With its World Premiere about a year away, tickets are already on sale for the Broadway bound musical N THE QUEEN OF PARIS. And 2015 is shaping up to be the year of Émile Zola, with Keira Knightley set to make her Broadway debut in the stage adaption of his novel Therese Raquin and N THE QUEEN OF PARIS bringing his novel Nana to the stage. Recently, David Clarke of Broadway World sat down with Ella Louise Allaire and Martin Lord Ferguson, the co-creators of N THE QUEEN OF PARIS, and Pascal Nadon to discuss the upcoming musical. Fans of Cirque du Soleil will recognize the pair as the producers of the ZED album (and more); Mr. Clarke’s interview touched on their time with Cirque briefly…
I also read that you both have experience writing for Cirque du Soleil and that your choreographer, Jean-Jacques Pillet, also has experience working with Cirque du Soleil. Can audiences expect a Cirque du Soleil tonality or their type of imagery in N THE QUEEN OF PARIS?
Ella Louise Allaire: Absolutely not. [She and Martin Lord Ferguson Laugh] You’re right. We did do a lot of Cirque du Soleil, starting in 2004 in Las Vegas with KÀ. Our contribution to Cirque du Soleil was the large score. We were always pushing for 60 pieces and musicians…
Martin Lord Ferguson: Choirs.
Ella Louise Allaire: Yes. Choir as well. This is what we did for KÀ and also for ZED, which was in Tokyo Disney. We went to record a 60-piece string orchestra as well as a large ensemble choir.
Martin Lord Ferguson: It’s a valuable question because Cirque [du Soleil] is an icon where we come from-Quebec. It employs a lot of people and creative minds for that reason. Sometimes you end up at that company by accident. It’s not necessarily because you had the love of circus arts when you were growing up.
Being in the music business and being in the theatre business, at a certain point we got approached by Cirque to do shows. Through them we also met great creators, like our choreographer. He’s actually from the classical side of choreography. He was a French choreographer who was doing modern choreographies for ballet in Paris, and he got approached for the same reason. He was pushing the boundaries further than others, so he got noticed by Cirque. They said, “Hey, I’d kind of like to take what you’re doing for modern ballet and dance and put it into a circus atmosphere.”
This is a bit like what we were doing. We were doing large scores, like Ella was saying. We were writing trailer music for Hollywood and these other large, large scores, and we ended up at Cirque for KÀ for that particular reason. We were writing in that big, epic style of music, and they were like, “Oh, let’s take this and bring it to the Cirque environment.”
Read the rest of the interview here.
{ SOURCE: Broadway World }
