Footloose — La comédie musicale cuts loose from original movie
The English Puritans, so the old joke goes, banned people from fornicating standing up because it might lead to dancing.
Such unhinged panic over the link between sex and cutting a rug was the basis of the 1984 movie Footloose (re-made in 2011), in which a big city teen finds himself in a Hicksville hell where dancing is banned. A preposterous premise for a modernday story, one might think, until you read that the movie was based on the real-life example of Elmore City in Oklahoma.
Despite the francophone dialogue (with the occasional anglo wisecrack) in this lavish and euphoria-inducing musical from the people over at Juste pour rire, the setting for Footloose — La comédie musicale, as it was in the movie, is the American mid-west town of Bomont. There was talk of shifting it to the French-speaking town of Batoche in Saskatchewan (not in Quebec, as I mistakenly wrote in last week’s column). But that idea seems to have been dropped, perhaps because Americana still equals cool box-office allure, even when set in the back of beyond.
But one notable change from the original is the way Philippe Touzel has approached the Kevin Bacon role of Ren McCormack.
Bacon’s performance, with its earnest rebelliousness and sashaying narcissism, was very much of its time. Touzel plays Ren with a laid-back charm which, while not quite sending it all up, winningly undercuts the swagger of ’80s youth movies. His self-deprecating, off-the-cuff delivery reminded me of ’80s icon Bruce Campbell, whose knowing performances so slyly
subverted the horror of The Evil Dead films. Significantly, Touzel’s Ren lands a job which doesn’t involve sweatily lugging heavy sacks in a barn, but has him, with comic bathos, roller-skating between orders in a burger bar.
Touzel gets a tough, sassy co-star in Éléonore Lagacé, the town’s wildcat of a preacher’s daughter. Both Touzel and Lagacé shone in the talent show, La Voix, and they’re in fine voice here, particularly in the duet, Almost Paradise. Not to mention spectacularly nimble on their feet. There’s also terrific comic support from Tommy Joubert as likable lug Willard whose lumpen inability to dance inevitably blossoms into something miraculous by the final curtain.
If the pace sometimes slackens with respect to the original’s rather maudlin storyline about the town preacher learning to love, live and (almost) bust a move, Dominique Côté and Émilie Josset as, respectively, the Reverend and Mrs. Moore, bring some raw emotional authenticity backed by soaringly-delivered songs.
The winning team of director (and translator) Serge Postigo and choreographer Steve Bolton, who collaborated on last year’s Juste pour rire musical Mary Poppins, work their magic on this simplistic, but effective material for all its worth.
And what magic it sometimes is. If it never quite reaches the wow factor of Mary Poppins’s famous rooftop dance, a scene in a cowboy bar certainly has an irresistible yee-haw factor. A delicious parody of ’80s pop videos — all hair-billowing wind and strutting beefcakes — set to Bonnie Tyler’s Holding Out For a Hero is another highlight.
And, of course, all stops are pulled for the climactic dance-off to Kenny Loggins’s title track, with precision-drilled formations, jaw-dropping solo turns and bashful wallflowers suddenly transforming into somersaulting acrobats.
And let’s hear it also for set designer Pierre Étienne Locas, costume designer Denis Lavoie and light and video maestro Matthieu Larivée, who, between them, create a spectacular blend of rugged industrial landscape and candy-coloured summer party.