Word: brel
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...Brel played its four-day run this past weekend. Today's article was originally scheduled for Friday; due to a reading period mix-up, it appears today. Though the writer regrets the delay, the article still remains the history of a remarkable drive for perfection...
SINCE HE first saw Jacques Brel...--three times in one week--Guy Rochman has known that someday he would direct that musical revue. "It was a traumatic point in my life, the fall of '68... I was taking drivered and breaking up with my girl. I saw the show and fell in love with it." He wanted to sing 'Amsterdam', but he wanted to direct it even more. When the lights went up on Wednesday night's black tie Patron's Preview, Guy had brought off the first non-professional staging of Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living...
...that everything has run as scheduled since kickoff. But as he chronologues his show's history, fate clearly helped those who helped themselves. Simply to get the show was an act of will: "I wrote to 3W Productions who said yes, referring me to Blau and Shuman (who put Brel together) who said yes, referring me to their agent, Music Theatre International, who said no." Guy waited til February, meanwhile casting and then scrapping an all-women production of Waiting for Godot ("another long story"). In February the agency said yes, but backed down ten days later when Boston...
THEY SENT me catalogues for Oklahoma! and Bye-Bye Birdie, but it was Brel that I was going to do." Guy started calling people and soon discovered that the folks at MTI had legally committed themselves when they gave the earlier promise. "I sent them a telegram, a night letter about 150 words long, politely asking 'Why are you fucking us over? Why won't you let me do the show?'" The next morning Guy got his phone call...
...stage lighting, fading in and out on the three performers doing their warm-ups. Tom Johnson, the music director, stops by to check details, as do five others in the next fifteen minutes. The room is noisy and alive, but not chaotic. Everything focuses towards the metamorphosis into Brel...