The Theater: Young Man with a Slingshot

A grubby, sad-faced gamin wearing an old sweater, patched pants and dirty sneakers, and carrying a slingshot, was packing them in last week in Montreal. He is known to all of French-speaking Canada as “Fridolin,” whose annual revues, begun in 1938, have become the joy of French-speaking Montreal and Quebec. His real name—Gratien Gélinas—has faded into the background, as has the fact that he was once the most popular artist on the Canadian, radio. This season’s Fridolinons, now running in Montreal, looks like the most successful ever.

Each Fridolinons is rich in chorines, costumes, tunes. But what draws the crowd is Author-Producer-Monologuist Fridolin himself. The grubby get-up expresses one side of Fridolin’s appeal—the wistful urchin, the Chaplinesque underdog who fights for causes that can never succeed, and makes love to girls he can never win. The slingshot expresses the other half of his appeal — the impudent nose-thumber who (at Bob Hope speed) lets fly at bingo, dance bands, radio advertising, women in war plants — and the Mackenzie King Government.

Last season Fridolin showed King taking a beating from “1’oncle Samuel” and “John Bouboule” at the Quebec Conference. This season Fridolin ‘s chief target is the French Canadians’ bete noire, conscription. Fridolin winds up the attack by describing a postwar parade of bemedaled heroes who, when a whistle blows, rush off to sell pencils and shoelaces.

One-Man Show. Fridolin works out everything in his three-hour-long revues, down to the dancing and the decor. His method never varies: each summer he plows through newspapers and magazines for topical material; each fall he locks himself in to write; each winter his revue runs for two or three months in Montreal and Quebec. The revues now fetch some 130,000 customers — in Montreal ten times the audience of any other show. They cost him a reputed $75,000 to produce, net him around $50,000 profit — and shut down the minute the house falls below 90% of capacity.

Fridolin (the name comes from a story book he read as a child) was born 35 years ago in a tiny French Canadian village, grew up in Montreal. After college, he worked in a department store, went into the insurance business. The story goes that earnest young M. Gélinas stumbled on his future career when, after a few too many drinks, he wowed an insurance convention with his antics. He started doing Little Theater and radio bits, at length was sponsored to write his own radio show, which immediately clicked.

His ambition now is to write a serious play. But he would be content, he says, with the epitaph once given to a famous European clown: “A fool has gone away.”