Creation : 02/10/2007 – Atelier du Rhin, Colmar, France
Co-production : Les Percussions de Strasbourg & l’Atelier du Rhin
An initiative of Jean-Paul Bernard and Matthew Jocelyn
Musical composition : James Wood
Adaptation et texte : Yves Lenoir
Adapted and written by : Catriona Morrison
Highlighting : Pierre Peyronnet
Scenography and costumes : Anne Werey
Musicians : 2 actors Patrice Verdeil alternating with Yves Lenoir + 3 percussionists alternating with Jean-Paul Bernard, Claude Ferrier, Bernard Lesage, Keiko Nakamura, François Papirer
Duration : 50′
Le petit bossu
Musical show for young audiences from 6 years old.
This is a musical show for young audiences from 6 years old.
This musical show is inspired by The Story of the Little Hunchback, taken from one of the tales of the 25th night of the Thousand and One Nights. One night, a little hunchback is invited to a tailor’s house, he chokes on a fishbone and dies… This is how this story full of twists and turns begins, the tailor panicking, drops him off at a Jewish doctor’s who himself throws him to his Muslim cook neighbour and the latter disposes of the body in a dark alley. The hunchback’s body is beaten up by a drunken Christian merchant. Arrested by the police, the merchant must be hanged, but the protagonists at the beginning of the story take turns declaring themselves guilty of the crime. Not knowing who to hang, the crowd gets tired of this endless story, the sky darkens, and miraculously, the little hunchback sneezes and spits out the fish’s backbone. All this to end up singing and dancing to have emerged safe and sound from a very strange story of which he has no memory.
I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to do that again, but I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to do that again.
I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to do that again.
James Wood, the composer, uses the religious references in this tale as musical elements to deal with. Each of the main characters is represented by a specific and easily identifiable group of instruments. In this way, the sounds are used as tools for the narrative. Catriona Morrison, the play’s director, explains that the story of The Little Hunchback, or “man’s hellish race to escape death”, is written in close and interdependent collaboration between music, stage and speech. The three percussionist musicians will meet and play with one actor, then another, a sort of kaleidoscope of characters and rhythms