Review: Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris by Austin Playhouse
by Michael Meigs

This is a pleasant and inconsequential little evening of cabaret.  Go and listen to the Austin Playhouse staging of Blau and Shuman's 1968 compendium Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris.  If you concentrate on the words, you may get a pale and distant impression of the genius who was Jacques Brel.

These are the problems of translation.  The music stands outside language, but Brel's stories and  lyrics are deeply embedded in the time, the culture, the national character and the man himself.    

Let's try a visual equivalent, with American painters.  Think of Edward Hopper's stark cityscapes or of Andrew Wyeth's haunting painting "Christina's World."  Here they are; you can click the images to view larger versions. 

Then imagine that you'd never seen the originals.  Your only access was via a sketch done in twenty minutes with a blunt charcoal pencil by a 20-year-old art student.  The detail disappears, color is gone and the context is lost, because you have no information about the rest of the artists' work.

Jacques Brel wrote and performed the score to the conflicted, hopeful, romantic and desperate recovery of France and of French speakers from the unthinkable ravages of the world war.  He told stories, intimate and hugely felt, in inventive lyrics of high poetry, sung and performed to tunes of his own -- playful, dramatic, keening, wistful or mocking.  For the quarter of a century between the start of his international career in 1954 and his death from lung cancer in 1979 he spoke for his generation.  Brel was bigger for French speakers than any artist has ever been for the United States.  Imagine a goofy-looking, thin man -- not even French, but a Belgian! -- who had the charisma of the young Sinatra, the intelligence and purity of the young Joan Baez, the caustic humor of Tom Lehrer and the cabaret punch of Liza Minnelli.  And who wrote and performed his own stuff.

If you're a French speaker, Brel's songs are so powerful that they bring tears to your eyes or a huge grin to your face, depending on the subject matter.  Above all, they are BIG -- in concept, in images, in story and in delivery.

With all the indulgences due to this attractive cast and with apologies that my impressions are colored by a great love for the original, I found the Austin Playhouse version directed by Don Toner and Michael McKelvey to be a small staging.  Rick Roemer has the voice and power to prevail over the keyboard, drumset and guitars in order to deliver the words; his delivery of "Next!" was the only number in the performance that tamed the band and carried the punch of the original ("Au suivant!").  Corley Pillsbury can't reach that level of projection but she has a confident and mostly correct delivery of  French in "Ne me quitte pas" and of Flemish in "Marieke."  

For the other 21 numbers I found that actors were mostly failing to exploit the lyrics, which are remarkable even in these translations. I usually dislike amplification, but given the importance of delivering verse over music, this show would have greatly benefited from the use of hand-held mics.  That might have gotten momentarily in the way of the cutely cantering choreography of Danny Herman and Rocker Verastique, but it would have established for the audience the fact that Brel was a poet. As it was, the majority who stayed beyond the intermission certainly went away with the impression that he was, instead, a tunesmith.

Sometimes it's the translation that undercuts Brel -- as in the atrocious transformation of the social satire Les Flamandes  into a failed "News of the World" summary of crazes of the twentieth century.  Other times it's Toner's direction.  For example, the company does Brel's "Madeleine" as a happy, bouncy, wheeling celebration of infatuation, and Huck Huckaby fairly bursts with pleasure at the thought of his beloved.  Brel's version is far darker, a caustic self-portrait, perhaps, of a hopeful, not too intelligent loser, one who knows his beloved will never come ("elle ne viendra pas").  Despite failure, rain, scorn and loneliness, he brightens once again at the thought that tomorrow, yes tomorrow, his glorious Madeleine could finally notice him.  The original is precise, vivid and heart-breaking.  (To see it, with subtitles, click here.)

It is possible to do justice to Brel, even in English.  About five years ago my daughter and I attended a Brel cabaret in north Chicago, done in a shuttered restaurant for an audience of no more than 50.  That performance was electrifying, in part because in that small space with only an upright piano, the focus had to be on the performer and the poetry.  Every word and every thought was delivered.

Review by Ryan E. Johnson at examiner.com, June 11

Review by Jeanne Claire van Ryzin on the Statesman's Austin360 "Seeing Things" arts blog, June 13

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EXTRA

Click to view the program for Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris at Austin Playhouse

Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris
by Eric Blau and Mort Schuman
Austin Playhouse