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      Buffy Sainte-Marie’s Indigenous Parentage Is Questioned

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      An investigation by the CBC disputed a key part of Sainte-Marie’s story, saying that a birth certificate shows she was born to a white family in Massachusetts.The parentage of Buffy Sainte-Marie, a folk singer known for her activism on behalf of Indigenous people, was questioned after CBC News reported that it had found a birth certificate indicating that she was born to white parents in Massachusetts, and not on a Piapot Cree reservation in Canada.Sainte-Marie, considered the first Indigenous person to win an Oscar, has said for decades that she was born to an Indigenous mother before being adopted first by a white couple near Boston and then, as an adult, by the Piapot First Nation. The CBC investigation, which was published on Friday, pointed to documentation, including Sainte-Marie’s birth certificate and marriage certificate, to show she was born in Stoneham, Mass., as Beverly Jean Santamaria.Sainte-Marie did not speak to the CBC, but in video and written statements, she said the woman she called her “growing-up Mom” had told her that she was adopted and was Native. In both a 2018 biography and the statements, Sainte-Marie also says she was told she may have been born “on the wrong side of the blanket,” referring to an affair.“I don’t know where I’m from or who my birth parents were, and I will never know,” Sainte-Marie, 81, said in the written statement. “Which is why to be questioned in this way today is painful, both for me, and for my two families I love so dearly.”Sainte-Marie, whose songs include “Now That the Buffalo’s Gone,” “Universal Soldier” and “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee,” won an Oscar in 1983 for “Up Where We Belong,” a song from the film “An Officer and a Gentleman.” “I wanted to write songs that would last for generations,” she told The New York Times last year.News of the investigation was particularly surprising to Canadians because Sainte-Marie is such a well-known figure, said Kimberly Tallbear-Dauphine, a professor of Native Studies at the University of Alberta who was quoted in the CBC article.“She’s a celebrity but she’s also somebody a lot of Indigenous people know and have met with, and that makes it more personal,” Tallbear-Dauphine said in an interview with The Times. Emails and text messages she has received show that people are “feeling very emotional about this.”The freelance journalist Jacqueline Keeler said in the CBC investigation that she began looking for Sainte-Marie’s birth certificate after watching an “American Masters” episode about the singer last year. Keeler wrote a column for The San Francisco Chronicle last year that challenged the Indigenous heritage of the actor Sacheen Littlefeather.In their article, CBC reporters described how they obtained Sainte-Marie’s original birth certificate from Feb. 20, 1941, which says she was born to Winifred and Albert Santamaria at 3:15 a.m. The CBC said the Santamarias were of Italian and English ancestry; in her statements, Sainte-Marie said Winifred was part Mi’kmaq, a tribe from eastern Canada.The investigation also cites a 1945 life insurance policy document that says Sainte-Marie was born in Stoneham and a 1982 marriage certificate in which Sainte-Marie certified that she was born in Massachusetts. Also included was a 1964 newspaper article in which an uncle of Sainte-Marie’s disputed her claims that she was Indigenous, saying, “This is all part of the professional build-up.”A lawyer for Sainte-Marie told the CBC that many adoption records had been destroyed by Canadian governments and that children adopted in Massachusetts were commonly issued new birth certificates. “Sainte-Marie is entitled to a reasonable expectation of privacy about her personal genealogical and family history,” the lawyer, Josephine de Whytell, told the CBC.After growing up in Massachusetts, Sainte-Marie was adopted by the Piapot First Nation in Saskatchewan, where she says she was born. In a statement, two members of the tribe, Debra and Ntawnis Piapot, said that “Buffy is our family.”“We chose her and she chose us,” they said. “We claim her as a member of our family and all of our family members are from the Piapot First Nation. To us that holds far more weight than any paper documentation or colonial record keeping ever could.” More

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      Sum 41 Says It Will Disband After Final Album and Tour

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      With catchy songs like “Fat Lip” and “In Too Deep,” the Canadian band was part of a pop-punk wave that included Blink-182, Simple Plan, Good Charlotte and others.The band Sum 41 announced on Monday that it was breaking up after 27 years, unleashing a well of nostalgia for the early 2000s, when pop punk seemed ubiquitous on MTV’s “Total Request Live” and in memorable scenes in blockbuster movies.The Canadian group, fronted by the spiky-haired singer Deryck Whibley, was part of a pop-punk wave that included Blink-182, Simple Plan, Good Charlotte and Avril Lavigne. Their hits included “Fat Lip” and “In Too Deep,” which fans loved to belt out in their car or jump up and down to at shows.The band’s music was also featured in popular movies from the early 2000s, among them “Spider-Man,” “Dude, Where’s My Car?” and “Bring It On.”In a statement on Twitter, Sum 41 did not explain why it was disbanding. It said it planned to finish its tour this year and that it would release a final album, “Heaven :x: Hell,” and announce a final tour to celebrate the end of its run.“Being in Sum 41 since 1996 brought us some of the best moments of our lives,” the band members wrote. “We are forever grateful to our fans both old and new, who have supported us in every way. It is hard to articulate the love and respect we have for all of you and we wanted you to hear this from us first.”News of the band’s decision led fans to mourn the end of an era. While many punk fans scorned Sum 41 and other groups like it as safe and conventional, pop-punk fans said the music was part of the soundtrack of their youth.“Fat Lip” reached No. 1 on Billboard’s Alternative Airplay chart after Sum 41’s breakthrough album, “All Killer No Filler,” was released in 2001. And decades later, fans still packed Sum 41’s shows clad in fishnet stockings or dark skinny jeans and heavy eyeliner, accented with tricolor wrist sweatbands.“Sum 41 is most definitely on the Mount Rushmore of early 2000s pop punk,” said Finn McKenty, the creator of the YouTube series “The Punk Rock MBA,” which features an episode on “The Strange History of Sum 41.”“To be able to ride the wave of the MTV-type hype that they had and turn that into a career with real longevity and respect is a rare thing that they were able to pull off,” Mr. McKenty said.The band’s music seemed to capture the spirit of suburban teenage high jinks.In an interview with Billboard in 2021, Mr. Whibley said that when the band, which formed in suburban Toronto in 1996, was trying to gain notice, its members filmed themselves “doing stupid stuff like drive-by water gunning people, egging houses, and cut it with some film of our shows.”The band’s manager then sent a three-minute version of the video to record companies.“And then, it was a matter of weeks,” Mr. Whibley said. “Every label in the U.S. was trying to sign us, and it turned into a big bidding war.”Mike Damante, the author of “Hey Suburbia: A Guide to the Emo/Pop-Punk Rise,” said that Sum 41 was one of the first popular pop-punk bands to fuse metal and hip-hop and that it was disbanding during “a really nostalgic time period for this time in music.”In recent years, Sum 41 had toured with Simple Plan and The Offspring.Mr. McKenty said the band had recently been producing music that was “as good or better” than its music from the early 2000s.“I always like to see people go out on top, rather than go out sad,” he said. More

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      Gordon Lightfoot, Hitmaking Singer-Songwriter, Is Dead at 84

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      His rich baritone and gift for melodies made him one of the most popular artists of the 1970s with songs like “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” and “If You Could Read My Mind.”Gordon Lightfoot, the Canadian folk singer whose rich, plaintive baritone and gift for melodic songwriting made him one of the most popular recording artists of the 1970s, died on Monday night in Toronto. He was 84. His death, at Sunnybrook Hospital, was confirmed by his publicist, Victoria Lord. No cause was given.Mr. Lightfoot, a fast-rising star in Canada in the early 1960s, broke through to international success when his friends and fellow Canadians Ian and Sylvia Tyson recorded two of his songs, “Early Morning Rain” and “For Lovin’ Me.”When Peter, Paul and Mary came out with their own versions, and Marty Robbins reached the top of the country charts with Mr. Lightfoot’s “Ribbon of Darkness,” Mr. Lightfoot’s reputation soared. Overnight, he joined the ranks of songwriters like Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs and Tom Paxton, all of whom influenced his style.When folk music ebbed in popularity, overwhelmed by the British invasion, Mr. Lightfoot began writing ballads aimed at a broader audience. He scored one hit after another, beginning in 1970 with the heartfelt “If You Could Read My Mind,” inspired by the breakup of his first marriage.In quick succession he recorded the hits “Sundown,” “Carefree Highway,” “Rainy Day People” and “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” which he wrote after reading a Newsweek article about the sinking of an iron-ore carrier in Lake Superior in 1975, with the loss of all 29 crew members.For Canadians, Mr. Lightfoot was a national hero, a homegrown star who stayed home even after achieving spectacular success in the United States and who catered to his Canadian fans with cross-country tours. His ballads on Canadian themes, like “Canadian Railroad Trilogy,” pulsated with a love for the nation’s rivers and forests, which he explored on ambitious canoe trips far into the hinterlands.His personal style, reticent and self-effacing — he avoided interviews and flinched when confronted with praise — also went down well. “Sometimes I wonder why I’m being called an icon, because I really don’t think of myself that way,” Mr. Lightfoot told The Globe and Mail in 2008. “I’m a professional musician, and I work with very professional people. It’s how we get through life.”Performing in London in June 1973.Michael Putland/Getty ImagesGordon Meredith Lightfoot Jr. was born on Nov. 17, 1938, in Orillia, Ontario, where his father managed a dry-cleaning plant. As a boy, he sang in a church choir, performed on local radio shows and shined in singing competitions. “Man, I did the whole bit: oratorio work, Kiwanis contests, operettas, barbershop quartets,” he told Time magazine in 1968.He played piano, drums and guitar as a teenager, and while still in high school wrote his first song, a topical number about the Hula Hoop craze with a catchy last line: “I guess I’m just a slob and I’m gonna lose my job, ’cause I’m Hula-Hula-Hoopin’ all the time.”After studying composition and orchestration at the Westlake College of Music in Los Angeles, he returned to Canada. For a time he was a member of the Singing Swinging Eight, a singing and dancing troupe on the television show “Country Hoedown,” but he soon became part of the Toronto folk scene, performing at the same coffee houses and clubs as Ian and Sylvia, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young and Leonard Cohen.He formed a folk duo, the Two Tones, with a fellow “Hoedown” performer, Terry Whelan. The duo recorded a live album in 1962, “Two Tones at the Village Corner.” The next year, while traveling in Europe, he served as the host of “The Country and Western Show” on BBC television.As a songwriter, Mr. Lightfoot had advanced beyond the Hula Hoop, but not by a great deal. His work “didn’t have any kind of identity,” he told the authors of “The Encyclopedia of Folk, Country and Western Music,” published in 1969. When the Greenwich Village folk boom brought Mr. Dylan and other dynamic songwriters to the fore, he said, “I started to get a point of view, and that’s when I started to improve.”In 1965, he appeared at the Newport Folk Festival and made his debut in the United States at Town Hall in New York. “Mr. Lightfoot has a rich, warm voice and a dexterous guitar technique,” Robert Shelton wrote in The New York Times. “With a little more attention to stage personality, he should become quite popular.”A year later, after signing with Albert Grossman, the manager of Mr. Dylan and Peter, Paul and Mary, Mr. Lightfoot recorded his first solo album, “Lightfoot!” With performances of “Early Morning Rain,” “For Lovin’ Me,” “Ribbon of Darkness” and “I’m Not Sayin’,” a hit record in Canada in 1963, the album was warmly received by the critics.Real commercial success came when he switched to Warner Brothers, initially recording for the company’s Reprise label. “By the time I changed over to Warner Brothers, round about 1970, I was reinventing myself,” he told the Georgia newspaper Savannah Connect in 2010. “Let’s say I was probably just advancing away from the folk era, and trying to find some direction whereby I might have some music that people would want to listen to.”Lightfoot with his 12-string guitar at the 2018 Stagecoach Festival in Indio, Calif.Frazer Harrison/Getty Images for StagecoachMr. Lightfoot, accompanying himself on an acoustic 12-string guitar, in a voice that often trembled with emotion, gave spare, direct accounts of his material. He sang of loneliness, troubled relationships, the itch to roam and the majesty of the Canadian landscape. He was, as the Canadian writer Jack Batten put it, “journalist, poet, historian, humorist, short-story teller and folksy recollector of bygone days.”His popularity as a recording artist began to wane in the 1980s, but he maintained a busy touring schedule. In 1999 Rhino Records released “Songbook,” a four-disc survey of his career.Mr. Lightfoot, who lived in Toronto, is survived by his wife, Kim Hasse, six children — Fred, Ingrid, Miles, Meredith, Eric and Galen — and several grandchildren, according to Ms. Lord, his publicist. His first two marriages ended in divorce. His older sister, Beverley Eyers, died in 2017.In 2002, just before going onstage in Orillia, Mr. Lightfoot collapsed when an aneurysm in his abdominal aorta ruptured and left him near death. After two years spent recovering, he recorded an album, “Harmony,” and in 2005 he resumed his live performances with the Better Late Than Never Tour.“I want to be like Ralph Carter, Stompin’ Tom and Willie Nelson,” Mr. Lightfoot told the CBC in 2004. “Just do it for as long as humanly possible.”Vjosa Isai More

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      in Theater

      A Cop Called Coco, an Actor Named Mani, a Quebecer Exploring Quebec

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      MONTREAL — Just five years ago, Mani Soleymanlou, a Quebec actor of Iranian origin, was playing characters named Ahmed, Hakim and Karim on French-language television shows produced in the province. Today, his roles include Patrick, a banker, in one successful TV series, and a corrupt police officer with the very Québécois name Robert “Coco” Bédard, in another.Coco appears in “C’est comme ça que je t’aime,” or “Happily Married,” a dark, rollicking comedy set in the 1970s in a suburb of the provincial capital, Quebec City — a time and place where the chances would have been slim of running into someone like Mr. Soleymanlou: an immigrant who was born in Iran, and grew up in Paris, Toronto and Ottawa, before landing in Quebec.“I think,” Mr. Soleymanlou said in French, with an accent picked up in Paris, “Québécois culture has long been very homogeneous.”But that is changing — thanks in part to people like him.That Mr. Soleymanlou, 40, went from playing typecast outsiders to an insider named Coco Bédard in a few short years is also indicative of larger shifts in Quebec society.Though it still remains rooted in the French language, in ethnicity and in a shared history, Québécois identity is in flux right now — and what it means to be Québécois is what Mr. Soleymanlou has spent the past decade deconstructing in his other career as a playwright.With his family, Mr. Soleymanlou was among the Iranian exiles who streamed to France in the years after Iraq invaded Iran in 1980.At a recent performance at the Théâtre Jean-Duceppe in Montreal, the packed audience gave Mr. Soleymanlou a standing ovation for his trilogy, “Un, Deux, Trois.” For four and a half hours, he dissects his own search for identity after arriving in Quebec, which made him feel like more of an outsider than anywhere else, and he explores the meaning of identity itself and the place of French speakers in Canada, an otherwise overwhelmingly Anglophone country.Collectively, the three plays raise difficult questions that go to the heart of Québécois identity.Can an immigrant from Iran, or anywhere else, ever be considered Québécois? If the French language is a pillar of Québécois identity, what is the place of the French spoken by newcomers from the Maghreb or West Africa, accents heard more and more throughout the province? Is French Québécois identity fated to disappear because of demographics and geography? Or can it — should it? — reinvent itself by becoming part of the global Francophone world?If the success of Mr. Soleymanlou’s trilogy and the arc of his acting career suggest that Québécois identity is expanding, the recent provincial elections also show that the evolution hasn’t been smooth and isn’t a given. The provincial premier, François Legault, and his allies won in a landslide, partly by promoting a cultural nationalism that portrayed immigrants as a threat to Quebec society.Quebec nationalists, especially during the heady days of the independence movement in the 1970s and 1980s, upheld immigrants’ mastery of French as the key to acceptance and integration in Quebec society.But Quebec nationalists have moved the goal posts in recent years, emphasizing instead that immigrants must adhere to an amorphous notion of Quebec values. Politicians like Mr. Legault and his allies, while stressing the importance of French, have also described immigration as undermining Quebec’s identity.“They’re using identity to score political points, especially among older voters, because that’s where fear works,” Mr. Soleymanlou said. “And that’s the problem. They’re not talking to the new Quebec.”Mr. Soleymanlou’s trilogy, “Un, Deux, Trois,” explores identity in Quebec and the place of French speakers in Canada, an otherwise overwhelmingly Anglophone country. Mr. Soleymanlou spoke recently during an interview at a café in Hochelaga, a Montreal neighborhood where he lives with his partner, Sophie Cadieux, a Québécoise actress, and their son. Appointed to the prestigious position of director of the French theater at Canada’s National Arts Centre in Ottawa last year, Mr. Soleymanlou was in the middle of a tour of eight Canadian cities with his trilogy.“In his work, he was able to use humor and laughter and this technique almost like standup comedy to talk about his experiences,” said Yana Meerzon, a professor of theater at the University of Ottawa, contrasting his plays with the straightforward tragedies of some other migrant stories.She added that his work acknowledged the differences between adult immigrants and child immigrants. “They don’t speak from that culture, necessarily, they speak from their own culture, which is mixed.” Mr. Soleymanlou’s successful dual career as actor and playwright points to the opening up of French Québécois popular culture, which has long existed apart from the rest of Canada. Despite the province’s demographics being changed by successive waves of immigration over many decades, the stage and the screen had until recently been dominated by stories told by French Québécois for an audience of French Québécois. “We were very late,” Mr. Soleymanlou said, “but now we’re accelerating to catch up.”Born in Tehran a couple of years after Iraq invaded Iran in 1980, Mr. Soleymanlou and his family joined a stream of Iranian exiles to France. In Paris, he attended public schools and learned French, before the family packed up again, this time for Toronto, when he was 9.In Toronto, he went to schools with immigrants like himself and eventually “forgot about himself” — immersed in the ever-widening circle of multiculturalism that is the ethos of Canada outside Quebec.He arrived two decades ago in Quebec to study at the National Theatre School of Canada in Montreal. By then, newcomers from Francophone Africa, many of them Muslim, were reshaping the city’s landscape, the way previous immigrants from Europe and Asia already had for decades. Still, the arts were the domain of the French Québécois.That was made clear to him on his first day at the school where he and three others accounted for the only non-French Québécois students. Four was the most there had ever been in a school with more than 100 students.“Since my arrival in Quebec, I’ve never felt more like a guy from elsewhere, like a stranger, an exile, lost, an immigrant,” Mr. Soleymanlou said in his play “Un.” The school director at the time made a joke of struggling to pronounce his name, Mr. Soleymanlou recalled. Then, using two common French Québécois family names, she said, “They’ll stop criticizing us for having only Tremblays and Girards at the National Theatre School.”“I didn’t understand at all why we were being separated into two categories of students,” he said.That first day set off a search for identity — his own and that of the French Québécois — that, almost by accident, eventually launched his career.In 2009, he was invited to perform at the Théâtre de Quat’Sous in Montreal, which then showcased immigrant artists every Monday evening. Drawing on his life, he wrote and performed a monologue that would become “Un,” the first part of his trilogy.“Since my arrival in Quebec, I’ve never felt more like a guy from elsewhere, like a stranger, an exile, lost, an immigrant,” he said in the play. “Never have I had to explain so often where I came from, to justify my accent, to describe my path, to pronounce over and over again my family name.”His anguished search for identity in “Un” resonated in a province where the dominant French Québécois had long fought to preserve their own sense of self, surrounded as they are by an English majority.“Quebec is a society that’s had to protect and defend itself, always positioning itself in opposition to the other,” Mr. Soleymanlou said. “That’s something I didn’t understand in the beginning — that the Québécois want to know how you define yourself because they have to define themselves to protect themselves.”Mr. Soleymanlou continued his search for identity in “Deux,” in a dialogue with a bilingual Jewish Montrealer, and then in “Three,” which featured three dozen French speakers who were not French Québécois.Before 2017, Mr. Soleymanlou had never been offered a role with a French name. “There’s been a radical change in the past decade, a phenomenal paradigm shift in the arts in Quebec,” he said. As his theater career took off, the scripts sent his way changed. In 2017, while performing his trilogy in Paris, he got a call from Radio-Canada, the public broadcaster, offering him the role of “Philippe” in a new series. He had never been offered a role with a French name before.“Philippe on Radio-Canada? My God, yes,” Mr. Soleymanlou recalled answering.But when he got the script, he found that his role had been changed to a Greek named “Yaniss.” The producers said sorry, but he remained Yaniss.He had to wait two more years for his first meaty role as an ethnic French Québécois — that of the corrupt, though lovable, cop in “Happily Married,” a series about two couples in a very French Québécois suburb, Sainte-Foy, who turn to organized crime while their kids are away at summer camp.“The role of a police officer, in the 1970s, in Sainte-Foy, in Quebec, played by someone of Iranian origin?” Mr. Soleymanlou said. “Ten years ago, that would have been impossible.” More

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      25 Years After ‘Titanic,’ Quebec’s Love for Céline Dion Will Go On

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      The outpouring that greeted the singer’s announcement that she has a rare neurological condition showed how both Céline fandom, and ideas of national identity in her home province, have evolved.MONTREAL — It was a Friday night in Montreal, and hundreds of euphoric revelers were dancing and singing “It’s All Coming Back to Me Now” at a sold-out Céline Dion tribute party. One young man vogued in a homemade version of the gold-tinted headpiece of singed peacock feathers that Dion wore at the Met Gala a few years ago. Another gawked at a mini-shrine of Dion-inspired wigs, showcasing her hairstyles through the decades.“In an era of arrogant stars, she is always authentic,” Simon Venne, the voguer, a 38-year-old stylist, gushed. “She is everything to us, a source of pride, our queen.”If there was ever a sense that Quebec, the French-speaking province of Dion’s birth, was conflicted about Dion’s rise to global superstardom with pop hits that she often sang in English, it has been dispelled. She now occupies an exalted space here, experiencing a cultural renaissance as Quebec’s younger generation has unabashedly embraced her: Radio Canada, the national French language broadcaster, parses her life on a podcast translated as “Céline—She’s The Boss!”; a recent docuseries called “It’s Cool to Like Céline Dion” explored her appeal to millennials, and Céline Dion drag competitions have been surging.Dion’s emotional announcement this month that she is suffering from a rare neurological condition called stiff person syndrome, forcing her to postpone upcoming tour dates, was met with an extraordinary outpouring. Québécois politicians from across the political spectrum, including both Quebec’s premiere, François Legault, and the head of a party advocating Quebec’s independence from Canada, jockeyed to express sympathy for Dion, 54. Fans commiserated over social media. A headline in Le Devoir, an influential Quebec newspaper, called her “Céline, Queen of the Québécois.” Dion, the newspaper noted, had attained the status of untouchable icon after years of being panned by critics and mocked by others.“It’s like hearing your aunt is sick,” Venne, the feathered fan, said. “Céline is famous around the world, but here she is family.”A sold-out Céline Dion tribute party in Montreal drew fans who dressed like her, gawked at Dion-inspired wigs, and danced and sang along to her music. Guillaume Simoneau for The New York TimesThe intensity of the reaction here — 25 years after the premiere of the blockbuster film “Titanic,” which helped make Dion’s bombastically exuberant “My Heart Will Go On” ubiquitous — shows how much Céline fandom and ideas of Québécois identity have evolved over time as the province, like its most famous daughter, has come of age.The Unsinkable Celine DionThe Canadian superstar has won over fans with her octave-hopping renditions of songs like “Because You Loved Me” and “My Heart Will Go On.”Rare Disorder Diagnosis: Celine Dion announced that she had a neurological condition known as stiff person syndrome, which forced her to cancel and reschedule dates on her planned 2023 tour.A Consummate Professional: At a concert in Brooklyn in 2020, the pop diva was fully in command of her glorious voice — and the crowd gathered to bask in it.Adored by Fans: Dion can count on some of the most loyal supporters in the industry. In return, she gives all of herself to them.From the Archives: Dion achieved international stardom in the 1990s after charming audiences in French Canada and France. Here is what The Times wrote about her in 1997.During a recent visit to Céline Dion Boulevard in Charlemagne, a soulless stretch of road in the gritty working-class town of about 6,000 on the outskirts of Montreal where Dion was born, a group of 20-somethings said it was no longer embarrassing to admit to liking her music.“Being stuck at home during the pandemic made people nostalgic for the past, and everything old and vintage is in fashion,” said Gabriel Guénette, 26, a university student and sometime Uber delivery man, explaining why he and his friends were singing “The Power of Love” during karaoke nights. Dion’s unbridled message of hope and optimism, he added, resonated during these uncertain times.Older residents in Charlemagne still refer to her as “notre petite Céline” — our little Céline — and recall her days as a shy teenager who performed French ballads with her 13 brothers and sisters at her family’s restaurant. Younger residents — including Meghan Arsenault, 15, who attends the same high school Dion did — grew up singing her songs.Across Quebec, a Francophone province of 8.5 million people that has been buffeted by centuries of subjugation and fears of being subsumed by the English language, Dion has at times been a polarizing figure. Even as many fans ardently embraced her, she was dismissed by some critics as the cultural equivalent of poutine, the Québécois snack of French fries and cheese curds drenched in gravy drunkenly and guiltily consumed at 3 a.m.Some elites balked at her success, seeing in her sprawling working class family, her garish outfits and her broken English an uncomfortable mirror of an old Quebec they preferred to forget. Some considered her quétaine, cheesy in Québécois argot.Céline Dion Boulevard in Charlemagne, her hometown.Guillaume Simoneau for The New York TimesOlder residents in Charlemagne still call her “notre petite Céline” — our little Céline.Guillaume Simoneau for The New York TimesAnd her singing in English has, at times, been an affront to hard-core Francophone nationalists. But when Dion thanked the audience with a “Merci!” at the Summer Olympics in Atlanta in 1996 after singing “The Power of The Dream,” the single word reverberated across the province, an affirmation that French Canada had gone global.Martin Proulx, a producer who hosted the podcast, “Céline, She’s the Boss!” recalled that as a gay teenager in Montreal in the 1990s, he hid the fact that he was listening to her “Let’s Talk About Love” album on his Sony Walkman. “It wasn’t cool to love Céline when I was in high school — kids my age were listening to hip-hop and heavy rock and she was for soccer moms who watched Oprah,” he recalled.Now, he said, he could proudly proclaim his ardor, in part because a more confident Quebec has shed some of its past complexes. The younger generation of Québécois, he said, seems less hung up than their parents or grandparents on issues of language and identity, and more likely to embrace Dion’s global stardom, financial success and bilingualism as a template for their own international aspirations.“We used to roll our eyes — now we think she’s pure genius,” Mr. Proulx said. “She never changed. We did.”Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the Quebec-born music director of the Metropolitan Opera in New York, said that his first memory of Dion was from 1984, when he was eight years old. Dion, who was 16, sang a song about a dove in front of Pope John Paul II and 60,000 people at Montreal’s Olympic Stadium. Nézet-Séguin said he had surged with pride that she was a fellow Quebecer, and said that he sees Dion as a “diva” in the operatic sense of the word.“When I think about a diva, I think about personality, having something recognizable artistically, and one can’t deny the virtuosic aspect of Céline’s singing,” he said.Bennett’s Dion collection is extensive.Guillaume Simoneau for The New York TimesHe even has a custom Dion sport coat.Guillaume Simoneau for The New York TimesThe intense interest in Dion is hardly limited to Quebec. “Aline,” a highly unusual, fictionalized film drawn from her life, drew buzz at last year’s Cannes Film Festival. When a musical parody of “Titanic” called “Titanique” recently moved to a larger Off Broadway theater in New York, its producers promised “More shows. More seats. More Céline.” And Dion is set to appear alongside Priyanka Chopra Jonas and Sam Heughan in a romantic comedy called “Love Again” that is expected in theaters in North America in May.The fascination with Dion endures in part because her Cinderella story never grows old. The youngest of 14 children of an accordion-playing butcher and a homemaker from Charlemagne, Dion’s first bed as a child was a drawer. At the age of 12, she co-wrote her first song, “Ce n’était qu’un rêve,” with the help of her mother and her brother Jacques. Her brother Michel sent a cassette demo to the impresario René Angélil, who became her manager and, later, her husband.Dion had a complete makeover, disappearing for 18 months in 1986 to study English, cap her teeth, perm her hair, and take voice and dance lessons. A star was born.When Angélil died in 2016, two days before his 74th birthday, his two-day, meticulously choreographed funeral at Montreal’s Notre-Dame Basilica was televised by the CBC, the national broadcaster, and flags were lowered at half-mast across Quebec. Dion, veiled in black, stood by her husband’s open coffin for seven hours, greeting Quebec dignitaries and the public.Nearly every inch of Mario Bennett’s cramped basement apartment is decorated with Céline Dion memorabilia. Guillaume Simoneau for The New York TimesIn the years since, Dion recast her analog image for the Instagram era. A Vetements Titanic hoodie she wore in Paris in 2016 broke the internet. A few years later, she stole the show at the camp-themed Met Gala, in an Oscar de la Renta clinging champagne-colored bodysuit embellished with silvery sequins. Her zany, self-deprecating appearance on James Corden’s Carpool Karaoke in 2019 from Las Vegas, during which she sang “My Heart Will Go On” in front of a replica of the Titanic’s bow at the Bellagio Hotel fountain, helped some people who had made fun of her realize that she was in on the joke.Now her fandom seems as strong as ever.Mario Bennett, 36, who works in a concert hall, began covering every inch of his cramped basement apartment with Céline Dion memorabilia at the start of the pandemic. He said that throughout his life, Ms. Dion’s powerful voice had been a clarion call to dream big. Among his prized possessions is an unauthorized collectible Céline doll, wearing a mini version of the midnight blue velvet gown that the singer wore to the Oscars in 1998.“She makes me feel that anything is possible,” he said.Guy Hermon, an Israeli drag queen who emigrated to Montreal a decade ago and absorbed Quebec culture — and the French language — by trying to embody Dion, said he had never been a fan of her music but invented his Dion alter ego, “Crystal Slippers” out of necessity on the Dion-obsessed Québécois drag circuit.After years of mimicking Ms. Dion, he said he had come to appreciate her. “She just wants everyone to be happy,” he said. More

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      Shakespeare or Bieber? This Canadian City Draws Devotees of Both

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      For nearly 70 years, Stratford, Ontario, has attracted legions of theater fanatics to its Shakespeare festival. About a dozen years ago, a very different type of pilgrim began arriving: Beliebers.STRATFORD, Ontario — It’s a small city that practically shouts “Shakespeare!”Majestic white swans float in the Avon River, not far from Falstaff Street and Anne Hathaway Park, named for the playwright’s wife. Some residents live in Romeo Ward, while young students attend Hamlet elementary. And the school’s namesake play is often performed as part of a renowned theater festival that draws legions of Shakespeare fans from around the world, every April to October.Stratford, Ontario, steeped in references to and reverence for the Bard, has counted on its association with Shakespeare for decades to dependably bring in millions of tourist dollars to a city that would otherwise have little appeal to travelers.“My dad always said we have a world-class theater stuck in a farm community,” said Frank Herr, the second-generation owner of a boat tour and rental business along the Avon River.Then, about a dozen years ago, a new and typically much younger type of cultural enthusiast began showing up in Stratford’s streets: Beliebers, or fans of the pop star Justin Bieber, a homegrown talent.William Shakespeare Street in Stratford.Brett Gundlock for The New York TimesA star dedicated to Justin Bieber outside the Avon Theater where he would busk as a child.Brett Gundlock for The New York TimesResidents don’t have much trouble telling the two types of visitors apart. One clue: Look at what they are carrying.“They’ve got the Shakespeare books in their hands,” Mr. Herr said of those who are here for the love of theater. “They’re just serious people.”Beliebers, on the other hand, always have their smartphones at the ready to excitedly document the otherwise humdrum landmarks connected to the pop star: the site of his first date, the local radio station that first played his music, the diner where he was rumored to eat.Unlike Shakespeare — who never set foot in this city, named after his birthplace, Stratford-upon-Avon, England — Mr. Bieber has genuine and deep connections: He grew up here and is familiar to many.“I know Justin,” Mr. Herr said. “He was always skateboarding on the cenotaph, and I was always kicking him off the cenotaph,” he added, referring to a World War I memorial in the gardens next to Lake Victoria.A cutout of Justin Bieber in the Stratford Perth Museum. The setting is meant to replicate the steps of the city’s Avon Theater. Brett Gundlock for The New York TimesDiane Dale, Mr. Bieber’s maternal grandmother, and her husband, Bruce, lived a 10-minute drive away from downtown Stratford, where the fledgling singer, now 28, could often be found busking on the steps of Avon Theater under their supervision, collecting as much as $200 per day, she said in a recent interview.Those steps became something of a pilgrimage site for Mr. Bieber’s fans, especially those vying to become “One Less Lonely Girl” during his teen-pop dreamboat era.Another popular stop on the pilgrim’s tour was Ms. Dale’s doorstep. After fans rang her doorbell, she would assure them that her grandson was not home, though that didn’t stop them from taking selfies outside the red brick bungalow.“Justin said, if you don’t move, we’re not coming to visit you anymore,” Ms. Dale, a retired sewer at a now shuttered automotive factory in town, recalled. She has since relocated.Businesses in Stratford that benefited from this second set of tourists began speaking of “the Bieber Effect,” a play on the “Bilbao Effect” in reference to the Spanish city revitalized by a museum.Justin Bieber’s grandparents’ former home in Stratford.Brett Gundlock for The New York TimesBut one of the problems with pop fame is that it can be fickle. As fans have aged out of their teen infatuation with the musician, “Bieber fever” has cooled and the number of pilgrims has dropped.The issues that have long afflicted other Canadian cities, like increased housing prices and drug addiction, are more often peeking through the quaint veneer of Stratford, a city of about 33,000 people bordered by sprawling fields of corn in the farmland region of southwestern Ontario.But more than 400 years after his death, Shakespeare’s magnetic force remains fully intact.The theater festival, which draws over 500,000 guests in a typical year and employs about 1,000 people, features Shakespeare classics, Broadway-style musicals and modern plays in its repertoire.Early in the coronavirus pandemic, the festival returned to its roots, staging a limited run of shows outside under canopies, as it did during its first four seasons, starting in 1953. In 1957, the Festival Theater building opened with a summer performance of “Hamlet,” with the Canadian actor Christopher Plummer in the titular role.The Tom Patterson Theater, a new addition to the Stratford Festival.Brett Gundlock for The New York TimesThis year’s production stars a woman, Amaka Umeh, the first Black actor to play Hamlet at the festival.While it’s unknown how popular Mr. Bieber will be four centuries from now, the appeal of someone who has sold over 100 million digital singles in the United States alone doesn’t dissipate overnight.And Stratford has taken steps to permanently memorialize his youth here.Mr. Bieber’s grandparents had hung on to boxes of his belongings, including talent show score sheets and a drum set paid for the by the community in a crowdfunding effort — until a local museum presented them with an opportunity to display the items.“It’s changed the museum forever, in a myriad of ways,” said John Kastner, the general manager of the Stratford Perth Museum.After informing the local newspaper that the museum was opening an exhibition, “Justin Bieber: Steps to Stardom,” in February 2018, Mr. Kastner said, he was flooded with calls from international media.“We were going to do one room, like one 10-by-10 room,” Mr. Kastner said. He called his curator. “I said, ‘We have a problem.’”Angelyka Byrne walking through the Bieber exhibit at the Stratford Perth Museum.Brett Gundlock for The New York TimesThey cut the agricultural exhibition that had been planned for the adjoining space, which proved helpful in accommodating the 18,000 visitors in the first year of the Bieber show, a huge jump in attendance from the 850 who visited the museum in 2013.The Bieber show, on view through at least next year, has brought in thousands of dollars in merchandise purchases, Mr. Kastner said, giving the modest museum some welcome financial cushion.Mr. Bieber has also made a handful of visits, marking his name in chalk on the guest blackboard and donating some more recent memorabilia, including his wedding invitation and reception menu, featuring a dish called “Grandma Diane’s Bolognese.”But even before the Beliebers descended on the town, young people had been coming to Stratford by the busload thanks to organized school visits, with 50,000 to 100,000 students arriving from the United States and around Canada each year.With the exception of the pandemic border closures, James Pakala, and his wife, Denise, both retired seminary librarians in St. Louis, have been coming to Stratford for about a week every year since the early 1990s. Thirty years before that, Ms. Pakala traveled to Stratford with her high school English literature class from Ithaca, N.Y., and the trip has since become a tradition.The Shakespearean Gardens in Stratford.Brett Gundlock for The New York Times“I love Shakespeare and also Molière,” said Mr. Pakala, 78, who was studying his program outside the Festival Theater before a recent production of Molière’s comedy “The Miser.”Other guests enjoy the simplicity of getting around Stratford. The traffic is fairly light, there is ample parking and most major attractions are a short walk from one other, with pleasant views of the rippling river and picturesque gardens.“It’s easy to attend theater here,” said Michael Walker, a retired banker from Newport Beach, Calif., who visits each year with friends. “It’s not like New York, where it’s burdensome, and the quality of the theater here, I think, is better than what’s in Los Angeles or Chicago.”Here for Now Theater, an independent nonprofit that opened during the pandemic and plays to audiences of no more than 50, enjoys a “symbiotic relationship” with the festival, said its artistic director, Fiona Mongillo, who compared the scale of their operations as a Fiat to the festival’s freight train.Performing “Take Care” at the Here for Now Theater in August.Brett Gundlock for The New York Times“It’s an interesting moment for Stratford because I think it’s growing and changing in a really lovely way,” said Ms. Mongillo, citing the increased diversity as Canadians from neighboring cities have relocated to a town that was formerly, she added, “very, very white.”Longtime residents of Stratford, like Madeleine McCormick, a retired correctional officer, said it can sometimes feel like the concerns of residents are sidelined in favor of tourists.Still, Ms. McCormick acknowledged the pluses of the vibrant community of artists and creative people, one that drew her musician husband into its orbit.“It’s a strange place,” she said. “There’s never going to be another place that’s like this, because of the theater.”And Mr. Bieber. More

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      The Times’s Theater Critic Reviews Stratford’s New Theater

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      The Stratford Festival in Ontario opened a glamorous new theater last month that prioritizes the theater itself, not just what surrounds it.Jesse Green, the chief theater critic for The New York Times, has just returned from the Stratford Festival in Ontario, where the 2022 season started with the opening of a new theater.Leaving aside the plays themselves, the most dramatic presences at the new Tom Patterson Theater may in fact be absences. The usual whir of swiveling lights and the endless whoosh of moving air that infiltrate most theaters are undetectable here. Likewise, the blackouts are fully black — just the kind of inky dark to set the mood for “Richard III,” the play that opened the glamorous new building at the Stratford Festival in June.I got a tour of the theater, which cost 72 million Canadian dollars, during a six-day, five-show visit last week. Greg Dougherty, the Patterson’s technical director, led me from the depths of the traps beneath the stage — useful for drownings, burials and the like — to the catwalks high above it. The various noise abatement measures, most notably air handlers that look like space capsules and take up a room the size of a playing field, reduce the ambient sound to 10 decibels, Dougherty told me, similar to that of a recording studio.That’s a lot of silence. I understood its real value at that evening’s “Richard III” performance, in which Colm Feore, as the title character, delivered the play’s famous first line — “Now is the winter of our discontent/Made glorious summer by this son of York” — in what he later told me had been a whisper. No need to project, let alone overact, here; I heard him as clearly as if he were sitting next to me.Next to me is not a place I would usually want to find the evil king — except for dramatic purposes. But that kind of intimacy is part of the inheritance of the new Patterson, built on the site of the old one, a building that had previously been a curling rink, a dance hall and a badminton club, with all the charm of a Quonset hut. Despite that, its long thrust stage was much beloved, at least by actors, bringing them uncommonly close to audiences. To create that intimacy, though, the 480 seats (575 when configured in the round) were so steeply raked that finding mine when I first saw shows there in 2017 felt like an Alpine event.By 2019, the old Patterson was gone. That summer, Antoni Cimolino, the festival’s artistic director, took me on quite a different tour, of a campus under construction. Though it was the only time I’ve worn a hard hat on the job, it wasn’t the only time I could have used one.Jesse Green, left, at the work site for the Stratford Festival’s new theater in 2019, with Antoni Cimolino, right.Andrew MirerThe building, then a skeleton, was already mammoth. The auditorium, a kind of enclosed fortress, was beginning to take shape, but the surrounding public foyers and event facilities, which mimic the eddies and bends of the Avon River directly across Lakeside Drive, were as yet difficult to discern among the girders. I was concerned that, like so many new performance spaces built in the last half-century, the new Patterson would be blandly luxurious, deferring more to art donors than to art.I planned to find out in 2020, but by then the coronavirus pandemic had shut down almost all theater in North America, including Stratford. When I finally returned last week, I was wearing a mask instead of a hard hat. (Masks are strongly encouraged but not required.) I saw both shows running then at the Patterson — “Richard III” and “All’s Well That Ends Well” — and participated in five discussions and interviews in Lazaridis Hall, one of the event spaces. I admired the sensuous materiality of the undulating brass-and-glass facade, the riverine expanse of white oak floor, the roughness of the pale brick girdling the auditorium. I noted the whiz-bang electronic screens as well as the sparkling and seemingly infinite bathrooms.But those you can get anywhere. What makes the Patterson the best new theater I’ve seen in years is the clear prioritization of the theater itself, which sits like a treasured heirloom in a custom case. The silence and the dark are part of that, creating a plush space that is paradoxically full of emptiness, exerting a pressure of expectation as you sit in one of its 600 rust-colored seats. Watching a play there, you are always watching your fellow audience members as well, who sit across the thrust watching you. Because the seating is relatively compressed, you feel them, too.In an event at Lazaridis Hall on Saturday — part of what Stratford calls New York Times week at the festival — I talked to Mr. Cimolino and to Siamak Hariri of Hariri Pontarini Architects, the Toronto firm that designed the building. We of course nerded out on details like where the rippling glass had been obtained and how the sound was tuned so that no microphones are needed.Yet we kept returning to something more abstract: the seemingly opposing feelings of intimacy and community that theater as a human endeavor, and this theater in particular, were designed to encourage. It’s an approach that acknowledges the art form as a palimpsest: a text that has been revised and overwritten for thousands of years. (In that sense, the choice to open with “Richard III” was no accident; the play, in a production starring Alec Guinness, opened the first Stratford festival, in 1953.) If we go to the theater in part to commune with the ghosts of our human past, we also go to feel a deeper connection to people living and breathing right now, in the seats immediately to our right and left.Trans CanadaThis week’s Trans Canada section was compiled by Vjosa Isai, a news assistant for The New York Times in Canada.Laylit, or “the night of” in Arabic, is a party based in New York and Montreal that spotlights music from the Middle East and North Africa.Ahmed Gaber for The New York TimesDance floors in New York and Montreal are ground zero for Laylit parties, which highlight music from the Middle East and North Africa and their diaspora. Laylit, which translates from Arabic as “the night of,” was co-founded by a Montreal-based music duo from Lebanon.Sean Kelly, the Quebec-born writer who helped infuse sharp-edged humor in the National Lampoon magazine, has died at the age of 81.In Nunavut, the discoveries of fossils of giant fish that had evolved limbs for walking around 375 million years ago, and then reversed course to become swimmers again, are challenging one of the biggest myths of evolution.Last summer, the Canadian women’s soccer team enjoyed a thrilling victory over the U.S. national team. This week, their rivals made a comeback in the Concacaf Women’s Championship final.Kinkcorn. Confloption. Sish ice, slob ice, nish ice. Duckish. You’ll find these words in “The Dictionary of Newfoundland English,” and if you happen to be traveling there, check out these book recommendations from a local author, Michael Crummey.In Ontario, the Shaw Festival is another draw for theatergoers besides Stratford. Here’s a preview of the ambitious reboot of the play “Gaslight.”Inflation in Canada has hit 8.1 percent, according to Statistics Canada, the national census agency, and is climbing at the fastest pace since 1983. Central banks in the U.S., Europe, Canada and parts of Asia are rapidly lifting interest rates to try to bring inflation under control.Jesse Green is the chief theater critic for The New York Times. His latest book, “Shy,” with and about the composer Mary Rodgers, will be published this fall. Follow him on Twitter at @JesseKGreen.How are we doing?We’re eager to hear your thoughts about this newsletter and events in Canada in general. Please send them to nytcanada@nytimes.com.Like this email?Forward it to your friends, and let them know they can sign up here. More

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      in Music

      Blue Jays Manager Charlie Montoyo Moonlights at Salsa Clubs

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      The salsa band was 45 minutes into their first set at Lula Lounge on a recent Saturday when Charlie Montoyo showed up at the front door. An owner of the music club spotted Montoyo and led him and his group to a table reserved for them closest to the stage.Montoyo, 56, took off his jacket and waved to the band members he knew. Moments later, Montoyo, the manager of the Toronto Blue Jays — one of the top teams in Major League Baseball — was up there with the band and was handed a güiro, a staple of Latin American music. A smile remained on his face for the next two and a half hours.“Tonight, we’re accompanied by our great manager of the Blue Jays,” Luis Franco, the lead singer of his self-titled band, told the audience in Spanglish. He signaled for Montoyo to join him at the front of the stage and continued, “This guy is doing an impeccable job with our team. A round of applause, please.”Montoyo stepped forward, embraced Franco, smiled and waved to the crowd. But he quickly returned to his preferred position: with the band members, among the instruments.Montoyo, in white shirt, played the güiro with the Luis Franco Worldwide Salsa band on a recent night in Toronto.Brendan Ko for The New York TimesBaseball may be the driving force of Montoyo’s life, but music has been the underlying beat. His stadium office is cluttered with bongos, congas, timbales, maracas and records. He plays salsa music to relax before games. And sometimes, he spends weekends during the season accompanying bands in night clubs with a güiro, an instrument which produces sound by rubbing a stick against a notched hollow gourd.“Charlie jumping onstage has been a thing our whole relationship,” Montoyo’s wife, Sam, said in a recent phone interview. “I remember looking up during our wedding after talking to people, and he’s onstage with the band.”On the field, the Blue Jays are a diverse and vibrant bunch. After a player homers, his teammates rush to get him a blue jacket, which features the names of the many countries represented on the team, from Canada to the Dominican Republic to Cuba to South Korea.Montoyo is from Puerto Rico and his vibrant team celebrates home runs with a jacket that honors the countries where players on the roster were born.John E. Sokolowski/USA Today Sports, via ReutersMontoyo is their boisterous leader, though it took him a long time to reach this point. After 18 highly successful years of managing in the minors for the Tampa Bay Rays and four years of coaching in the majors, he finally got his chance to manage Toronto in 2019.The 2022 M.L.B. Season“Relax, all right? Don’t try to strike everybody out. Strikeouts are boring! Besides that, they’re fascist. Throw some ground balls, it’s more democratic.”An Ace Seeks a New Title: Dave Stewart has been a star player, a coach, an agent and an executive. To truly change baseball, he wants to own a team.Look Good, Feel Good, Play Good. Smell Good?: For numerous players, a heavy dose of cologne or women’s perfume is the unlikeliest of performance enhancers.The Third Baseman’s Gambit: Manny Machado is the hottest hitter in baseball, and he is coming for your Queen.King of Throws: Tom House has spent his life helping superstars get even better. With a new app he wants to fix young pitchers before they develop bad habits.He took over a promising but rebuilt roster and guided it to the playoffs in 2020. The Blue Jays fell one win shy of another postseason appearance last season but entered 2022 as a popular preseason World Series pick. Through Wednesday, they were 33-23.Every step of the way for Montoyo, the soundtrack has been salsa.“He’s been phenomenal,” Blue Jays General Manager Ross Atkins said of Montoyo. “His experiences have always been attractive to me, personally. His minor league experiences, his playing experiences, his cultural experiences. He’s been exactly what we had hoped for in hiring him and then some.”From the small town of Florida, Puerto Rico, Montoyo was raised around salsa and baseball. After a four-game call-up with the Montreal Expos in 1993 and 1,028 games in the minors, Montoyo retired and began his coaching career.“I always wanted to be a baseball player,” he said sitting in his office at the Rogers Centre in Toronto. “I never thought I’d be a musician. But little by little, I played more. And I love salsa. But now, yes, I’d love to be a musician.”Unlike his brothers, Montoyo never took music classes or joined the school band. Growing up, he learned music organically. At parrandas, a Puerto Rican tradition that is like Christmas caroling at night, he helped play the maracas, güiro or tambourine as they went door to door. At gatherings on the beach, he watched others play the congas and picked it up himself.Montoyo has a large collection of instruments at his permanent residence in Tucson, Ariz., and at his office at the Rogers Centre, which is also a shrine in equal parts to Puerto Rico and salsa. His wife surprised him with an autographed painting of his favorite musician, Herman Olivera, and a new set of congas for the office after he was hired by Toronto.Montoyo’s love of music has led to him keeping records on hand to play along with in his office.Brendan Ko for The New York TimesThe office is like a shrine both to Puerto Rico and to salsa music in general.Brendan Ko for The New York TimesMontoyo said meeting or getting to know some of his musical heroes — such as Roberto Roena, Oscar Hernández, Eddie Palmieri and Olivera — has meant more to him than meeting many famous baseball players.During spring training in 2019, Montoyo hosted an impromptu performance in his office in Dunedin, Fla., with the singer Marc Anthony, whose entertainment company has a baseball agency that represents the Blue Jays star first baseman Vladimir Guerrero Jr. Anthony sang “Aguanile,” the salsa classic by Willie Colón and Héctor Lavoe, while Montoyo handled the bongos. Other members of the Blue Jays coaching staff from Puerto Rico joined in.(The night of Montoyo’s recent visit to Lula Lounge, he texted Anthony a video of his performance. “Wow,” Anthony wrote back. “What swing, papito. I love it. Made my day.”)Montoyo holds jam sessions often. He once invited a few musicians from the club to his office, and they played until 4 a.m. But most of the time, Montoyo is by himself, cuing up music videos on the TV hours before a game and playing along.“We’re in a competitive sport, and the position he’s in comes with a lot of pressure and attention from the moment he walks in the clubhouse,” said Hector Lebron, 44, an interpreter for the Blue Jays who played for Montoyo as a Tampa Bay minor leaguer. “He uses the music to relax a little bit and to think.”Montoyo first played at Lula Lounge in 2019. During pregame batting practice in May, he met some of the musicians from the club who had heard about his musical ability through mutual friends. In their conversation, Luis “Luisito” Orbegoso, a well-known local artist, said he could tell Montoyo knew what he was talking about and invited him to the club that night. Montoyo came and played, and that started their friendship.Brought on stage at Lula Lounge, Montoyo was handed a güiro and asked to play along with the band. Brendan Ko for The New York Times“Whenever he’s in Toronto, he calls me to ask, ‘When are we going to play? When are we going to rumbear?’” said Orbegoso, 51, who was born in Peru and moved to Canada when he was 12. “Including in the winter, the off-season, he contacts me and sends me videos. We’re pure salsa.”Lula Lounge was among the things Montoyo missed most about Toronto from 2020 to 2021, when Canada’s pandemic border restrictions forced the Blue Jays to play a majority of their home games in Buffalo and their spring-training facility in Florida.“He’s got a home here,” said Jose Ortega, a co-owner of Lula Lounge who began hosting salsa dance lessons at his apartment in Toronto in 2000 before that grew after two years into the permanent restaurant and club that he co-owns with Jose Nieves. “We see him as almost another band member.”Montoyo has played at Lula Lounge six times in all, including twice this season after Saturday afternoon home games. He often goes with team officials or coaches and has brought his wife when she was visiting from Arizona, where she stays during the school year with their youngest son. Montoyo was tired the day of his most recent visit — the Blue Jays were in the middle of a stretch of 20 straight days of games — but the club is his escape.“If Sam knows it’s Saturday and we lost a tough game and I’m at the apartment alone, she tells me to go there and enjoy,” Montoyo said.Montoyo stayed on stage until just after midnight, leaving only because his baseball team had a game later that day.Brendan Ko for The New York TimesSo after the Blue Jays beat the Houston Astros — a game from which Montoyo was ejected in the fifth inning for arguing a called third strike to Guerrero — he was at Lula Lounge with the Luis Franco Worldwide Salsa band.“We call it swing,” said Alex Naar, 42, a percussionist for the band who lent Montoyo a güiro and guided him through the more modern arrangements. “He has a natural swing for the music. He feels it in his heart. He has the rhythm.”After the first set, Montoyo posed for photos with a few fans. As a D.J. played salsa and reggaeton classics, Montoyo darted up to the empty stage to play congas along with the song. And when the band returned for their second set, he rejoined them.“Baseball is very Caribbean,” said Ortega, who was born in Ecuador and raised in New York. “It’s Puerto Rican, it’s Dominican, Venezuelan, and the whole rhythm and style and panache that Latinos bring to the game. That vibe, it kind of goes together. So to me, when Charlie was there, I thought, ‘Wow, this is a funny, perfect marriage of all of those things.’”In all aspects of his life, Montoyo has tried to represent his island, from the field to the stage.“It’s hard to reach this level,” he said of his job. “I sincerely never expected to reach it after so many years. That’s why I have the Puerto Rican flag on my glove, everywhere. I’m proud of where I’m from and the music.”Not long after midnight, with a few songs left in the second set of his recent visit to Lula Lounge, Montoyo was done. He handed the güiro back to Naar, gave him a hug and said his goodbyes. He didn’t want to leave but the Blue Jays had a 1 p.m. game. He grabbed his jacket and left with the team employees who had come along. He will be back. More