“A contemporary poet”, “a songwriter”… For fifty years already, Alain Souchon has been talking about us, about childhood, about the funny world around us. For Françoise Gillard, member of the Comédie-Française, it deserved a tribute, like that, seemingly nothing…
A rustic living room-kitchen, with its farmhouse table, comfortable leather armchairs, luminous globe. It is in this warm setting that Françoise Gillard, designer and director of the show , succeeds in evoking Alain Souchon with a few female accomplices and three musicians. As if at the end of a dinner with friends we all decided to take up together the repertoire of a singer we love.
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A personal light on the songs
Six actresses from different generations (Coraly Zahonero, Françoise Gillard, Danièle Lebrun, Claire de La Rûe du Can, Yasmine Haller, Emma Laristan) and with a lovely voice, each give a personal light to the songs. Thus the delicious Danièle Lebrun interprets Hello boo mom, with this very Souchonian detachment and mischievous eye. Claire de La Rûe du Can, she exposes The world is changing that she delivers to us like a poem, dwelling more on the text. As for the two young students of the Academy: one (Yasmine Haller) gives tremendous anger and power to Disgust and to sentimental crowd ; the other (Emma Laristan), brings to I am 10 years old a mixture of ingenuity and rabble.
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Stripping full of charm
“His songs are like polaroids that reveal our image and that of society”, notes Françoise Gillard who connects in her show joyful moments and those more intimate, quite naturally drawing the portrait of the anti-hero of I’m bogusa tube machine, as discreet as it is popular.
A one-hour stripping full of charm: his childhood love for Apollinaire, his shyness, his roles in the cinema ( Killer Summer with Isabelle Adjani…), his composition of the original song of love on the run of Truffaut, his gently rebellious side “who makes him walk on the grass, beside the road”, and of course the artistic complicity with Laurent Voulzy.
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We have the pleasure of discovering, for many of us, lesser-known creations such as The sailor Or The Theodore Life, in homage to a great desert traveler, Théodore Monod. We sometimes hear the singer’s voice in tasty extracts from interviews or television reports. But the Ballad of Souchon also knows how to preserve a part of mystery. As Danièle Lebrun says: “Souchon when he complains it’s pretty.”
“The Ballad of Souchon” by Françoise Gillard and Amélie Wendling
Directed by Françoise Gillard
With Coraly Zahonero, Françoise Gillard, Danièle Lebrun, Claire de La Rüe du Can, Yasmine Haller, Emma Laristan
The musicians: Yannick Debornes, Mathieu Serradell, Florence Hennequin
From January 26 to March 5, 2023 at 6:30 p.m.
Studio Theater of the Comédie-Française
99 rue de Rivoli
Louvre Carrousel Gallery, Paris 1st
