His song Luc Plamondon's

Sunday, January 16, 2000

His song Luc Plamondon's
English-language breakthrough was a Titanic hitwill go on By KIERAN GRANT -- Toronto Sun
 Luc Plamondon's songs have won him massive success in his home province, Quebec.

 His musicals have made him a household name in France.

 Suggest that his fame is spreading to the English-speaking world, however, and the veteran lyricist shrugs so hard it looks like he's cringing.

"I've never dreamed of being known in the English-speaking world, and I've
been writing songs for 30 years," Plamondon says on a recent visit to Toronto to promote Notre Dame de Paris. The French-language musical begins a week-long run at the Pantages Theatre on Saturday.

 In his prolific songwriting career, Plamondon has made at least one enormous English breakthrough -- a worldwide hit. His song L'Amour Existe Encore was translated into Celine Dion's inescapable Titanic hit, My Heart Will Go On, which won both an Oscar for best original song and a Grammy for record of the year.

 Notre Dame, based on Victor Hugo's classic novel, sold out Paris' Palais de Congres for six months in 1998 and spawned an album which sold five million copies. It made its Toronto premiere last year with a sold-out week at the Princess Of Wales Theatre.

 While one of the show's current companies prepares to perform here again, another will debut in Las Vegas on Friday.

 An English-language version of the musical is set for a London premiere in May.

 All this stands to make Plamondon even busier, and richer, than he already is -- which, frankly, doesn't have him dancing in the aisles.

 Slumped coolly in a black suit and hiding a jet-lagged pair of eyes behind dark shades, the 57-year-old is dry but funny, quiet but forthcoming. And dog-tired.

 He says he wants to take a long hiatus like his friend Dion is doing. He helped Dion rehearse a number with the Notre Dame de Paris cast for her New Year's Eve farewell concert in Montreal.

"It's incredible what she can do in one week," he says.

"But she really needs, and wants, a rest. I'm at the same point. I just
feel like stopping everything. I can't. I want to stop doing interviews and flying so I can write again. This is not the life I dream of.

"I was happier when I had no money, no glory, no fame. But when you have a
week to travel, you just go to an island and rest for seven days, and afterward you think, 'What a waste of time.' "

 He chuckles: "I used to spend two months in India, or Morocco, or Brazil or Italy. I write when I travel, and I travelled when I had nothing else to do. I can't write in Paris or Montreal."

 That's not exactly the kind of pomp and circumstance you might expect from a man who has been trumpeted in some theatrical quarters as the next Andrew Lloyd Webber.

 But Plamondon is experienced enough to know better.

"I'm the man behind (the musicals), and in that sense I can be compared to
Webber," he says. "But creatively, I'm more like (Webber's lyricist partner) Tim Rice. I always wanted to do theatre but I had to make a living."

 Raised on a farm near the town of Saint-Raymond, he grew up among the last vestiges of Quebec's Catholic feudal system. He once planned to become a priest, but by his mid-teens a dual love for pop music (Elvis), books and plays (Hemingway, Sarte) had eclipsed the conservatism of the seminary. He got his BA in literature from the Universite de Montreal and studied in Paris and New York before writing his first hit, Dans Ma Camero, in 1971.

 Plamondon's first official pop muse arrived later that decade in the form of Diane Dufresne, who ultimately recorded seven albums of his material.

"She was the number-one singer in the '70s in Quebec, and the first female
rock singer in the French language. She had an actor's talent and was able to transform herself and make believe and become a different person in a song. I've never found another like her. She was my ideal interpret, as we say in French."

 Over the years, Plamondon also wrote for Francoise Hardy and a number of other French singers. He fulfilled his goal of creating a musical in 1978 when he teamed up with composer Michel Berger for the francophone hit Starmania, later to be anglicized by Rice. (Berger died of a heart attack in the early '90s, leaving Plamondon to oversee Notre Dame on his own.)

"Between 1970 and 1975, I must have written 200 songs," he says. "I was
able to stop for two or three years and write Starmania."

 While Plamondon might have never found another like Diane Dufresne, Dion launched her career after recording his Starmania song Ziggy in the '80s. She recorded an entire album of his songs in the form of Dion Chante Plamondon in 1992.

"I'd planned to stop writing songs for singers. Of course, when Celine came
and asked for songs, I couldn't say no."

 Plamondon says that the story-based quality of French songwriting lent itself to theatre. Much in the way that he wrote characters for Dufresne to portray in pop songs, he could create characters to be portrayed on stage.

 In the French tradition

"The problem when you write for a star is the public doesn't always make
the difference," he says. "Let's say, in the tradition of French song, Charles Aznavour sings a song about a gay guy, but no one thinks Aznavour is gay because he sings 'I'm gay' in his song. When Edith Piaf sang a song about a mad woman, nobody thought she was talking about herself.

"Now, a singer doesn't want to sing a song when they think it's not them."

 Likewise, Notre Dame is purposefully short at two hours, with more songs than dialogue. Plamondon hired avant-garde Quebec director Gilles Maheu for the project to avoid a big, flashy spectacle.

"It had to be staged in a more abstract way in order to make room for the
songs," he says. "I've been criticized for that by critics from the English-speaking world. Not in France. But most of the theatre directors who came from New York agree it's probably a new way of doing musicals, because it's shorter, it's snappy, it's two hours full of songs.

"Today, people watch television, they zap, they're used to being told much
faster stories than before. When you watch the old television series, it took them 15 minutes to say what they say in one minute today."

The LUC PLAMONDON File

 On the inspiration for Notre Dame de Paris: "I was fascinated by the fact that nobody had thought of turning it into a musical before. Then I was told in London last year that this producer had received about three versions a year since the creation of Les Miserables. He turned them all down."

 On the story: "I reduced it to seven characters. It could have been 40 characters. I didn't want to do a big show, an historical show. I wanted to take down the story to its very heart. It's interesting that it's a story written in 1831 and set in 1482, and the world hasn't changed that much.

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Mathieu Received on Sun Jan 16 2000 - 23:03:31 PST