#sadia starmania

[kimodraw]

⭐ plein d'enfants de la pollution⭐

#starmania #starmania 1979 #starmania 2022 #johny rockfort #cristal starmania #sadia starmania #ziggy starmania #marie jeanne starmania #zéro janvier #stella spotlight #saw it with my friends last week :)))))))))))) so good #been a fan for years its a REALLY GOOD version #for the uneducated....starmania's a good and fun french musical...written by michel berger #with balavoine and france gall in its original run #im havin fun with the designs i might do more...good break from animation work lol

[braimee]

Very obsessed with the way Monopolis is talked about in Starmania

Like, Monopolis meaning the One city, the Only city, when we know for a fact that it is a sprawling city, that it is expending all over the country - according to Sadia at least

Add the fact that Monopolis is the very first “character” that is introduced to us. Before anything else, before we can find out about the characters or the story, the very first thing we learn is that everything happens in Monopolis. There is no escape from it, there is no way for the characters to exist outside of it, no story can take place beyond the borders of the city - assuming there even are borders

Love love love the implication that there is nowhere else to go; Johnny and Cristal want to leave, they want to find a no man’s land, and it doesn’t exist. There isn’t a place that is not the city, because it is everywhere, it’s the only thing there is left

Also, call me a nerd, but the way it’s just called “la ville” by various characters reminds me a lot of how Rome was called Urbs (City in latin). Like. There is only One City. We don’t need to add anything else, because there is only one place that truly matters. It’s driving me insane 

#starmania #starmania 2022 #cristal #johnny rockfort #sadia #this has been on my mind for a looong time #this is just for fun btw #its just the way i see it #yes i think that monopolis is a character in that story #no i won’t elaborate. anyway

[melancholic-cinnamon-roll]

Just two friends sharing a fag

#my post #my art #starmania #starmania 2022 #starmania fanart #johnny rockfort #sadia

[starmaniamania]

FULL!!!! Naziland, Jan 25, 2024

#starmania 2022 #video #audio #season 2 #manet miriam baghdassarian #Sadia #cw flashing #Cw strobing #Dancers #lighting design #sets & costumes

[docwormie]

currently thinking thoughts. none of them coherent.

#starmania 2022 #johnny rockfort #cristal #sadia #côme #lilya adad #manet miriam baghdassarian #text post #memes #starmania #in the second one idk who's speaking

[capitaletele]

J'ai jamais lu un journal...

One of my early headcanons about Johnny, which is half serious and half crack, is that he can't read.

(I know, he's supposed to be leaving his name tagged on all the walls of Monopolis, but also kids who can't read at all, or read well, can still definitely learn how to write their names, and be wonderful artists who can reproduce shapes. Johnny was just never taught, back in his shitty banlieue nord school, or maybe he skipped too much for it to stick, or maybe he has severe undiagnosed dyslexia, or needs glasses, which doesn't fit the rest of my story but I love the image of Johnny in glasses so here, take it as a gift from me.)

Anyway, that's why he's "never read a newspaper." And also why he loves comic books, because he can look at the pictures.

So anyway, it goes like this:

Cristal joins the Etoiles Noires in the hangar and figures out that several of them have huge gaps in their literacy education. She has nothing much to do while she's supposed to be hiding out in the hangar, so she takes it upon herself to make Cristal School happen and raise the reading level around here.

Meanwhile, Johnny is always ~~around somewhere while that's happening, tinkering with his motorbike, cleaning his gun, puttering around the car or "taking a nap" (with his eyes open).

At first Cristal thinks it's because he wants to keep an eye on her - is it because he doesn't trust her around the Etoiles Noires? Or because he doesn't trust them around her? Neither is a great option.

But no, one day she catches Johnny peering intently at the bit of wall she's using as an improvised chalkboard, and he's frowning in concentration and his lips are moving. He's hanging around because he wants to follow the lessons, but he doesn't want anyone to know! And especially not Cristal!

So anyway, Cristal confronts him one night when they're in private, and he admits to it, and also lets slip that Sadia knows -- she's been helping him cover for it with Cristal -- but that she also used it to demean him and never let him forget how dumb he was and how much he needed her to make up for it :(

Cristal never noticed because he keeps a hoard of comic books piled up next to his pallet, and she's found him "reading" them a bunch of times. But he explains that he looks at the pictures and makes up his own stories, which are probably cooler anyway.

Obviously, sexy alphabet learning ensues! Cristal helps him practice using his comic books, and she's kind and patient and never treats him like he's an idiot (contrary to all his teachers, and his father, who never missed an opportunity to tell him how much of a disappointing idiot he was.)

Following up on the "he can't write but he knows how to draw his name" idea, maybe Johnny is good at sketching! And he has little notebooks that he pilfers from around town that are full of portraits of the Etoiles Noires and random stray cats (Johnny loves cats, but that's a headcanon for another day) and also Cristal -- Cristal asleep, Cristal smiling at him in the passenger seat of the Jaguar, and mortifyingly for him, many many sketches of half- or fully-naked "Starmania"-era Cristal that definitely predate their meeting and that she wasn't supposed to ever find out about.

But he leaves her little sketches of herself with her name carefully written in block letters underneath, like: CЯISTAL, and it fully melts her heart.

And then massmedia, she of the brilliant ideas, said: "What if Sadia knew he/the Etoiles Noires couldn't read and so she was careless with incriminating evidence of her being a double-agent around, and now that Cristal is here they find out!"

Which is an excellent idea for a way to introduce a fix-it where they get to live out the rest of their days happily on their goat farm :) :) :) And Johnny draws his own comics about their adventures to show their future children, and when Cristal is pregnant and uncomfortable, he reads her stories to help her go to sleep.

#starmania fic #not!fic #johnny rockfort #cristal #sadia

[chocolateluma]

Pretty sus in my opinion.

#starmania #starmania 2022 #Starmania 22 #sadia #zéro janvier #fanart #meme #digital art #chocolart23 #musicals

[tiendei]

C'est le scoop de ta vie, tu peux pas passer à côté!

#my art #2023 #starmania #sadia

[yingtoi]

Johnny Rockfort - Côme Cristal - Lilya Adad Ziggy - Adrien Fruit Marie-Jeanne - Alex Montembault Stella Spotlight - Magali Goblet Zéro Janvier - David Latulippe Gourou Marabout - Malaika Lacy Sadia - Miriam Baghdassarian Gourou Marabout - Simon Geoffroy

#SADIA BLUE HAIR REALNESS #AND CRISTAL<3 #starmania #starmania 2022

[massivefanmilkshake]

M’appelez pas madame sans savoir qui je suis, je n’suis pas une feeeeeemme je suis un travesti

#Starmania #travesti #Sadia my beloved

[wildishmazz]

Tim Rice's "Get Onto My Cloud", Starmania

Since there isn't a transcript available for this podcast yet, I sat down and typed it out myself.

This is Tim Rice. Welcome to my podcast, Get Onto My Cloud.

[70s style theme music]

I thought for this podcast, I would tell you something about the only foreign musical I’ve ever translated.

I remember Cameron Mackintosh, in around 1983, sending me a copy of the Les Miserables French album, which I’m not sure I even played. Which was not the most astute move of my career. I think I must’ve been getting going on Chess at the time. However, Cameron and the French authors could not have been more brilliantly served than by Herbert Krezmer’s English lyrics in 1985, and of course Les Mis is a worldwide phenomenon still running all over the world(pandemics permitting). So, when I received another French musical album in 1989, a year after Chess had flopped ignominiously on Broadway, I actually inserted the recording into my CD player.

My career was going through - how can I put it? - a quiet patch, and I felt I had the time to listen to a French show with what had the rather uninspiring title, Starmania. Or, in French, Starmania.

Starmania is a cyberpunk rock opera. It was written in 1976, in French, by Michel Berger(music) and Luc Plamondon(lyrics).

Michel was a major player in France in popular music culture, both as a songwriter and performer. He wrote and produced records for French superstars including Johnny Hallyday, Françoise Hardy, and his wife, France Gall. Who, incidentally, won Eurovision in 1965 with “Poupée De Cire, Poupée De Son”, representing(for some reason) Luxembourg. But Michel was not involved in that. It was he who had sent me the album.

Luc Plamondon was a French Canadian lyricist, who was responsible for many of Celine Dion’s French language hits in the early part of her career.

On first hearing, I was intrigued and impressed by the record. I speak tolerable French, especially after a few glasses of red wine, and had managed to pick up the drift of some of the plot which, to say the least, seemed fairly convoluted. It was much more rock influenced than the score of, say, Les Mis or Phantom. As a frustrated, failed rocker from way back, this appealed to me more quickly than a traditional theatrical score might have done.

Starmania started off as an album in France, and made it onto stage in Paris in 1979. It was a massive hit; and indeed, still is, with yet another major revival scheduled in Paris for 2020(or as soon as is possible). Its success is quite an achievement as the French don’t seem to like any musicals, with none of the English-speaking mega-hits doing particularly well when translated and presented in France. Jesus Christ Superstar, despite having its French premiere attended by both Salvador Dali and Frankie Howard, only ran for a few months.

Anyway, I went over to Paris to see the show and to meet Michel and Luc. The show was great, and I was even beginning to come to grips with the story - as this is only a 20 minute podcast, I don’t think I’ll go into all the subtleties of the plot. Suffice it to say, it was set in the near future, which then was the year 2000, in Metropolis(sic), the capital of the recently created Occident Nation. As it was already the late 80s, we were in for a pretty turbulent 11 years, if Luc’s story was to be an accurate prophecy.

The leading characters in Starmania were Johnny Rockfort, a cross-dressing student agitator(sic); Zero Janvier, a billionaire businessman planning to run for the presidency of the country(so Luc was right on the money there); his girlfriend, former sex symbol movie star Stella Spotlight; a waitress/narrator called Marie-Jeanne; hopelessly in love with Ziggy, an androgynous fantasist record dealer; Cristal, the host of the TV show Starmania, who becomes involved with Johnny; and then there was Johnny’s gang of street rebels, the Black Stars.

You probably don’t need to remember all of this.

Marie-Jeanne has one of the score’s most powerful moments, at the climax of the show, a song called “Le Monde est Stone”. In the English version, which after a lot of thought I entitled “The World is Stone”, it was sung on the album we recorded eventually by the fabulous Cyndi Lauper and was a medium-sized hit single for Cyndi in the UK in 1992. Here it is.

[musical interlude, “The World is Stone”]

Cyndi Lauper, and “The World is Stone”.

Not having a particularly full dance card at the beginning of the 90s, I happily agreed to translate or adapt the songs into English, for an English release album, particularly as Michel had done a deal with CBS in the UK where the delightful Muff Winward, formerly of the Spencer Davis Group, was the executive overseeing this particular project.

Muff was an all-round good egg, if eggs can be round. An all-oval good egg, perhaps. Muff and Michel managed to assemble a very distinguished international lineup of artistes to perform on the English-language album. It was recorded eventually in London, Paris, and Los Angeles. I also translated the book of the show, i.e. the dialogue between songs, and took the decision to rename Starmania “Tycoon” as the Zero Janvier tycoon character was pretty central and “Starmania” sounded a little bit too like Opportunity Knocks or, in today’s TV terms, Britain’s Got Talent. This was probably a mistake. “Starmania” today sounds like a great retro title for a show.

Muff and I had been over to New York with the aim of roping Cyndi Lauper into the project. She’d heard two songs that she’d been sent, “The World is Stone”, and another number called “You Have To Learn To Live Alone”, which is actually one of my favourite lyrics. And Cyndi seemed moderately intrigued. It was soon clear that she hadn’t a clue who I was, so I managed to subtly inform her that I’d written the words for “One Night in Bangkok”, which had been a massive radio and chart hit in the States. And by the time I’d flung Superstar and Evita into the mix, Cyndi’s enthusiasm had perked up a bit. Funnily enough I met Cyndi in a restaurant in Barnes, about 25 years later, and on that occasion she thought I was Robert Stigwood. Since her great success as a writer of the musical Kinky Boots, I’m hoping for recognition, instant recognition, as a fellow theatrical next time we meet.

Back to Starmania/Tycoon. On the album in addition to Cyndi Lauper we had Tom Jones, Bros, Celine Dion, Kim Carnes, Willy DeVille(who as Mink DeVille made that superb 1977 album Spanish Stroll), German punk superstar Nina Hagen, and - particularly exciting for me - the wonderful former Ronette, Ronnie Spector(whom I last saw in 1964 on the set of TV’s Ready, Steady, Go, when I failed to win a Billy-Jay Kramer miming competition). By any standards, that’s a pretty impressive list of artists, and it was a great thrill for me to meet and work with them. Obviously, the album would do well in the UK, and we hoped also in America. Why not? Which in turn could lead to an English language stage version of France’s biggest ever rock musical.

Obviously, this did not happen.

But I’m still glad I got involved, if only because it led to one of the best recordings of my lyrics I’d be lucky enough to have experienced. In French, the song was titled “S.O.S. d'un Terrien en Detresse”, which translated is “S.O.S. of an Earthling in Distress”. In the show it’s sung by Johnny Rockfort, mourning the death of his lover Cristal. I decided not to go with “S.O.S. of an Earthling in Distress” as the title, and called the song “Only the Very Best”. And it was sung magnificently by the leader of the US rock band Cockrobin, Peter Kingsbury.

[musical interlude, “Only the Very Best”]

Peter Kingsbury, what a vocal, with “Only the Very Best” from Tycoon, my English version of the French megamusical Starmania. I was particularly pleased that the distinguished composer of Les Mis, Claude-Michel Schonberg, chose that track as one of his Desert Island Discs.

So, my attempt to bring France’s greatest musical to the English stage was a total failure. The English language album and two or three singles did very well in France, and sold a few copies in French Canada, but that probably wasn’t because of my brilliant English lyrics. Nothing really happened record-wise in the UK after Cyndi’s initial success with “The World is Stone”.

The whole enterprise received a terrible blow when Michel Berger, aged only 44, suffered a fatal heart attack after playing tennis in August 1992. In France, his death led to a massive outpouring of sincere and shocked tributes to one of the nation’s best and most popular musicians. I remember him as a warm and civilised fellow, with whom it was always a pleasure both to work and to have dinner with, with him, France, and their family. I’m sure his work would have made an even greater international impact, had he lived a little longer.

All the same, Starmania lives on in its home country, and I hope to see it again before too long. I wouldn’t put any money on that English version ever emerging, but Luc is still happily with us(admittedly in Quebec a lot of the time), so if an insanely optimistic producer wanted to give it a go, I don’t think it would be too hard to get Luc’s permission. And mine.

The biggest star involved in the project was the legendary Tom Jones, who recorded my translation of the evil Zero Janvier’s big number, “Le Blues du Businessman”. For someone like Tom to sing a lyric one has written is as much an honour as a pleasure. I remember the recording session in Los Angeles as a great music memory for me, as was the session with the wise and wonderful Ronnie Spector in Paris.

So thank you, Michel, thank you Luc, thank you France, and thank you, Muff.

To end this Starmania podcast, here is Tom Jones, with “Le Blues du Businessman”, aka “I Would Love to Change the World”.

Remember, when this was written, I had not heard of Donald Trump.

[musical interlude, “I Would Love to Change the World”]

#Starmania #Tim Rice #I definitely get the feeling that when he last left the show Sadia did not exist

[miss-starmania]

Starmania V “Mogador-93”

20 th anniversary cast

#starmania #norman groulx #kwin #johnny rockfort #sadia #Instagram

[braimee]

can’t believe it took me this long to think of this! (this one’s in french, sorry about that)

#starmania #starmania 2022 #johnny rockfort #cristal #sadia #côme #lilya adad #manet miriam baghdassarian

[melancholic-cinnamon-roll]

Trio de la jalousie vs sos d'un terrien en détresse

Merci cam pour l'inspi + source du template

#my post #my art #starmania #starmania fanart #johnny rockfort #sadia #cristal #trio de la jalousie #starmania 1979

[starmaniamania]

Ah, Starmania, where everyone is a good person, having a great time, making the right choices.

#stella spotlight #maag #starmania 2022 #fanworks #meme #text posts #cristal #lilya adad #adrien fruit #ziggy #johnny rockfort #côme #sadia #manet miriam baghdassarian #marie jeanne #louise charbonnel

[docwormie]

Little rant about the Etoiles Noires and gender ahead (i need to get the starmania brainrot out of my system and can not stop analyzing everything i watch through a queer lens)

i can't quite articulate how much i love the 2022 version of Starmania but one of my fav bits is at the end of travesti, after sadia's just sung about being hot and fucking crazy and Not Cis™, and after killing like 3 different people in the span of one song, all of the étoiles noires (which are mostly men here) gather around the car and sing with her !!! like. they know, they don't care, and they think it slays.

the fact that those murders happens during travesti makes the queer narrative more obvious because, of course, it's all about transgression. the étoiles noires are those left behind by society, those who don't "fit in" an expected norm, so they embrace what makes them different and they find community in violence. sadia (who is literally the allegory of that violence) embodies that !! the whole group singing the word "travesti" while in the middle of organized crime to overthrow the system is a political statement (and it would have been even more radical back in 1979, though idk how the song was staged). the things that makes them outcasts and their anger feeling left out are their fuel to act.

of course their respective reasons to join the zonards/étoiles noires must be different but queerness (and more generally, non-conformity to social norms) is definitely a part of it. the fact that sadia is not the one singing "des gars qui se maquillent" in 2022 confirms it, and although the étoiles noires have this "manly" behavior (which the women share anyways), they also somewhat subvert the norm, wearing make up and nail polish, showing emotions... btw i think it's good that the 2022 show goes back to a sensitive, vulnerable, somewhat feminine portrayal of johnny (which Balavoine definitely had and that was kind of lost in the 1988/1993 versions). i also really love how there seems to be a real spirit of camaraderie/friendship between them all ?? like there are displays of affection, (cf. johnny with the guy that helps him put the white coat on + the person sitting on the car next to him). they're literally commiting heinous murders but all you can see is how much fun they're having !!

then there's also the "besoin d'amour" bit which is really great because just like in travesti (the parallel in the choreography is very obvious !), they have cristal, aka stereotypical barbie, singing this girly, very much france gall-esque, pop song on the top of the car, about how joyous and fun it is to be in love, and the whole gang is dancing around her like a chorus to highlight how universal the message is. and then cristal's transformation after joining the étoiles noires !! it's clear to me that what the media depict as a "kidnapping" is actually a sort of liberation for her: she's allowed to leave behind her perfect image (= the golden cage stella never escapes) and maybe even a part of performative femininity as shown through her outfits. (i have a short post about that coming soon!) to become this more "messy", darker version of herself that doesn't need to be pure as crystal (lol) all the time.

overall the way the étoiles noires are portrayed is really cool because it subverts the classic representation of that scary gang with cold, judgmental, unfeeling vibes, and instead makes them a supportive group that faces together a cold, judgmental, unfeeling society ! (however !!! the different periods (1979/2022/whatever year starmania takes place in) overlapping in starmania do create a dissonance in how queerness is portrayed, and of course queercoding villains is a little problematic, but that's a post for another day!)

so yeah this violent group (of outcasts) terrorizing the population being made of gnc characters that aren't afraid to show feelings means a lot to me that's it 🫶🫶🫶

#sorry this was chaotic #the ideas this gave me !! #i know sadia being an “outcast” is debatable #but i'll tackle it in my next post #still shadowbanned though ! #thomas jolly #lgbtq #sadia #johnny rockfort #starmania 1979 #queer analysis #queer representation #gender noncomformity #côme #gabrielle lapointe #lilya adad #manet miriam baghdassarian #ambriel #william cloutier #starmania 2022 #starmania