Thanks again! Funny, both my wife and I studied at the Alliance in NYC in the 1970s. Small world. By the way, have you checked out the handful of Montand videos on youtube? He seems kind of curious as a cabaret performer – perhaps just an issue of styles changing in the years since. In his autobiography, he states that cabaret was really the crucible for him as a performer – the most challenging thing he did and the source he came back to, even during his movie career.
By the way, there are also a handful of Trenet videos on youtube, including a very aappealing version of “Boum”
One more interesting Montand story. As you probably know, his real name was Ivo Livi. When he was a kid, his Italian mom unsed to lean out their apartment window and yell “Ivo, monta!” (“Ivo, come up!”) when it was time for dinner. Apparently his friends heard that and started to call him Ivo Monta, which became Yves Montand. How cool is that?
His autobiogrpahy is also a good chronicle of what it was like to work as a laborer in occupied France. That is really where he came from – all that “I am a proletarian” stuff was not made up.