One woman's French Foly - regretfully revisited

We've all been there - trying to recapture a moment that brought so much enjoyment first time around and left us with a wonderful memory.

Such was the case with Liane Foly's "La Folle Part en Cure", which has just wrapped up a month-long run at the Théâtre Le Palace in Paris.


It was, to say the least, disappointing, and at times quite frankly - dull.

The problem was no so much Foly's talents as a comedienne and impressionist - they are indisputable.

Instead it was the material, and certainly the venue didn't help, which meant the show fell short of the magic from Foly's 2008 "La Folle Parenthèse" when the blues and jazz singer first revealed her talents as an impersonator to the general public and regaled audiences with spot-on impressions and biting humour.

So what went wrong this time around?

Well first up the script. The running gag was the world coming to an end in 2012 and a very special spa opening its doors to a range of celebrities enabling them and the audience to laugh away the blues.

Giving Foly a hand on stage and allowing her to slip from one voice to another was Serge Perathoner as "Docteur Loco" the psych in charge of spa.

He accompanied her on the piano, fed her lines to poke fun at celebrities and provided continuity necessary to avoid the show becoming a string of disconnected characters and disjointed impersonations.

But it simply didn't work.

Some of the jokes were lame, the vignettes a little too long and the running gag, tedious.

The sketches that opened and closed the show were cases in point.

Lady Gaga at the beginning and Geneviève de Fontenay (the woman who until recently had been the doyenne of the Miss France competition) at the end were not so much impressions as they were caricatures.

Nothing wrong with that as they both brought about an initial smile and allowed Foly to launch into some astounding impersonations of singers - male and female. The younger generation of the French music scene at the beginning in the shape of Grégoire, Zaz and M (Matthieu Chedid) were astonishingly spot-on.

And so were the late greats Joe Dessin, Mike Brandt and Daniel Balavoine at the end - allowing audience participation as everyone sang alone.

But as Lady Gaga, Foly amused only for the initial 30 seconds - and that only really in terms of her costume - and as Geneviève de Fontenay there was a joke involving an interminable and incomprehensible meeting with the Pope. Both went on for far too long.

Missing from the show was the political bite and satire of her 2008 show. Sure Ségolène Royal made an appearance - a rather long one - but the humour was as absent as the former Socialist party's presidential candidate seems to have been from the political scene in recent months. And as convincing as Foly was as Roselyne Bacholet, once again the jokes just fell flat.

French president, Nicolas Sarkozy made a brief entrance along with his wife Carla, but there wasn't really much happening apart from some shoulder shrugging .

Of course some impersonations were always going to work because Foly masters the voices and the mannerisms so well. That was the case with a couple of her favourites - Line Renaud and Muriel Robin - where it's hard to tell where Foly finishes and the character takes over.

And a duet of Jeanne Moreau singing with Vanessa Paradis was remarkable.

But there were also those that missed the mark by a mile, such as Susan Boyle and Edith Piaf. In both cases it just sounded like Foly singing. And that's perhaps how she should have left it because she has a magnificent voice and a wonderful timbre.

While the material was a bit iffy, the venue didn't help much either.

Dating from the 1920s, Le Palace is a former music hall and cinema which reopened in 2008 after having being closed for more than a decade.

But it's shabby, badly air-conditioned (in other words not at all) and the seating is uncomfortable; a far cry in terms of comfort from the Théâtre Marigny at which Foly performed back during her Paris run in 2008.

Hopefully the show will tighten up as it goes on the road around France until November, taking in dates at Arras, Rennes and Rouen and popping over the border in September to the Swiss city of Geneva.

Véronic DiCaire triumphs in Paris

There aren't that many impressionists (of the sort that impersonate famous people rather than the painters, writers and composers) around in France who are household names.

And those that are, tend to be men. Indeed it wasn't until a couple of years ago that the general public would probably have been hard pushed to name even one woman.

That all changed when Liane Foly revealed that she was not only a consummate singer but also an excellent impersonator of prominent figures - French and international - both male and female.

Now Foly has competition, and it comes in the shape of Véronic DiCaire, who has just finished an extended run at the Théâtre de la Gaîté playing to packed houses and entertaining audiences with her own stunning array of voices.

Veronic Dicaire (imitatrice de génie) a Paris
par Tadoussac

DiCaire is already a star within the French-speaking community back in her native Canada used to playing at much larger venues.

But her run at the 400-seater Théâtre de la Gaîté fairly blew audiences away and has assured her a return to the French capital in the autumn.



Although DiCaire, just like Foly, has a big singing voice in her own right, she prefers to use it in her show to bring together a group of figures without the political and current affairs bite that is perhaps more of a French tradition where parody takes precedence.

Sure DiCaire picks up on the mannerisms of the women she's impersonating, but the real triumph lies in the spot-on vocal performances which are sometimes hard to distinguish from the original.

That's especially true when she takes on fellow Canadians such as Lynda Lemay, Isabelle Boulay and of course Céline Dion as well as French singers such as Vanessa Paradis, Mireille Mathieu and Edith Piaf or Belgians Maurane, Axelle Red and Lara Fabian.

But don't believe that her range is limited to French-speaking singers if you will.

Madonna, Britney Spears, Rihanna, Amy Winehouse, Christina Aguilera and Lady Gaga were also up there on stage in Paris, courtesy of DiCaire. And even Susan Boyle put in an appearance.

In 90 minutes DiCaire illustrated to the audience how "easy it is to take on someone else's voice" with the helpful explanation of the journey of the "hot potato" from the head of Vanessa Paradis to the mouth of Amy Winehouse and finally hitting the feet as she strutted around the stage Tina Turner style.

But it was probably as Dion that DiCaire really triumphed, a woman for whom she has on occasions been the opening act and whose husband, René Angélil, has even acted as her producer. So the 33-year-old has probably had plenty of time to perfect her impersonation.

In Paris DiCaire took the audience on a trip through Dion's career (and hairstyles) so far, from her first appearance on French television back in the 1980s to a rendition of "All by myself" in which she ducked out at the last moment when she was supposed to hit that high note, just to prolong the wait as she relaunched herself back into the song and out-Diva-ed Dion of course.

And if all that were not enough, she followed it up with a duet featuring two women with completely different voices. Dion's powerful but slightly nasal tones were joined by the much rounder and fuller and deeper ones of Maurane in a performance of Jacques Brel's "Quand on n’a que l’amour" which inevitably had the whole audience on its feet in appreciation at the end.



DiCaire - and her many voices - will now take a well-earned break before taking to the stage again in Canada in May.

But she'll be back in Paris in early November when she'll be performing at the 1,000-seater La Cigale for seven nights.

One woman's French Foly

Right up front it has to be said that this is far from being a hard-hitting news piece. And what's more it'll probably only have a limited appeal bearing in mind that among the roll call of names are those that will only be familiar to the French, or French ex-patriots, Francophiles, Francophones and France-watchers.

There again there are some that will strike a chord around the globe, so forgive the indulgence. And if you’re in the slightest bit curious keep reading to discover an account of a rollicking good evening spent watching a performance that had the audience proverbially “rolling in the aisles”, whooping with laughter and grinning from ear-to-ear for more than two solid hours.

All right it was probably a public easily won over and which had come to see the launch of a very special sort of one-man show. Or perhaps better said, a one-woman show, performed by Liane Foly.

She's no stranger to the French and it's as a singer that the 45-year-old has made her name over the years, releasing her first album in 1988 and following it up with a string of hits and the occasional appearance in films made for television.

But in her one-woman show "La Folle Parenthèse" Foly makes her first real venture into another area of entertainment entirely as an impersonator and she pulls it off with professional aplomb.

In it she single-handedly assembles some of the greats - past and present - of the French music scene, with some international artists thrown in for good measure along with politicians, television stars, and actresses.

The 19th century Théâtre Marigny just off the Champs Elysées in Paris, with seating for over 1,000 was packed to the rafters every night of Foly’s recent opening run as she sang, strutted, croaked and danced her way through 30 plus characters, interspersing her performance with rapier wit and wicked social and political comment.

Whether it was as a swooning parody of France’s first lady Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, or as a majestically strutting Socialist politician, Ségolène Royal, Foly slipped effortlessly from one imitation to the next with a minimum of costume changes, no gimmicks, and a simple mimic of gesture and mannerism to convince the audience that she really had brought along a whole cast of characters.

Accompanied by just two musicians – the pianist Jean Yves d'Angelo and his brother, Pierre, on the saxophone and percussion – Foly presented a simple plot to hold everything together.

She bantered as the gravel-voiced actresses Muriel Robin and Line Renaud, and later as Celine Dion in her rapid-fire French, with the imaginary Pedro somewhere at the back of the theatre.

Pedro wanted her to provide a possible line-up of improbable stars for a cabaret to be performed the following evening in St Etienne, a less than fashionable city in central eastern France better known perhaps as the former capital of this country’s bicycle industry and for its soccer team which in the 1960s and 70s dominated the French league.

A most unlikely venue for some of the past and present greats of the French music and film world and certainly not a place international stars would put high on their list of performance dates.

The scene set, Foly used the “audition” as a vehicle for some spot-on satire, political and social comment and some belting good songs - never letting the audience forget that not only can Foly hold a tune as herself, she can do it as a host of other people too.

As France Gall she warbled some French evergreens and as Sylvie Vartan she flounced about the stage, dangling a wandering microphone and flicking her non-existent lavish blonde locks

Actress Jeanne Moreau growled, the late Serge Gainsbourg's English-born wife, Jane Birkin, sang a tribute to her husband in her much-beloved and heavily accented French, Canada’s very own Mylène Farmer intentionally left everyone wondering exactly what she was singing about as she pirouetted mindlessly around the stage and had her ethereal music mocked for its incomprehensibility. Madonna went in for a touch of S&M just for a change.

Carla Bruni-Sarkozy flirted with the pianist as though he were the incarnation of her "Nicolas" and to the strains of la Marseillaise and huge applause on strode last year's defeated Socialist presidential candidate, Ségolène Royal, promising not to talk politics and then proceeding to do just that.

Into the mix Foly threw Christophe Willem - a former winner of France's answer to American Idol and the voice of music producer Orlando.

After performing non-stop for just over two hours, Foly was dragged back for the inevitable but hugely welcome encore to perform as two icons of French music no longer around – Barbara and Dalida.

And then, just when you thought there could be no more, France television’s own very dippy and often inappropriately-dressed 50-something meteorologist, Catherine Laborde, came on to give us an update on what weather would lie ahead for tomorrow, the night of the “real” performance.

Foly's run at the sumptuous Théâtre Marigny in Paris ended at the weekend and she’ll now be taking her show on the road around the country for the rest of the year – ending up back in the French capital in December for an encore at Olympia.

If any of the names here have meant anything to you, and you’re planning a trip to France at some time this year, this is one act – or a multitude of them – that you would be well advised not to miss.