Word: brel
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...JACQUES BREL, in a production got together by the Charles Street Playhouse, managed to live through 12 weeks of Boston summer, admittedly no easy task. So when it came time for the Charles to open its regular season, rather than force the successful Jacques to walk the streets, the Somerset Hotel, a respected but nonetheless dying Back Bay establishment, hastily renamed one of its drafty old ballrooms "The Somerset Cabaret" and invited Jacques over to entertain for a spell. And is the dear boy still doing well, you ask. That, it seems, is debatable. The opening night audience couldn...
...Jacques Brel, a long-running hit off-Broadway, is a musical review, on the surface all sophistication and brightness, under its skin just a touch of pathos. Jacques Brel-yeah, no kidding, they're really not fooling-is a 40-year-old Franco-Belgian troubadour. He wrote the songs on which the show is based-all twenty-five of them. A cast of four (out of a rotating pool of seven) performs nightly; not only do they sing, but also they provide, thanks to director Moni Yakim, a bit of mime and dance...
Problem two: Only one of the four performers that handled the opening show proved to be in tune with the moods of Brel's material. George Ball and Bob Jeffries, the male half of the quartet, lacked any of the sense of hurt or loss that underlies Brel. Their dress, the inevitable tentative mod, their hair, just a touch of long, their manners, frightfully winning, the two looked less like Brel's sailors and soldiers and cast-off lovers, rather more like two Red Sox players in an off-season gig, or, worse yet, the male models in a Sears...
...FACT, at times one almost felt her too good for the material, Brel-at least the Brel who filters through the English translations-is generally heralded as "a poet," "a poet and a philosopher," "an ironies of cynical maturity," and "a man low on hope but high on love" (to quote the bedazzled Boston press). Brel, they would have us believe, is a realistic romantic and a tempered cynic. But what comes through his songs-at least those chosen for this show-is not so much romantic as sentimental, the songs of a man less a cynic, more a weak...
...Paul McCartney and Jacques Brel...