Word: brel
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...better avenue for her talents. In 1961, she found herself in a little musical entitled O, Oysters! Its author-producer was Eric Blau, a minor poet who was to become her second husband. A ghostwriter by trade (for Mickey Mantle, Jim Brown), Blau had a contagious obsession: Jacques Brel. "I was knocked out when I heard his work," he recalls. "I had never known any songwriter to address himself to the human condition. I began to collect Brel." So did another enthusiast, Composer Mort Shuman, who had assisted at the birth of the rock generation by writing tunes (Viva...
American Treadmill. Brel's idiom is barely translatable from Flemish to French, let alone from French to English. Blau and Shuman went an impossible step farther, translating English into American. Les Flamandes (The Flemish Women), for example, became Marathon, and metamorphosed from a Belgian character study into a portrayal of the American treadmill. Then came the hard part. Blau wanted the show staged with "everything floating, and the feeling that all was pressed against a tapestry of utter silence." Off-Broadway, utter silence is a phenomenon that usually occurs only after a show closes...
Elly Stone made it an ingredient of her debut. Oceans of eerie quiet still surround Brel's 16-bar novellas at every performance. The narrow, tremulous wraith appears in black velvet pants and jacket, a little lace jabot at her throat. The mordant chords purl from the back of the stage, and she becomes an authentically possessed figure. On the slow numbers, the words are not sung; they seem to float from her throat. The uptempo songs could survive almost any rendition, but when Elly sings them, she charges them with alternating currents of energy and melancholia. She does...
Ironic Couplets. The resemblance to Brecht and Weill does not end with Elly. The elusive melodies seem, at first, to be mere cloaks for Brel's verse. But they bear constant repetition -indeed, some enthusiasts have come to the Brel show as often as 56 times. As for his lyrics, the terse, ironic couplets recognize revelations beyond politics and fashion; they know that every man is an expatriate from the province of youth...
Those who have heard both Brel and Stone know that Elly is more than an interpreter of the composer; she is a soul sister whose versions often excel those of their creator. That is fortunate; it will be some time before Jacques Brel recrosses the Atlantic. He professes love for Americans in America, but he will not pay a visit to the U.S. until the war in Viet Nam is over. He is-literally-Up in the air about his present career. He has but one important possession, a private airplane, in which he darts about the Continent...