Opera Queen

Hour.ca – Richard Burnett

The very day al-Qaeda terrorists flew two jetliners into NYC’s World Trade Center on 9/11, Luc Plamondon was in Paris watching a one-night-only revival of his famous rock musical Starmania, in which terrorists bomb the 121st floor of the fictional Golden Tower skyscraper in Las Vegas.

“The cast was terrified,” Plamondon recalls today. “And the audience was dead silent at the end of the performance. It was amazing that Starmania had predicted 9/11. What I wrote [in Starmania] had become reality.”

Starmania, of course, is the great 1978 rock opera that lyricist Plamondon co-wrote with famed French songwriter Michel Berger.