Musical comedy: La Revue genevoise 2024 is taking us on board!

On this Thursday evening at the Casino-Théâtre, the Revue troupe makes its final somersaults after two hours of a scintillating and breathtaking show. The audience is laughing and delighted. The applause meter is in the red. Two spectators stand up, followed by ten others. Soon, all 400 or so people in the room were standing. Standing ovation. Deserved. “The people of Geneva are usually so demanding,” assures, everything and a moment later, Laurent Deshusses, director and actor. “They got up, it’s crazy, it’s rare!” He glances at his empty glass. “But can’t anyone bring me some champagne?”

First public performance, therefore, for the Revue 2024, 132^e of the name. “That evening, it’s always a very special audience,” slips Claude-Inga Barbey, inspired author and amazing actress in her role as a horny cleaning lady. An audience, therefore, with manes more salt than pepper. The ladies went to the hairdresser. The men took out their blazers. We speak well and loudly. We sip Chasselas. We are regulars, good-natured Genevans.

Bleeding sketches

This year, the Revue is setting sail. The board is a boat. And the cruise will rock and have fun. Often to the detriment of local political figures; this is the aim of the maneuver. Frédérique Perler and Antonio Hodgers are thus entitled to quite poignant and distracting sketches, one on her family hires, the other on her PAV. They’re great, the little critters who came to moan at Hodgers’ press conference.

We loved the sequence on the CERN particle collider, whose scientific raison d’être is the subject of an Arabic telephone call which quickly turns absurd. Before ending, we don’t really know how, on the conflict in the Middle East, with a frenzied dance of death. It’s incredibly well written, zany and clever.

Geneva news

Also perfect are the dialogues between the ship’s barman (Christian Savary), drunkard and philosopher, with a large seagull that he is perhaps the only one to see. These hilarious exchanges allow the authors to slip in nods to the latest Geneva news, such as the closure of the Gaîté, that of Weber toys or the contamination of the waters of the Left Bank. Fortiche.

And then there is the show. The crackling and precise choreographies. The sumptuous costumes. Cascading scenographic discoveries. The music and the songs, performed with real vocal brilliance, in particular by the leader of the revue, Virginia Sirolli, with her virtuoso throat. There is a delightful fusion between two generations on the set; between the athletic freshness of youth and the cheeky cunning of older people.

This generational mix, or clash sometimes, constitutes one of the recurring themes of the show. With, in particular, a wonderful restaurant meal scene, where two couples, in their twenties on the left, in their fifties on the right, dine while flirting with each other. Corseted wokism and tofu on one side; dismaying beaufism and foie gras on the other. We laugh. As for the scene about the AVS and the anguish of the elders in their lifeboat, it leaves the shores of burlesque for a moment to head towards a tragicomic register which draws a few tears in the room.

But of course, we are at the Revue. That of Geneva. Finesse and delicacy do not always lead the way; puns and saucy gags rain down. And when Gérard Depardieu – well-padded Deshusses – comes on board, the affair turns into flatulent bawdiness, inevitably a little predictable. Abbé Pierre remained on the platform from the start of the show. Phew.

Jérôme Estèbe directs the cultural section and the weekend supplement. It covers, in particular, gastronomic and oenological topics. He is the recipient of the 2002 Berner Zeitung local journalism prize. More info

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