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The profile · researched 16 October 2026
Twenty years of Rock Story: how a Starmania alumnus turned a covers night into a Quebec institution
Rock Story is the classic-rock musical revue Jean Ravel built in Quebec City in 2004 and has since played more than 700 times; with Andie Duquette alongside him since 2020, it passed its twentieth anniversary at the Centre Vidéotron and is now booked into theatres and casino rooms across Quebec through to 2027.
From Starmania to a Quebec City stage of his own
Jean Ravel started singing at ten and had a band by about fifteen, but the career that made Rock Story possible happened in Europe. Between 1995 and 1999 he was in Starmania, taking the roles of Johnny Rockfort, Zéro Janvier and Ziggy across France, Switzerland and Belgium. From 1999 to 2001 he toured Europe in Notre-Dame-de-Paris as Phoebus and Gringoire. Those two productions put him in the orbit of Luc Plamondon, Garou and Bruno Pelletier, and the francophone musical circuit became his trade for the better part of a decade.
He came home to Quebec in 2004 and, rather than chase another musical-theatre contract, created his own production. Rock Story was the result: not a tribute to one band but a revue built from the rock canon of the 1970s and 80s, assembled so that a two-hour theatre bill could move from Led Zeppelin to Queen to The Eagles without the usual tribute-act costume logic. It first went on stage in March 2005.
Ravel has kept a foot in other repertoire throughout. He has toured as a special guest with Dennis DeYoung of Styx, and runs a separate, smaller show, Ravel chante Dubois, revisiting Claude Dubois's catalogue at Le Confessionnal in Quebec City.
Twenty years of nights, mostly in the same handful of rooms
Rock Story grew by repetition rather than by release. There is no studio album behind it; the asset is the room count. By its fifteenth anniversary in early 2020 the show had passed 400 performances. By the twentieth, promoters were quoting more than 700, and the production's own figure for tickets sold across two decades is around 150,000 — substantial numbers for a show that has barely left one province.
The two venues that built it are Théâtre Capitole in Quebec City, where the revue has sold out more than fifty times, and the Casino de Montréal, where it has played more than a hundred. Around those anchors sit the regional theatre circuit: Espace St-Denis in Montreal, the Amphithéâtre Cogeco in Trois-Rivières, Salle Méchatigan in Sainte-Marie, the Centre des arts Juliette-Lassonde in Saint-Hyacinthe. A parallel corporate and private-event version exists too, sold with giant-screen projection and an optional Made in Canada programme leaning on Bryan Adams, Céline Dion, Alanis Morissette and Avril Lavigne.
The female lead has changed once. Elyzabeth Diaga held the role from 2009 and clocked more than 250 performances with the show across the province. Her last two nights were at the Capitole on 28 and 29 February 2020, both sold out.
Andie Duquette and the voice the show needed
Duquette took over in the spring of 2020, which meant inheriting a touring show immediately before the shutdown. Her background is unusually long for her age: childhood studio work lending her voice to children's programming including Sesame Street, Caillou and La Boîte à Lunch, then session and stage work alongside Jim Corcoran, Robert Charlebois and Louise Forestier. A long spell in the Dominican Republic produced her English-language band SnowProof. Her music was licensed in the United States through Spectra Music Group in 2018, and Disney picked her to represent Canada in its Dream Big, Princess campaign.
What made her the obvious fit was a single television performance. Duquette reached the wider Quebec public on the first season of La Voix in 2013 with a cover of Heart's Barracuda — exactly the register Rock Story depends on. Heart, Pat Benatar, Janis Joplin and Alannah Myles sit at the centre of her half of the setlist, and reviewers have singled out the Joplin medley as the point where the show stops being a covers night.
The split between the two leads is the structural trick. Ravel handles guitar as well as vocals and takes the Queen, Journey, Styx, Foreigner and AC/DC material; Duquette carries the women-fronted canon. Together they can run a set that passes through Boston, Toto, Van Halen, The Guess Who, Bonnie Tyler, Blondie, Scorpions and Bon Jovi without a gap.
The anniversary, and the Friends expansion
The twentieth-anniversary push was the first time Rock Story tried a room bigger than a theatre. On 5 December 2024 the production staged Rock Story & Friends at the Centre Vidéotron in Quebec City, with Ravel and Duquette joined by France D'Amour, Suzie Villeneuve, Elyzabeth Diaga, Éric Lapointe, Breen LeBoeuf and Bruno Pelletier. The anniversary was covered by Radio-Canada's Téléjournal Québec. One review of the night described thousands of people turning the arena into an enormous karaoke, working through U2, Heart, Radiohead, Bonnie Tyler, Janis Joplin, AC/DC, Whitesnake, Europe, Bon Jovi, The Eagles, Styx and Queen, and noted that several of the backing musicians have been playing together for more than forty years, going back to the band Zane.
That result turned Friends into a recurring format. The second edition went outdoors on 2 August 2025 at the Agora du Port de Québec, the riverside amphitheatre below the Château Frontenac, with Bruno Pelletier, France D'Amour, Breen LeBoeuf, Martin Fontaine, Elyzabeth Diaga and Geneviève Jodoin on the bill. Tickets went on sale on 4 April 2025 through lepointdevente.com. Reviews of the evening put it at major-league standard, with Queen, Styx, Janis Joplin, Heart and Alanis Morissette in the programme.
The two strands now run in parallel: the core duo-plus-band revue in theatres and casino cabarets, and the occasional large-scale Friends night with guest vocalists, built for arenas and summer sites.
Where it stands in late 2026
The most recent reviewed performance was at Théâtre Capitole on 18 October 2025, a full-house night that worked through Hotel California, The Final Countdown, We Will Rock You, We Are the Champions and Highway to Hell. The verdict was that the revue is still doing exactly what it has done for twenty years, and still filling the room for it.
The diary ahead is the usual Quebec circuit. Live Nation currently lists four dates on sale: Théâtre Capitole in Quebec City on 17 October 2026, the Cabaret du Casino de Montréal on 19 February 2027, the Théâtre du Casino du Lac-Leamy in Gatineau on 20 February 2027, and a return to the Capitole on 8 May 2027. La Vitrine's listing adds Salle Méchatigan in Sainte-Marie on 13 November 2026 and Le Calypso in Saguenay on 15 May 2027. Start times run from 7.30pm in the casino cabarets to 8.30pm at the Capitole, where a dinner-show package is sold from 5.30pm.
Nothing in the current booking pattern suggests a push beyond Quebec, though the production has stated an ambition to work towards the United States. For now the model is what it has been since 2005: a fixed pair of voices, a band that has been together a long time, and a rotation through rooms that have already sold the show out dozens of times.
The show, now
A Rock Story night is a theatre bill rather than a concert: two lead singers, a six-piece band, and a run of roughly fifty hits delivered at a pace reviewers have described as relentless from the opening bars. Ravel sings and plays guitar through the Queen, Journey, Styx, Foreigner and AC/DC side of the repertoire; Duquette takes Heart, Pat Benatar, Alannah Myles, Bonnie Tyler and a Janis Joplin medley that critics have picked out as the strongest passage in the set. The musicians double as backing vocalists, which is how the arrangements hold up against originals built on stacked harmonies — the review of the May 2023 Studio-Cabaret run at Espace St-Denis in Montreal said that with eyes closed the covers pass for the records. Staging is deliberately plain: lights, volume and a screen running archive footage from the show's own history, with no costume changes or narrative framing. There are no support acts on the standard dates; the duo plays the whole evening. Recent nights have ended with crowds on their feet demanding encores, and the October 2025 Capitole show closed on Hotel California, The Final Countdown, We Will Rock You, We Are the Champions and Highway to Hell. The larger Rock Story & Friends editions — the Centre Vidéotron in December 2024, the open-air Agora du Port de Québec in August 2025 — swap that format for a guest-vocalist bill with Bruno Pelletier, France D'Amour, Éric Lapointe, Breen LeBoeuf and others, which one reviewer of the arena night described as thousands of people turning the building into a mass singalong.
Researched from rockstory.ca · carrefourdequebec.com · artsetculture.ca · artsetculture.ca · magazineprestige.com · bpartsmedia.ca · linitiative.ca · destinationvilledequebec.com
Pictures
Photographs from Wikimedia Commons, credited
Jason Langheine · CC BY-SA 2.0
bakameh · CC BY 2.0
