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      France Cheers For ‘Starmania,’ Its Favorite Musical

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      Songs from “Starmania” are frequently heard and covered in France, but until a new production opened in Paris, few had a chance to see the 1979 rock opera onstage.PARIS — Imagine a musical so beloved that on opening night, its lyricist receives a standing ovation before the show even starts. That’s what happened here Tuesday night. As the songwriter walked to his seat, the audience at La Seine Musicale couldn’t contain their excitement — starting with Brigitte Macron, the wife of President Emmanuel Macron of France.No, this musical wasn’t “Les Misérables.” (In fact, while it was originally created in French, few people in the country are aware of the existence of “Les Miz,” or the wild popularity of its English-language version.) The occasion was the long-awaited return of “Starmania,” a dystopian rock opera that has turned into a singular French phenomenon since it was first heard in the 1970s.Of the numbers co-written by Michel Berger, who died in 1992, and Luc Plamondon, whose appearance triggered the ovation on Tuesday, at least 15 — like “Need For Love” and “The World Is Stone” — are frequently heard and covered in the world of French popular music, with their eloquent lyrics that speak of loneliness, power struggles and rebellion. Yet “Starmania” itself has been elusive onstage.It’s not entirely surprising: Like many examples of the rock opera, a genre born in Britain in the 1960s, “Starmania” started life as a concept album, albeit one with a complex, multicharacter plot set in a futuristic global city, Monopolis. The first theatrical run, in 1979, lasted only a month, and the last full stage production in France — a country where musical theater isn’t especially popular — was back in the 1990s. An English version, “Tycoon,” written by Tim Rice, was released as an album starring Cyndi Lauper, Céline Dion and Tom Jones in 1992, but never took off in theaters.This poses unique challenges for any director looking to tackle “Starmania.” Even as the songs remained cultural touchstones, the narrative’s twists and turns have faded from memory. For instance, few know that “The Businessman’s Blues,” an idealistic number about an entrepreneur who yearns to be an artist, is actually sung by Zéro Janvier, a disingenuous real estate tycoon turned fascist political leader.It was time to rediscover Berger and Plamondon’s socially prescient work. In Monopolis, the capital of the newly unified West, Janvier is running for president on a law-and-order platform, against the environmentalist Gourou Marabout. Around them, would-be Monopolis influencers chase fame on TV, while a gang of punk rebels, the Black Stars, sow violence in the streets.The current, pandemic-delayed revival at La Seine Musicale, an impersonal venue in the Paris suburb of Boulogne, was entrusted to Thomas Jolly. This 40-year-old director is having a banner year: In September, he was announced as the artistic director of the opening and closing ceremonies for the 2024 Paris Olympics and Paralympics, a plum job that will put him in the international spotlight. While Jolly’s flamboyant style has long been divisive with French critics, his fondness for laser lights and over-the-top special effects may serve him well on the Olympic stage, and it is on full display in “Starmania.”Manet-Miriam Baghdassarian as Sadia in “Starmania.”Anthony DorfmannI can’t recall ever seeing so much lighting equipment. The lighting design — or rather, the laser choreography — was created by Thomas Dechandon, and several key numbers are sung without sets, under a canopy of lights flashing furiously to the beat. Right before the climax of “The Businessman’s Blues,” trap doors open onstage, and a small army of additional spotlights rear their mole-like heads.Eye-watering electricity bill aside, it is a staging choice that wows at first, yet offers diminishing returns over the course of the three-hour show. Perhaps because of the demands of touring, since “Starmania” will be performed around France, Belgium and Switzerland over the next year, Emmanuelle Favre’s sets are fairly minimal. A rotating, towerlike structure is the most distinctive element, and effective when representing Naziland, the nightclub where Janvier awaits the election results.Berger and Plamondon created an improbably rich world, and there was room to imagine just how Monopolis — a city of skyscrapers and underground tunnels — might feel. Yet even the Underground Café, whose waitress Marie-Jeanne acts as the story’s narrator, is a quasi-blank space.The real star of “Starmania,” though, is the music. Not only does each of the eight lead roles have at least one vocally acrobatic solo turn, but most audience members still have the exact texture and phrasing of past performers in mind. In a nod to the 1970s cast, the well-known French singer France Gall appears in a hologram in one scene.Gall’s silhouette drew applause, as did many of the songs — not when they ended, but as soon as the first words were heard. At least a dozen times over the course of the first night, the six-strong band and singers would start a number, only to be drowned out by cries of joy. Rather than a new production, “Starmania” often felt like a collective trip down memory lane, tapping into layers of emotion that have accumulated over decades.The weight of expectations must be daunting, but the large cast of singers from France and Canada were brilliantly fearless. (Unforgivably, their names weren’t listed anywhere in the theater or on the production’s website.) David Latulippe avoided egregious villain mannerisms as Janvier, and had a superb match in Magali Goblet (known as Maag), who brings weary depth to the role of Stella Spotlight, a broken actress Janvier seeks out as his consort.Stella gets some of the most virtuosic, heartbreaking numbers, starting with “The Farewell of a Sex Symbol,” which lays bare the mental health toll of being objectified as a young actress. The cult of celebrity, and its darker side, are the overarching theme of the plot. In the musical, “Starmania” is the name of a TV show that promises instant fame to a lucky few. Ziggy (Adrien Fruit), a record dealer, falls into that trap, abandoning his friend Marie-Jeanne to chase success with Janvier.As Marie-Jeanne, Jolly and his team cast a nonbinary performer who uses male pronouns, Alex Montembault. He is the heart and soul of the show, with an understated simplicity that contrasts with showier personalities, like Manet-Miriam Baghdassarian, who brings darkly intimidating energy to the gender-fluid character of Sadia, a Black star described as a transvestite.The word may be dated, but here again, “Starmania” makes space for questions around gender that are far more common today than they were in the 1970s. And it does so with a songbook so saturated with memories for many who have grown up in France that there is joy — and occasionally melancholy — in simply mouthing along to the lyrics.Jolly has crafted a production that may not be subtle, but it is generic and spectacular enough to make space for newcomers as well as audience members who grew up with “Starmania.” After over two decades without an opportunity to see it onstage, that’s enough of a gift.Starmania. Directed by Thomas Jolly. La Seine Musicale, through Jan. 29. More

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      Anne Bogart Is Not Entirely Retiring

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      The theater director Anne Bogart first made a splash with the radical student productions she put on while teaching at New York University in the early 1980s. Her “South Pacific” (1984), for example, was conceived as the show that veterans in a mental institution performed as part of their therapy. Legend has it that the Rodgers and Hammerstein estate snuffed out the production, but Bogart clarified that it simply denied an extension. “It’s more dramatic to say they shut us down,” she said, chuckling.Under Bogart’s leadership, the New York City-based Saratoga International Theater Institute (SITI) Company, formed by a group of artists in 1992, spent three decades exploring experimental outposts in both original creations like “Bob,” “The Medium” and “Hotel Cassiopeia” and re-imaginings of classics, often by ancient Greek playwrights.The group’s emphasis was on rigorous actor training and the performers’ physicality. Bogart’s approach involves “decentering emotion and re-centering the body,” said Jay Wegman, the director of N.Y.U. Skirball, which presented SITI’s “Radio Macbeth” last month. “I love how metaphorical her work is. It becomes an event, and there’s almost a mystical feeling because everything comes together so tightly in her stagings.”Now, SITI is ending its producing activities. “It came down to whether we are an institution — in which case you get a younger, more diverse company and a young artistic director — or a group of people,” Bogart, 71, said. “After a great deal of quite emotional discussion, we decided that we’re a group of people. I think that the legacy is more how we offer a model for future young companies: a collaborative ensemble whose focus is not on real estate but on the plays they do.”Bogart, center, with Kelly Maurer as Andy Warhol in a 1990s production of “Culture of Desire.” Dolly Faibyshev for The New York TimesBogart is not entirely retiring. She will remain a professor in Columbia University’s directing program, whose alumni include Rachel Chavkin, Jay Scheib, Diane Paulus and Jeffrey L. Page, until 2026. She will also continue to direct on a freelance basis.Although SITI is presenting “A Christmas Carol” at Bard College (spearheaded by the co-director Darron L West) from Dec. 16-18, this felt like a good time to look back, especially since the company’s digital archives are going live on its website on Nov. 15, and a book, “SITI Company: This Is Not a Handbook,” is due soon via Yonkers International Press. Bogart spoke in a video chat from London shortly after the latest (and last) SITI gala. The event prefaced a revival of the company’s production of “War of the Worlds” and turned into a heartfelt tribute to the director. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.What were some of the fundamental things that you all agreed on when starting SITI?The actors met at a diner and asked each other: “What does it mean to be a SITI Company member?” Every year they renewed that question, and they always had the same answer: We train together. It’s the cement that’s kept us going over time. Not only do they train together and learn together, but they teach that training, which makes sure they have a paycheck year-round. My own proposal to them was that I had all these theatrical essays I wanted to create. We didn’t expect it to last as long as it did, but I did need a group of people who would work together over time and solve problems together.How did you manage your freelance activities with SITI?I do a lot of opera outside. I always felt that was the least stressful for SITI Company: If I’m going to do opera, nobody can complain, because they can’t sing like opera singers. I still have a big appetite for all those things. That hasn’t changed.Where did you find inspiration when you started out?I came to New York in 1974, at the end of the Judson Church era, and I was very influenced by dance. It was also the explosion of theater companies like the Performance Group, which later became the Wooster Group, André Gregory’s Manhattan Project, Joe Chaikin’s Open Theater, and with the crazy work of Richard Foreman and the big wild things of Bob Wilson. I was also completely in love with German theater — particularly Peter Stein, Klaus Michael Grüber, Luc Bondy — and I stole from them a lot.Bogart with her wife, Rena Chelouche Fogel, in October at the Laurie Beechman Theater.Dolly Faibyshev for The New York TimesIs that why you temporarily moved to Europe in the early 1980s?I decided I hated Americans and I was going to be German. But what I discovered is that I’m actually very American: I have an American sense of humor, an American sense of structure. And I’m really interested in American history — a lot of my work since then has been about Americans like Orson Welles, Bob Rauschenberg, Joseph Cornell.What are some of the big theatrical trends you’ve seen coming and going over the past decades?I was part of the generation who just admired directors. I used to follow Bob Wilson and Lee Breuer on the street! Then I noticed that people weren’t naming directors, they were naming companies, like Complicité, for example. That lasted for about a decade. Now the revolution is happening in playwriting, where extraordinary new voices are challenging the old forms. “An Octoroon” — that’s a radical play. So it’s gone from director to company to playwright.How have theater directors themselves changed?I’m surprised by how little they are interested in the regional theater. We have these theater factories around the country that used to be where everybody wanted to go, and it’s not so attractive right now. What is attractive are the art centers, and SITI Company has lived in the realm of the art centers, like the Krannert, the Walker, the Hancher, U.C.L.A. Directors like Rachel Chavkin or Diane Paulus are also looking at commercial models in new ways. When I was younger Broadway was not of interest to me, but the young directors are intrigued.What do you make of theater in the Covid era?We’re in a very interesting moment. The wonderful Scottish philosopher William MacAskill has a theory that every time there’s a cataclysmic event, there’s a period of plasticity in which change happens, and then soon afterwards we clamp down into a new accepted way of being. I think we’re in that moment of plasticity. What comes out on the other side? You or I can’t know.Whose work do you like these days?I got really interested in the work of Stan Lai, a Taiwanese director who’s rethinking the way audiences and plays function. I’m always interested in what Ivo van Hove is thinking about. I have a hate/love relationship with [Romeo] Castellucci: I cannot stand his work most of the time, but I have to deal with it. I guess what I’m looking for is somebody throwing down the gauntlet.“I got really interested in the work of Stan Lai, a Taiwanese director who’s rethinking the way audiences and plays function,” Bogart said.Dolly Faibyshev for The New York TimesDo you think there’s been a renewed interest in the relationship between audiences and theater, especially since Covid?I think that’s what the frontier is right now. My friend [and one of SITI’s artistic directors] Leon Ingulsrud went to the theater the other day. I asked how it was and he said, “Not so good — the actors never said hello to the audience.” I thought that was really interesting. The acknowledgment of that relationship, or how an audience interfaces, is the prize, I think.But how do you do that? Wouldn’t it be distracting?“Bob” [1998] starts with him literally saying hi — there’s a moment of interface, where everybody comes together. In Ivo van Hove’s “More Stately Mansions” [1997] the actors came out onstage, bowed to each other and to the audience, then Joan MacIntosh started speaking at top speed the first monologue of that O’Neill play. I started hearing the thump of people leaving the seats. They just couldn’t stand it. But in a way, that’s also like saying hi. At first I thought, “Damn him, I could never do that — I’m an American, I’m about populist art.”OK, but in all honesty, you’re not really thought of as a populist director.Deep down, yes, it’s in me. It’s how I was brought up. At the beginning of SITI Company we were kind of, “[expletive] the audience.” I don’t feel that at all anymore. I feel that the point of being there is the audience — it’s all about the audience. More