She inquired where he was dining that night. After convincing her father to stop for 5 minutes at the door of a restaurant, she walks to his table with long strides and calls out to him. He turns around, she takes his face between her two hands and kisses him greedily before leaving at a run.
She is Josyane Boulos, he is Julio Iglesias passing through Beirut for a concert. We are in 1980 and she is 17 years old.
Since then, she has come a long way and has never lacked courage once more. Host of TV shows alongside her father, the illustrious Jean-Claude Boulos, in the 80s, producer, actress, author and currently director of the Monnot theater, she ignored the steps to follow to face the public alone on stage and threw herself headlong into this adventure where she gave everything, dared everything: the postures, the rhythms, the insults, the confidences, the confessions, the silences, the taboo subjects… She led the spectator with her in a voyeurism so full of emotions that it has become funny and touching.
It all started with this meeting with Julio Iglesias from whom she had succeeded in stealing a kiss, a groupie dream which she realized and a pretext to stage her play The Girl Who Loved Julio which will unfold like an oral autobiography in public where it’s regarding life under the bombs, distraught youth and passing years. A generation will find themselves in the pages of Lebanon’s history and another younger one will be able to project themselves into what their parents experienced. As for the close friends and family who shared all those moments, they will reunite with tears in their eyes and smiles in their hearts.
All comedians will agree that a performance alone on stage is an intimidating, even agonizing task, an obstacle course, where you have to struggle, ignoring the silences following a failed pun, to overcome your stage fright and stress, not being able to rely only on oneself without any actor or actress opposite to catch up.
But Josyane Boulos overcame everything.
Not to know her is to ignore her courage, her determinism, her will to power, her always laughing spirit, her derision, her strength to assume everything, her faith in life despite all the hazards encountered along the way. Humor, despite all the lightness that can be attributed to it, is not practiced in a state of weightlessness, it illustrates a capacity to take something tragic, a source of pain, and to transform it into a source of pleasure. This is what Josyane knows how to do best, on stage of course, but in life too.
Far from being a discourse without consequences, humor is a mirror. We laugh at ourselves, at our wounds, our tears, our disappointments, our disenchantments. And to balance, we balance moments of happiness, accomplishments (having shoved Julio Iglesias), recklessness, audacity (at a Syrian roadblock in the middle of the war), resilience (under bombs and sniper shots). Some in the room described the performance as cute, light-hearted and fun, but one who has never been on the front lines is no fighter, so “if criticism is easy, art is difficult” , and we can only greet and applaud Josyane Boulos, a courageous artist who interprets, from October 29 to November 6, the Girl who loved Julio in act 1 of the Monnot theater.
She inquired where he was dining that night. After convincing her father to stop for 5 minutes at the door of a restaurant, she walks to his table with long strides and calls out to him. He turns around, she takes his face between her two hands and kisses him greedily before leaving at a run. She is Josyane Boulos, he is Julio…