Word: brel
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...deserves credit for putting together a show without any embarrassingly bad moments and with some rivetingly good ones as well. A workman-like air prevails in the Leverett Old Library, as though the performers want to tell the audience. "We promised you nothing more than a collection of Jacques Brel songs, and here they are." There's a feebly executed but well-meaning attempt to create coffee-house atmosphere--the audience trades its ticket stubs during intermission for a cup of coffee and a croissant--but the floodlit cavernous Leverett dining hall offers little in the way of bohemian squalor...
Nonetheless, the simple genius of Brel's music carries the show. With deftness and economy this balladeer of the down-and-out mixed the tender and the funereal into a weltschmertz as heady as any German musician has ever brewed. These are songs that use familiar sounds--the sagging languor of a torch-song, the steady intensity of an army march--to put the listener off-guard and then knock him flat with cynical or black-humorous lyrics. "Marathon" goes on a careless, accelerating dance through the 20th century, nostalgically stopping at favorite decades, until the abrupt, eschatological ending puts...
...French pronunciation in the untranslated opening number--but only one singer stands out. David McIntosh's leering, contorted expressions and jerky, stage presence give no hint of the size, strength and confidence of his baritone voice. His solos, "Mathilde" and "Amsterdam," demand the most stamina and brashness of the Brel songs in this show, and McIntosh has plenty of both. In "Amsterdam," a lurid ballad of drunken sailors, he bellows the lines with as much force and volume as anyone would want in the small confines of the Leverett theater, yet manages to make almost every word intelligible...
...some individual numbers have full vignettes acted out around them, there's no sense that these people have any ideas about their materials except that they're beautiful or passionate songs. Black turtlenecks and black trousers can't single-handedly evoke the contnent, and no matter how well-wrought Brel's songs are, they could use a little interpretation to carry the evening...
...show like this is a painless way for singers to exercise their talents and for students to spend an evening. As long as Brel and its fellow revues can continue to draw audiences, there's no harm in them. But it's hardly unreasonable to demand more--more thought behind the singing, and more ambition in their choice of material...