Montreal, April 3, 2006 – Quebec humorist, author, composer, musician and comic audioclips designer, François Pérusse is participating in the creation of The Beatles LOVE, Cirque du Soleil’s upcoming show that will evoke the extraordinary musical adventure of the Beatles. He leaves tomorrow for Las Vegas to work with the creative team. Written and directed by Dominic Champagne, The Beatles LOVE will have its world premiere June 30, 2006 at The Mirage, in Las Vegas.
As the comic audioclips designer for The Beatles LOVE, François Pérusse will create several segments for the show on a series of quotes from the Beatles in their own words, taken mostly after many unreleased ad-lib studio conversations recorded between takes during the sixties.
“I see it as a creative editing task rather than traditional writing,” François Pérusse explains. “For sure, there’s a bit of my humor in the end result, but most of the time the goal was to showcase the Beatles’ own brand of humor.”
François Pérusse has had to sift through hundreds of hours of conversations in order to assemble a vast collection of sound bites from which he crafted fluid dialogues based on the show’s storyline. He tackled this daunting task with obvious delight. “When Dominic Champagne proposed this project to me, I was utterly exhilarated,” the humorist admits. “This is the kind of stuff I’ve been playing with for the past 25 years! And by coincidence, my career as a musician is based on the Beatles’ music.”
As a master of wordplay, puns and absurd humor with a career spanning 15 years, François Pérusse made his breakthrough with radio show Les 2 minutes du peuple broadcast in Quebec (Énergie), in France (Rire et chansons) and in Switzerland (Couleur 3). Between 1991 and 2003, his output included nine volumes of the Album du peuple CD (1,360,000 sales) and a DVD (10 X Platinum). He also created three animated comedy series: La série du peuple (2000), Le JourNul—a satirical news program (1999 to 2001)—and On s’écoute parler (on the TVA network, March 2006).
