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The profile · researched 6 November 2026
Thirty years in the jumpsuit: Martin Fontaine takes Elvis to the orchestra pit
Martin Fontaine has played Elvis Presley in Quebec City, Las Vegas and in front of arena-sized symphony orchestras since 1995. After stepping back from the role in 2022, he is touring Elvis Expérience Symphonique through 2026, with five shows at the Théâtre Capitole from 25 to 29 November.
An audition in Quebec City, and a role that lasted
Martin Fontaine was born in Quebec in 1964 and came up as a multi-instrumentalist rather than an impersonator. The Elvis work began with an audition: in 1995 he won the lead in Elvis Story, a production mounted at Le Capitole in Quebec City, and ended up holding the part for a dozen years. It was never a one-off novelty booking — Elvis Story settled into the Capitole as a repeating fixture and travelled beyond Quebec, and the cumulative count across his Presley productions now stands at more than two million spectators since 1995.
Fontaine has been consistent about method over mimicry. He has described preparing by reading about Presley's life and working through video and recordings, and he builds the face with make-up, lighting and shadow, a wig and sideburns rather than prosthetics. His own summary of the job is that he tries to think and feel as Presley did while performing. His favourite song in the catalogue is "If I Can Dream".
That craft framing matters to how the shows are built. The productions are reconstructions of specific concerts from specific years, with the band, the backing voices and the stage patter treated as part of the score rather than as decoration around a singer.
Elvis Experience: a 1972 concert rebuilt part by part
In 2013 Fontaine launched Elvis Experience, with himself as singer, artistic director and director. The premise was narrower and more demanding than a greatest-hits revue: it recreated the show Presley performed 837 times in Las Vegas between 1969 and 1976, pinned to a 1972 concert. On stage that meant 24 musicians and eight choir members cast as the original personnel — the TCB Band, The Stamps, The Sweet Inspirations and Joe Guercio's orchestra.
The production reached the source. In 2015 it played the Elvis Presley Theater at the Westgate Las Vegas Resort & Casino, the room where Presley himself had worked through hundreds of sold-out dates, with that run closing on 30 May. Alongside the Vegas booking, Elvis Experience kept an annual ten-week summer season in Quebec City.
Fontaine built variation into the format rather than locking a single running order. Jumpsuits and set lists changed from night to night, drawn from a repertoire deep enough that, as he put it, the audience never gets the same show twice. Elvis Experience ran until 2022, interrupted by an 18-month pause through 2020 and 2021 under COVID restrictions.
Where the orchestra came in
The symphonic strand grew out of arena dates. A symphonic staging filled the Centre Vidéotron in Quebec City in 2016, and on 9 February 2018 the show reached Place Bell in Laval with the Orchestre symphonique de Québec. The Laval performance ran to 38 songs from the 1969–1976 Vegas period, including "Love Me Tender", "Fever", "My Way" and "An American Trilogy", with some numbers deliberately left for the band alone. The musicians were made up to resemble James Burton, Jerry Scheff, Ronnie Tutt and John Wilkinson; Fontaine handed out scarves and stuffed animals, and kept the gestures, the hip movements, the karate poses, the band introductions and even Presley's jokes.
Reviewing that night for Radio-Canada, Philippe Rezzonico — openly sceptical about symphonic remakes as a genre — found the orchestral integration largely seamless and singled out the arrangements for "Welcome To My World" and "You Gave Me a Mountain". His reservations were specific rather than general: some tracks were over-orchestrated, and Fontaine's singing missed the mark in places, notably on "The Wonder of You". The conclusion was that the fusion works in the room even when it looks dubious on paper.
The format then moved to Trois-Rivières. On 28 August 2024 the Orchestre symphonique de Trois-Rivières presented Elvis Experience Symphonique at the Amphithéâtre Cogeco under conductor Joël Thibault, with more than 50 musicians and Fontaine directing the staging himself. Tickets went on sale at $90 plus tax.
A step back, then a return
Fontaine had already signalled a wind-down. By 2022, after 27 years in the role, he was performing around 150 shows a year, each requiring two hours of preparation, and said the schedule no longer left adequate recovery between dates. The emphasis shifted to Le Memphis Cabaret, the 150-seat dinner-show venue he opened in Trois-Rivières in 2018 and still runs.
By May 2025, seven years in, he described the Memphis as being at full cruising speed, built around musical revues and themed productions for an audience that largely wants nostalgia, and admitted plainly that selling tickets is hard work. His own stage time that year went to a retrospective marking 40 years in music, running from 3 October to 29 November 2025 with the band Porn-Flakes, pulling in material he had not played since the 1980s along with songs from his Sunny album and the SHOWMAN revue.
The Presley repertoire came back in 2026, in the symphonic version rather than the nightly Vegas reconstruction — a format that works as a handful of large dates a year instead of a season.
2026: three cities, and five nights at the Capitole
The current tour opened in Montreal with two performances at the Théâtre St-Denis on 14 and 15 August 2026, both at 8pm, with more than 50 musicians on stage and Fontaine again responsible for artistic direction and staging. It returned to the Amphithéâtre Cogeco in Trois-Rivières on 18 September 2026.
The run now on sale is the Quebec City one: five performances at the Théâtre Capitole from 25 to 29 November 2026 — Wednesday to Saturday at 8.30pm and Sunday at 2.30pm — with 50 orchestral musicians behind Fontaine and his collaborators. Tickets are listed from $118 to $235, and the presentation is bilingual. Returning to the Capitole closes a loop: it is the room where Elvis Story started in 1995.
Reviewing the opening night in Montreal on 15 August 2026, BP Arts Média described a production that put the audience inside a Las Vegas concert at Presley's commercial peak, crediting the staging, lighting and projections for the illusion and the period detail of the costumes for holding it up. The orchestration, the review said, added extraordinary richness to the arrangements, Fontaine sang with considerable energy, and much of the house ended up standing and dancing.
The show, now
The 2026 show is a symphonic rebuild of Presley's Las Vegas concerts rather than a biographical revue: Fontaine fronts his band and backing singers with more than 50 orchestral musicians behind them, and directs the staging himself, so the strings and brass sit inside arrangements that otherwise follow the 1969–1976 originals. The template from the arena performances has held — a long set drawn from that period (the Place Bell night with the Orchestre symphonique de Québec in February 2018 ran to 38 songs, with some numbers left to the band alone), musicians made up as the original players, the gestures, karate poses, band introductions and Presley's own between-song jokes reproduced, and scarves and stuffed toys handed into the crowd. Projections and period-accurate costumes do the rest of the work; there is no announced support act, the orchestra is the opening attraction. Reviewing the Théâtre St-Denis opening on 14 August 2026, BP Arts Média credited the staging, lighting and projections with convincingly placing the audience in a Vegas showroom, called the orchestration an extraordinary enrichment of the arrangements, and reported much of the theatre on its feet and dancing. The sharpest published reservation remains Philippe Rezzonico's from the orchestral debut years — that a few songs are over-orchestrated and Fontaine's voice can miss on exposed ballads such as "The Wonder of You" — set against his verdict that the orchestra and the band fuse better live than the concept suggests. At the Capitole the four evening shows start at 8.30pm and the Sunday matinee at 2.30pm, and the presentation is bilingual.
Researched from ici.radio-canada.ca · ici.radio-canada.ca · ostr.ca · quoifaire.com · linitiative.ca · bpartsmedia.ca · graceland.com · fr.wikipedia.org
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