Theater: French Eros

An evening With Yves Montand—

French Troubadour Yves Montand has a bedroom voice in a truck driver’s body. His throaty baritone undresses every noun, verb and parenthetical clause that comes slithering past his lips. With hips cocked, eyes squinted against some inner sunburst of passion, and hands expressively molding the air, Montand is one of the most potent love potions ever poured across the footlights. But Montand has more than sex appeal buttoned under his dark brown open-necked shirt. He is a one-man theater of the performing arts, an expert mimic, a clown, a barometric actor who can shift moods, weather-quick, without shattering them.

His chansons are about ordinary people who come to sad ends rather than bad ends. In Un Carbon Dansait, a slum-bred youngster dreams of being another Fred Astaire; Montand manages a brilliant satiric evocation of second-rate Astaire—the outflung white-gloved hands (without the gloves), the staccato rhythms tapped out on a walking stick like a hollow third leg, and the agitated centipede footwork interrupted with dazzling toothpasty smiles. The funniest number casts Montand as a feverish symphony conductor who snaps his baton, his Beethoven concert and his career in two to waltz off with a girl who cares only for waltzes. In sentimental Parisian songs, Montand runs the risk of sounding like a younger Chevalier, but winds through his own Paris as naturally as the Seine.

Since his 1959 Manhattan visit, Montand has annexed, but not really acquired, some English. His two English numbers are close to ho-hum. But for the rest of the evening, this Gallic son of Aphrodite is mmmmm-nnnnnn!