan Neilsen placed a long, narrow flexible beam called a Russian bar on their shoulders and repeatedly used it to launch Alexandra Royer more than 20 feet in the air. Vice & Virtue might be costume theatre, but it is still circus in the old sense of leaping acrobats.
Like another leading Montreal circus troupe, Cirque Eloize, and some small foreign circus troupes, Les 7 Doigts has moved steadily since its founding in 2002 toward merging acrobatics and drama. There’s a characterdriven narrative to their work that often includes human themes audience members can identify with. For Cirque Eloize’s Cirkopolis show, it was big-city alienation. For the New Zealand troupe Dust Palace in The Goblin Market, it was the perils of drug abuse. Nowadays, Montreal’s National Circus School has courses in character building and esthetic presentation to go along with the purely physical work of becoming a circus performer.
“The 7 Fingers (les 7 Doigts) let the artists get very involved in building their own numbers. They don’t tell you, ‘This is what you should do,’ ” Haglund said. “I really respect that. Little moments of personal input make the artist feel like it’s theirs.”
Beyond the morality or immorality of nightclubs, Vice & Virtue also touches on the long struggle for Quebec women’s right to vote in provincial elections, which culminated finally in 1940. Thérèse Casgrain and McGill professor Idola St. Jean led the fight to get a women’s voting bill passed in the National Assembly. The initial rejection of the bill is shown as a balancing act with Marie-Eve Dicaire and Geneviève Drolet playing the two activists.
Other colourful characters and incidents from earlier Montreal pop up in Vice & Vertu, including one of St. Cyr’s lovers, reporter Al Palmer of the defunct Montreal Herald as well as The Gazette. He trolled the underground for gossip and lore. His 1950 book, Montreal Confidential, is a rich source of information about after-hours Montreal. The foreword to the book’s 2009 re-issue is by another former Gazette reporter, William Weintraub, whose 1996 book, City Unique, is also a highly readable account of the 1940s local scene by someone who lived it.
Vice & Vertu’s approach owes much to the award-winning show called Queen of the Night that Les 7 Doigts staged for more than a year at New York’s offBroadway Diamond Horseshoe theatre. The goal was to immerse the audience dining on gourmet food in acts going simultaneously on three separate stages.
“People walked around and got pulled to the side for a little personal interaction,” said Bates, one of those doing the pulling.
The show won the 2015 New York Drama Desk Award. Vice & Vertu might well start a grand immersive trend.