Félix, je me souviens

The writer the whole thing rests on

Félix Leclerc was born on 2 August 1914 in La Tuque, the sixth child in a family of eleven. University studies ended with the Depression, and the work that followed was radio: an announcer's job from 1934 to 1937, then a post at Radio-Canada from 1939 writing dramatic scripts. The songwriting that made his name came later and almost by accident of geography — in 1950 the Paris impresario Jacques Canetti heard him, took him to France, and the Quebec singer with a guitar and a boot-worn vocabulary became a success there before he was one at home.

The recognition accumulated across four decades. In 1958 the Académie Charles Cros gave its top award to his second album. He was made an Officer of the Order of Canada on 20 December 1968 and invested in 1971. In 1977 he became the first laureate of the Prix Denise-Pelletier, Quebec's state prize for the performing arts, and in 1986 France made him a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour. He died on 8 August 1988 at Saint-Pierre-de-l'Île-d'Orléans, on the island where most of the late work was written.

What he left behind is unusually spread out, and that matters to the show now in production. He was a songwriter, but also a radio dramatist, a fabulist, an essayist, a novelist and an actor, and a nationalist voice whose late songs were read as political statements rather than entertainment. Quebec's annual recording awards, the Félix Awards, carry his first name. In 2006 he was inducted posthumously into the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame for three songs. For an industry that named its trophies after him, the striking gap was that nobody had built a large-scale stage work out of him.

Why a production company from Québec took it on

The idea came from Jean Pilote and the team at LCQ Productions, the Quebec City outfit responsible for Elvis Story, Elvis Experience, Génération Motown and a French-language Les Misérables — a company with a long habit of turning a catalogue into a theatre run rather than a concert tour. Radio-Canada, reporting the announcement on 10 November 2025, described it as the first major spectacle devoted to Leclerc's work.

Martin Genest was brought in as creator and stage director, with Jean-Philippe Lehoux writing the texts and handling dramaturgy, Simon Leclerc as musical director and arranger, and Louis Tremblay as artistic consultant. Genest's stated starting point was structural rather than sentimental: to translate Leclerc at all, the form of the show has to resemble him. His argument is that Leclerc was Quebec's first genuinely multidisciplinary artist, so a single-discipline tribute — a band and a run of songs — would misrepresent the subject.

The family signed off on it. Nathalie Leclerc, Leclerc's daughter, endorsed the project and gave the creative team access to her father's house on Île d'Orléans, where much of the writing was done. The Fondation Félix Leclerc is a partner, as is the newspaper La Presse alongside the two host theatres. Pilote's team has said it hopes eventually to take the production to France, where the career started in 1950.

The central choice: an absent lead

The decision that shapes everything else is that no actor plays Félix Leclerc. His presence is assembled instead from archive audio — his own recorded voice set in dialogue with the live performers — while the ensemble carries the periods, the writing and the songs around him. It removes the impersonation problem that sinks most biographical stage tributes, and it forces the production to characterise him through his output rather than through a wig and a guitar.

The material reaches well past the hit catalogue. Lehoux's script draws on the theatrical texts, the poetry and the radio dramas as well as the songs, and the promotional framing moves from boreal forest to the streets of Paris, with the late protest song L'alouette en colère used as a thematic anchor. The production also presses the contemporary case — the environmental writing, the political writing, the feminist readings — rather than treating the work as heritage.

Mechanically, it is a hybrid. Song and live music sit alongside circus, theatre, puppetry, illusion and video, with Simon Leclerc's orchestral arrangements played on stage by a nine-strong band and the set changing quickly between tableaux. The billing is 19 performers: six to eight actors depending on the version of the cast list, two circus artists, and the musicians.

Casting, and one late change

The full company was revealed on 28 May 2026, with Maude Guérin and Jean Maheux announced as the leads. Both had a personal line into the material — Guérin comes from La Tuque, Leclerc's birthplace, and Maheux met him in his youth. Around them were Réginald Bellamy, Nicolas Drolet, Pierre-Olivier Grondin, Laetitia Isambert, Klara Martel-Laroche and Jean-François Poulin, with the circus artists Colin André-Heriaud and Philippe Normand-Jenny.

That line-up changed shortly before the opening. On 24 September 2026 the production confirmed that Kathleen Fortin had replaced Maude Guérin in the cast. No reason for Guérin's departure has been made public. Fortin, joining in the final weeks of rehearsal, has credited the company's working climate for making a late integration workable — not a throwaway remark for a performer taking on one of two lead roles in an 18-part show with a month of dates already sold.

Where it stands in October 2026

Tickets went on sale at 10am on 10 November 2025, close to a year before the first performance, through the production's own site and the two theatres. On 24 September 2026 journalists were shown a rehearsal — the first public look at the staging. Reports from that session put the structure at 18 tableaux and 15 songs, with roughly 20 people on stage, and described acrobatic sequences, a scene set in 1960s Quebec, and a closing image of Leclerc's arrival in Montréal with a suitcase and a guitar. The reaction from the room was that the excerpts landed, though a rehearsal of selected scenes is not a verdict on the finished show.

Nothing has opened yet. The Montréal run begins on 14 October 2026 at the Théâtre St-Denis and ends on 25 October; the Québec run follows at the Capitole from 31 October to 15 November. Published criticism will only exist after the first of those dates, so the current evidence is the press preview, the creative team's track record and the catalogue itself.

The commercial shape is a theatre season rather than a tour. The official schedule lists 13 performances in Montréal and 16 at the Capitole, almost all of them evening shows at 8pm with weekend matinees added at 2.30pm and 4pm. Capitole seats run from CA$84.50 to about CA$142. If the France plan materialises, it will be after the Quebec run closes in mid-November.