Between 1939 and 1960, Montreal enjoyed a period when it operated as an "open city".
It was a time when vice such as prostitution and illegal gambling houses called "Blind Pigs", and graft amongst the Montreal Police Department and city hall, ran rampant. Popular nightclubs like the El Morocco, the Esquire Showbar and the Normandie Roof hosted some of the biggest American entertainers at that time. And Montrealers could read all about the swinging nightlife in their hometown via the screaming bold headlines on the front pages of the Montreal Gazette, the Montreal Daily Star and the Montreal Herald (where they could get the latest nightlife dope in Al Palmer's widely-read "Man About Town" column).
In fact, Montreal was the original "Sin City" before Las Vegas inherited the title and has kept it to this day.
But the cornerstone of Montreal's naughty open city nightlife was the Gayety Theatre on the corner of St. Urbain and St. Catherine streets, where American-born stripper Lili St. Cyr made it her home base, as her risque burlesque-style shows throughout most of the 1940s caused a sensation -- and a scandal -- with her Montreal fans and detractors.
However, by the beginning of the 1950s, a big change was to overcome the adult playground that was downtown Montreal. Pacifique ("Pax") Plante, a crusading member of the Montreal Police Department, first as head of the vice squad and then as chief of police, decided to undertake a major clean-up of the city; and his main target was Lili St. Cyr and her titillating shows that constantly filled the Gayety Theatre whenever she was in town.
And now, more than 60 years later, George Bowser and Rick Blue, Montreal's satirical troubadours par excellence, pays tribute to the wild side of Montreal's open city era in their musical romp "Last Night at the Gayety", which caps off the Centaur Theatre's 2015-2016 season from now until May 15.
The show takes place in 1951, when Plante begins his anti-vice clean up campaign in earnest, first as a series of expository articles in the newspaper Le Devoir (which also became a sensational best selling book), and then through a series of raids throughout the city's many bordellos, gambling houses and nightclubs. And with the help of the powerful Catholic Church -- in the form of the equally crusading Father d'Anjou -- Plante aims his vice cleansing sights on the Gayety Theatre in general, and Lili St. Cyr's moral corrupting burlesque shows in particular.
The show magically recaptures the glitz and bright lights of Montreal's adult playground era of 70 years ago, from the boudoir style of Ms. St. Cyr's dressing room, to those colourful neon signs that loudly pronounced the boisterous clubs that dotted the downtown landscape, to those eye brow-raising spectacles that filled the Gayety ... silk stockings, bubble-filled bathtub and all. And Bowser & Blue's signature satirical sound is prevalent throughout the songs that make up the show's musical score, and entertainingly sets up the story of Montreal's vice-ridden history, from the grittiness of Griffintown, to how Plante has to grow a large pair of balls to be Montreal's top cop, to how the city thrived on the trio of casinos, bordellos and booze.
And the ensemble cast works so well together to make this piece of Montreal history come alive, especially Daniel Brochu as Pax Plante (who bears quite the resemblance to the real-life anti-vice crusader); Michel Perron as Father d'Anjou (who convincingly exhibits the power behind the cassock in Quebec during those pre-Quiet Revolution years); Holly Gauthier-Frankel as Molly, the wide-eyed young girl who wants to escape her humdrum life in Griffintown for the tantalizing excitement of the Gayety stage; Davide Chiazze as Jimmy, the Montreal mobster who has his own drum rimshot every time he delivers his vaudeville-style one-liners; and special kudos goes to Julia Juhas' performance as Lili St. Cyr, who recaptures the scandalous spirit of this legendary stripper with every bump and grind she performs onstage (and here's a piece of dramatic coincidence: the entire cast of the show are from Montreal with one exception ... Julia Juhas -- who is from Toronto -- which sort of parallels that of Lili St. Cyr, the Montreal sensation who was actually born in the United States).
"Last Night at the Gayety" is an entertaining snapshot of a Montreal that is no more, but in all of its red light glory. It's a fun way to discover a chapter of Montreal history that many of today's generation of Montrealers are seldom familiar with, and is a rousing time capsule-type of salute to a Montreal that went from a sin city during the 40s and 50s to an international city thanks to Expo '67 and the 1976 Summer Olympics.
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