Ti-Coq at Th éâtre Gesu

[BOURASSA ANDRE G]

Bonjour!
Othe members of the troupe were perfectly bilingual: Paul Dupuis, qho was
a war correspondant in London and had played in a few movies there; Muriel
Guilbault, who was born in Saskatchewan.
_Tit-vcoq_, "first bilingual play by the same troupe in Québec?? I always
hasutate when I hear or read about anything being "first". What about the
local english version, by John Duplessis Turnbull of Matthew Gregory
Lewis's _The Wood Demon, or The Clock has struck_, in montreal, 1809, and
_Le Démon de la forêt, ou l'Horloge a sonné_, 1817? Even if Duplessis
Turnbull was accused of having copied Lewis (_The Montreal Herald_, 19 et
26 décembre 1818, p. 2), this is a local bilingual play, apparently
played by the same actors. In these times, there were quite a few english
speaking actors of french origin; see:
<http://www.theatrales.uqam.ca/fil5.html>.

Amitiés, André G. Bourassa.
<http://www.theatrales.uqam.ca/>.


    > I recently acquired, through a stroke of luck, a rare eight-page
program of what would seem to be a 1949 production of Gratien Gélinas's Ti-Coq at the Gesu Theatre in Montréal.  The program notes that the play opened in French in May 1948, and then re-opened in the autumn of that year at the Gesu, setting a Canadian record in running for 200 consecutive performances. The program is for a production in English, for as it somewhat cryptically notes: "The current occasion is the first in theatrical history that a bi-lingual cast appears [with one exception] in the identical play in a second language."  That cast includes not only Gélinas, who is twice called 'Fridolin' for he was so firmly identified with that role, but also Fred Barry as Papa Desilets and Denise Pelletier as Germaine. The production was co-directed by Gélinas and Barry. The second page contains the famous 'Karsh of Ottawa' black and white photograph of Gélinas, looking very dapper.  The olive green cover has a charming articulated image, as though made out of pieces of paper, of Ti-Coq, with the abstract image of a rooster in red forming his eyebrows, some of his hair, his nose, and his mouth, contained within the overall 'cut out' of the rest of his face, his neck, and his right hand which, conspicuously, is holding a cigarette.  I say "conspicuously" because the back page contains an advertisement asking "Did you notice? . . . ," and then adds, "Ti-Coq smokes Player's mild," with an image of a Player's package at the bottom.  I would be happy to send you a laser photocopy of the program (or a scanned image) if it might be relevant to your research or if you would like a copy for your collection of theatrical memorabilia. It is unusual, these days, to find Montréal theatrical memorabilia, pre-1950, with the exception, of course, of material in institutional collections like the Lande, the BNQ, and so on.
>
> --Denis Salter.
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> __________________________________________________
> Denis Salter
> Professor of Theatre
> McGill University
> 853 Sherbrooke St. West
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