Nicole schreibt...

Marseille 2024

In recent years a shift in thinking took place for me and things I used to dismiss as "don’t be silly" have often moved on to "why the hell not?" – my three expensive expeditions to New York in short succession being the prime example. They were now joined by this crazy short trip to Marseille and while I was there for barely more than 24 hours, I still feel like I want to capture the crazy in a little trip report for myself, because, again, why the hell not? This of course leads to the other question: Why the hell? I could try and come up with half a dozen excuses that make me sound smart and sophisticated, but I’ll be honest and shallow: Of course it’s about a bloke. It’s always about a bloke. In this case, in quite a departure from my weedy American guitar boys, it was charismatic Italian ball of testosterone Gian Marco Schiaretti who had the female audience in Cologne in a collective drool when he strutted onto the stage as the evil Duke of Monroth in Cologne’s Moulin Rouge (poor Christian never stood a chance) but left fairly early to join the latest outing of the Notre Dame de Paris tour in summer 2023 – in New York of all places. And while I was there at the right time and would have killed to see him in my favourite part of Gringoire (as I still pined for a worthy successor to the one and only Bruno Pelletier after twenty years and thought he was in with a chance), my schedule on Broadway was already filled to the brim. But funny enough I did see the man in the flesh at the Lion King box office of all places where I had gone with my Mom to buy her a ticket and he was standing there with a gaggle of what I presume were other people from NDP (one of them kindly carrying a bag with the show logo helped to confirm it was him indeed). And me being my usual self, of course I didn’t jump his bones, but just gawked from afar.

Fast forward several months in which I hadn’t really paid attention to the tour, since NDP has turned up erratically all over the world for short runs for years now and so I thought this had been a New York/Montreal thing only. Until some weeks ago painful realization hit me that they had actually gone back on a proper tour through France all through spring and there would have been several possibilities to catch it, even in my own backyard of Brussels. Now only two tour stops were left – Lyon and Marseille. And this time it only took me a few days of wondering because I knew I’d regret not seizing this last opportunity to catch the tour before it would head on China for the autumn and who knew when and with what cast it may return to our shores? While Lyon was a bit too short notice and a town I'd like to spend more time in, Marseille seemed just about perfect in every way, since I had been there before and even a few really good seats at Le Dôme (the spectacularly ugly building here) had freed up at short notice, so I could grab one. While Germany has all but destroyed its market for bargain airlines, I thanked my lucky stars once more for living close to the border and found decently-priced flights with Ryanair from Charleroi (pretending to be Brussels South) at good times, that clinched the deal. But of course it couldn't go as swimmingly as I had hoped - the plane that was meant to take us to Marseille had broken down and couldn't take off again, so we had to wait for another one. It was all a bit chaotic in Charleroi's tiny Terminal 2 (all of three Gates) and while I HAD left ample buffer time, I was starting to get anxious.

We finally departed a whopping three hours late (16:00 instead of 13:10!) and there was further trouble in Marseille, where the airport buses weren't circulating after a traffic jam on the motorway. But I eventually made it to my hotel near the central station Gare Saint-Charles, where I had just enough time to check in and freshen up. A leisurely dinner by the Vieux Port was an illusion by then. I grabbed a baguette and drink at the station, then took the metro to Le Dôme, where at long last I could relax with plenty of time before curtain up. Was it worth the trouble? Oh hell yea. As if one ball of testosterone as Gringoire wasn't enough (and hunky Gian Marco proving that my faith in him had not been misplaced - so now we don't talk about Bruno anymore), they threw Damien Sargue into the mix as Phoebus, who I had seen as a weedy 19-year old Romeo in "Roméo et Juliette" ages ago (and him greying now made me feel old) and on this evening Robert Marien, who was once the first francophone Valjean in Les Mis in Paris and Montreal, played Frollo. And the Marseillais blithely took photos and even little videos of the show without anyone stopping them, so thought, well, don't mind if I do.

The leads were completed by veterans Angel del Vecchio as Quasimodo who had already touched me deeply with his performance when I last saw the French version in Paris, Alyzée Lalande as Fleur-de-Lys and Jay as Clopin as well as a complete surprise Esmeralda in Elhaida Dani, who wasn't even in the programme. I was a bit disappointed at first to not see the wonderful Hiba Tawaji again, but Elhaida did a fine job with a slightly more husky and thus all the more sensual voice than the others I've seen. The show has remained unchanged since it's conception in 1998 and is still one of these I can watch over and over for its mix of fantastic songs, impressive scenery and breathtaking choreography and while I was incredibly happy to see it with this cast now, I couldn't help feeling a bit sad how crap most musical theatre music is these days (not just in the anglophone sphere but in the francophone sphere as well, where the oldies like NDP and Starmania are doing gangbusters while newer ones are already forgotten).

One regret during my touristy visit of Marseille back then as part of a bigger treck around Provence was that we couldn't take the boat out to Château d'If (where Dumas locked up his fictious Count of Monte Cristo) because it was too windy and I was looking forward to finally get to visit after all. So I walked down to the Vieux Port next morning after breakfast and guess what, it was too windy again! Edmond Dantes may have gotten off the island at last, but it seems I'm doomed to never get onto it. At a loss of what to do with the morning and still feeling tired after the very long day followed by a short night, I ended up on the cheesiest of cheesy tourist vehicles, the mini train. Well, the tour I chose, served two purposes: First it would potter along the Corniche which was too far to walk anyway and then up the hill to Notre Dame de la Garde, which I was far too lazy to slog up again, because I remembered the trek! So here's a picture of the gorgeous coastline along the Corniche (and how I had missed that particular deep blue of the Mediterranean!) that passed the Plage des Catalans, and the elusive Château d'If out in the bay as far as my zoom could reach:

Notre Dame de la Garde, perched on a hilltop above the city (see the very first picture above) is for Marseille what our cathedral is for Cologne in terms of meaning and identification. They call her La Bonne Mère and pious sailors have hung little models of their ships inside to thank Mary for protecting them from shipwreck and pirates. With its location and meaning, I was really glad I got a chance to revisit the gorgeous basilica and in my case add a thank you for saving the trip from disaster when everything seemed to have gone pear-shaped the previous afternoon. From there the mini train trundled back to the Vieux Port and I headed on to the second item on my to-do-list, the MUCEM (Musée des Civilisatons de l'Europe et de la Méditerranée), which had still been under construction back then to open 2013 when Marseille was Cultural Capital of Europe. The actual museum is a brand new building that has been fused with medieval fortress St. Jean that once watched the entrance of the Vieux Port along with its twin St. Nicholas on the other side and the fortress offered some splending views as well. Here's one of the fort itself and the beautiful green spaces they added where I could take advantage of a wooden "sun lounger" to chill for a longer time, and of the pompous Palais de Pharo that Napoleon III. had had built for himself:

After I fortified myself with cappuccino on the lovely roof terrace, I finally tackled the museum proper, which showcased stuff mostly from France, Spain and the former colonies in North Africa (Algeria and Morocco), grouped topically, including a large section dedicated to entertainment and the performing arts, which gladdened my heart. Here's a copy of the Venus of Arles (the original lives in the Louvre), a replica of an old Breton farmer's hut and a case displaying Edith Piaf's black dress, Maurice Chevalier's boater hat and Josephine Baker's infamous banana skirt:

And with at least this item ticked off my list, I went for a stroll through Le Panier, the charming old town of Marseille that feels like an old provencal village in the middle of a bustling metropolis and where I found a lovely little square to have my only proper meal of the trip. Because, short and sweet, the trip was already coming to an end as I had to make my way back to the airport and the evening flight to Charleroi (which was on time!). I can't say how happy it made me that I was so spontaneously able to see Notre Dame de Paris with this cast after all and how wonderful it was to be back on the sunny Mediterranean if only for a day. This short trip really confirmed once again that sometimes you just need to indulge your inner child screaming "I want!" because it is oh so rewarding... So to cap this off, here's the finale of the show, where the French always do that wonderful thing of singing along loudly and turning it all into a party (and the guy in the suit, by the way, is composer Richard Cocciante, who had come out for a little speech and song).