#i didn't revise this bc im not getting paid so if i switched tenses in the middle of a paragraph or something... that's your problem now

[atouchofsass]

english translation under the cut, you're welcome flop stans

The True Story of Cindy Cendrillon 2002, the Worst French Musical of All Time

January 2021. Within the great chorus of internet memes, the video “Rave Party”, a clip from the musical “Cindy 2002” and its infamous “Can someone explain to me what a rave party is?” makes its zillionth round on social media. Little is known about this show, if only because the tour had to be quickly cut off. I understand now that it is time: I must turn the knife in the wound and investigate one of the greatest fiascos in the history of the musical industry. For several months, I contributed heavily to the view count on the full recording of the show (here) and had conversations with the fans, singers, dancers, technicians, and creators of “Cindy, Cendrillon”. I jumped from facebook profiles to deleted groupie blogs, saved from internet limbo by my top secret methods. I found one of the performers in Quebec in their spiritual medicine practice and then another in their cabaret in Salzburg. And now, after all this work worthy of an Albert Londres, I can finally write with confidence: once upon a time, there was Cindy 2002....

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At the root of this affair: a point in time. We are in 2001, I am seven years old, I dream of being a stylist while playing “Dessinons la mode”, plastic butterfly clips in my hair. “Aimer”, the overbearing duet from “Roméo et Juliette,” crackles through my radio. The unctuous adaptation of Shakespeare’s play has just been launched at the Palais des Congrès at the same time as “Les 10 commandments” at the Palais des Sports. The dawn of the 2000s is the advent of the sentimental musical; its paragon, “Notre Dame de Paris.” Between 1998 and 2005, the show written and composed by Luc Plamandon (“Starmania”) and Richard Cocciante was seen by 2.5 million people. In 2001, on the wind of this success, there is a great pondering beneath Plamandon’s shock of white hair. The Canadian thus unearths the idea of the century: what if Cinderella became a princess of the projects?

In the role of this hood heroine: Lââm, 29 years old at the time and already in possession of hundreds of oversized hats. Who better than this child of foster care, called “the cinderella of the ghetto,” figurehead of aptly-named “urban music”? The prince, Ricky, is played by Frank Sherbourne (Ziggy in “Starmania”) sporting shoulder-length blonde hair and a triangular mini-goatee affixed to his chin.

And now, the pitch- pay very close attention. Cindy’s father is an Irish pilot, a veritable Don Juan of the airport. She has never met her mother, a Cuban woman who once spent a night with her father during a layover. When her father disappears, Cindy is raised by her racist stepmother, La Palma (Patsy Gallant) and her two stepsisters, the irritating Pétula (Carine Haddadou from Star Académie) and Tamara (Assia). But, God bless, Cindy can find comfort in her greatest passion: the jig, a bouncing Irish dance from the 17th century, omnipresent in the show. One night, Petula and Tamara, the vile sisters, are invited to the birthday party of the ultra-famous rocker and arch-hottie, Ricky, in the nightclub Le Galaxy. This idol, costumed in leather which exposes one nipple, comes directly from Manchester, a city “where there’s nothing to do but become either a footballer or unemployed.” Cindy has not received an invitation for this Ball 2.0, but turns up anyway thanks to her fairy godfather Gontrand- a fashion designer fallen from grace who mourns his days of Parisian glory. When she arrives at the “bal à Ricky” (direct quotation) in her pseudo-eastern getup, all eyes are on her- to the despair of Ricky’s girlfriend, the model Judy (Judith Bérard, seen in Starmania), a fragile, vivid soul who drowns herself in hard drugs to the point of embarking on the “Cocaine Express.” The Mancunian singer asks Cindy to dance, but the clock strikes midnight. As she flees, the orphan loses her ring. A few days later, she responds to a casting call for Ricky’s next music video: a brand new single set to the tune of a jig, the Irish dance so beloved by our princess of the ghetto. During the audition, Ricky recognizes the love of his life. Watching the two fall head over heels for each other, Judy, the rocker’s girlfriend, commits suicide. Overcome with guilt, Cindy flees to Ireland, her country of origin as well as that of the jig, but her prince succeeds in finding her. The two lovebirds ditch everything and leave on a spaceship.

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“Luc Plamandon had the concept for the piece when he finished Notre Dame,” Romano Musumarra, speaking from Rome, tells me. He composed the songs for the show, but above all he is famous for such gems as Elsa’s “T’en va pas” and Jeanne Mas’s “Toute premiere fois.” “Rehearsals ran for six months in Caen. The production had already reserved the Palais des Congrès for September 2002. We were working under pressure: while the singers and dancers were gradually learning everything, we were still finishing writing the piece,” he continues. Behind both the production and the tight schedule was, fittingly, Charles Talar, ex-director of the PSG, who had hit the jackpot with “Notre Dame de Paris.” The financial investment for Cindy approached 7 million euros. Onstage, an enormous centerpiece- a mechanical tower, eight meters tall, weighing eight tons, and with eight rotating arms- would surely wow audiences. And the super-2000s costumes? Those were Givenchy.

The studio album with its pink cover was released at the end of February 2002, six months before the premier. While the CD dragged itself laboriously to 24th on the French charts, in Caen, it was rehearsals for Waterloo. “Talar, the producer, put the cart before the horse when he reserved a theatre before the show was really done” notes Judith Bérard (who played Judy, Ricky’s suicidal girlfriend). She explains “Plamandon is a free spirit, he doesn’t work well with a gun to his head. They gave us rough, unfinished drafts that we worked with. The show existed, but primarily in his head. Really, in the cast, we quickly realized that we were on a magnificent Titanic. It was a splendid project.”

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From Caen, they sold an unfinished show to the national press. “Cindy 2002” was launched like a feature film, with omnipresent posters and a trailer playing on repeat on TV. But more water was being poured on this drowning show. A month before the musical’s opening, the director Lewis Furey walked out. Rumors flew that Lââm wanted to jump ship. The alleged cause? Overly soppy songs.

After six months of intense rehearsals, it was the big Paris premier. September 25th 2002 in the wings of the Palais des Congrès, Lââm, armed with her legendary swagger, rallied the troupe. They warmed up their voices. In the audience: Céline Dion and her husband René, as well as then-Minister of the Interior Nicolas Sarkozy.

“Obviously, before the opening, we were really nervous. We just weren’t ready at that time,” recalls Patrice Blouin (who played Jack, Ricky’s producer dressed in Beetlejuice stripes). “This musical had been reduced to its most minimal form. There was an inability to reproduce on stage what had been created on paper. That’s the real tragedy,” he explained. He still sings to this day, in addition to opening a spiritual medicine practice in Montreal.

The curtain rose. For two hours, the audience discovers the urban tone Plamandon has breathed into the show- and with it, errors in French to increase authenticity: Ricky “spreads ketchup on hot dogs on burgers,” and the stepmother asks herself “What we can do to shut up his mouth?” And, as a bonus, we get such daring rhymes as in the song “Salaud” where Judith Bérard lists rhymes for “axe” in the middle of her pre-suicide number: “Like a solo by a sax/This word that I fax/Bleached like with Ajax”

After the premier, the press tore the musical apart. Le Parisien described with great cynicism how “The audience, all the same, stood up to applaud at the end of the show, as if trying to convince themselves that they had liked it. As if the public had wanted to reassure itself!” In an interview, Plamandon condemned the media’s tenacity.

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The journalist Julien Baldacchino, at the microphone of “Les rois du monde est stone etc,” a podcast dedicated to musicals, recalls the day in 2002 when, at 11 years of age, he had rushed to the CD section of Auchan de Béziers on a saturday outing with his grandparents to buy the live album of Cindy. He already owned the studio recording. “I think it was written in the stars that it was going to go badly. Like a stroke of cruel fate, when I got home, I realized that the case was empty,” the expert says with irony. With hindsight and his enormous knowledge of musicals, he has his own theory to explain this failure. “I think that Plamandon wanted to combine too many different concepts together in a single show. There’s a problem of coherence with the script” he diagnoses, noting that certain characters disappear without explanation and that in the filmed version, the same cutaway shot of the audience appears roughly a dozen times.

In 2002, some months after the opening, backstage, the production announced the end of its run. “We were despondent, the team was very close-knit,” recalls Judith Bérard, “It was a catastrophe. It permanently stuck to some singers’ careers- they couldn’t bounce back after that failure.” “Plamandon is an innovative artist; critique flew right by him because he was ahead of his time. The media was waiting to do him in after Notre Dame,” retorts Romano Musumarra, the composer. “It took a little reading-into to understand the text. He may have been too bold. Nevertheless, the public was there. 100,000 people bought their tickets in Paris. That’s not nothing.”

What if Musumarra was right? What if Cindy 2002 was just too ahead of its time?

On Twitter, maintaining that she did not want to respond to my requests, Lââm shut me up with a “Sorry it’s in the past. I have nothing to say thank you good luck.” Floored by this silence, then seeing three little dots pop up on the chat window, I realized, relieved, that the star was still writing to me! “Know that artists rarely speak about their failures. I was 30, I landed the role of Cendrillon and I celebrated my 31st backstage. With bad press coverage you're screwed: Lââmayonnaise did not come together.”*

*translator's note: too lazy to make it work in English; this is a joke on her name and a French expression literally meaning "the mayonnaise didn't thicken/come together" with the figurative meaning "it didn't catch on"

delightful article honestly. this is exactly what I needed to read after two whiskeys