Two decades after its very first spark, the love story between Bruno Pelletier and French audiences continues. The Quebecer reignites the flame today with a role in the musical Al Caponepresented in Paris until May.
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No, our French cousins have not forgotten Bruno Pelletier, even two decades after he donned the Gringoire clothes at Notre-Dame de Paris. On the other hand. Today they are celebrating his grand return to the stage at the mythical theater of the Folies Bergère in the 9th arrondissement.
“I didn’t know what to expect. In fact, I thought they had forgotten me after all these years. But it’s a very loyal audience,” says the Quebecer on the line from the City of Light.
Le Journal spoke to Bruno Pelletier earlier this week just before he took the stage for the fifth performance of the musical Al Capone.
The story of the most famous American gangster is revisited in this original creation by Jean-Félix Lalanne, starring the Franco-Italian tenor Robert Alagna in the title role. Bruno Pelletier borrows his facial features from Eliot Ness, the police officer who spent his career tracking down Al Capone in Chicago in the 1930s.
fact and fiction
But while its premise revolves around very real and documented facts, the musical takes many liberties in the name of entertainment. The fiction is particularly relaxed when Bruno Pelletier’s character falls in love with Rita Capone, the sister of the gangster he obsessively pursues.
“This is not the story of Al Capone,” specifies Bruno Pelletier. He had sisters, but the one on the show is entirely fictional, as is his romance with Eliot Ness. »
This Eliot Ness is also very different from what we discover in the great history books. “Darker, shabbier and more taciturn” on the panels, the character turns out to be the antithesis of Gringoire, the famous narrator of Notre-Dame de Paris, which Bruno Pelletier revealed to many French people in the late 1990s.
And that’s exactly why the role was so appealing to the Quebecer.
“Of course I can’t make the French public forget Notre-Dame de Paris,” confirms Bruno Pelletier. But if I come back here [en France] after twenty years it had to be a completely different role, a role that had nothing to do with what they knew about me. »
Al Capone will be presented to the French media on Thursday evening.