Jacques Brel at Stratford, Ontario

Sean Pinchin does blues at the Boar's Head, Stratford.

The Stratford, Ontario 2010 production of Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris is a hip cabaret of a musical and a roaring success. As usual with this play, there is no story, there are no songs bursting absurdly from women at the meat market or men at the docks or grandfathers sitting on the toilet. As it should be in all shows where music is the focus, Jacques Brel is one compelling song after another, freed from the syrup of some far-fetched narrative.

From aggressive, raw portraits like “Port of Amsterdam” to lighter, zippy tunes like “Madeliene” to touching ballads like “Timid Frieda,” Brel’s range is terrific. If you don't love each song, you will at least admit you're never bored as he fits often complex lyrics to unconventional, unpredictable music. One reviewer compares Brel to Bob Dylan—different kinds of songs, same kind of musical-poetic genius. I think too of Leonard Cohen as composer or Edith Piaf as chanteuse.

I cannot find YouTube samples that do the songs justice. If the music is OK there, the technology is bad, and vice versa. Brel, singing his own work, is also at YouTube, but I find him overly dramatic. "Composer" and "Singer" are not synonyms (said that damnable New Critic again).

So I’ll just mention that I’ve seen or heard four performances of the play, and Stratford’s four singers and four musicians are the best of the lot by far. From the jazzy, raucous and sometimes comic material to the most moving, melodic ballads, no one can touch the the Stratford group for purity of intent or accuracy of delivery.

In the upbeat comic schticks, the director, singers, and musicians know their bounds. Brel’s comedy has substance and purpose, and the burlesque moments must not obscure that. Still, if there were any toes that didn't tap at all or teeth that didn't grin, they belonged to a few cadavers someone snuck into the building.

You need at least a vague sense of this, so here is Tommy Wallach, a YouTube guy, doing his rollicking version of “Jackie.” Tommy loses control at the end, but you might find his enthusiasm contagious. If it's a bit too long, hang in there for one verse and be sure you hear the refrain:

YouTube - W. #14 - Tommy Wallach - Jackie by Jacques Brel (cover)

If I could be for only an hour
If I could be for an hour every day
If I could be for just one little hour
Cute, cute, cute in a stupid-ass way.

If you won't say that about yourself, I don't trust you.

In slower, more emotional songs like “Fanette,” “Sons of,” “Old Folks,” and “If We Only Have Love,” everything at Stratford is just right—tempo, pitch, mood, choreography, lighting, make-up. The band is especially impressive: one player for guitar and cello, one for violin and accordion, and one each for bass and piano.

From my personal favorite, “Timid Frieda,” here's one YouTube version to give you just a bit of the melody and mood:

YouTube - Ottavia - Les Timides (Brel cover)

Then consider these lines in English about a young woman, maybe the archetypal daughter at 18 or 22, just beginning life in the city. The final three lines in the quotation are a refrain.

Timid Frieda
Won't return now
To the home where
They do not need her,
But always feed her
Little lessons
And platitudes from cans.

She is free now
She will be now
On the street where
The beat's electric.

There she goes
With her valises
Held so tightly in her hands


No tongue stud, no thong, no brassy mouth (though she does try to "take her brave new Fuck You stand"). If this is not a daughter in her idealized vulnerability, maybe she's the first love of many a man, the one he takes home to meet his mama.

If you know nothing of the music in Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris, you might want to go ahead and sample some more of the flawed YouTube performances. At least you'll see that it's not bluegrass.

In spite of YouTube's damaged goods, one or two clips might coax you into investing in the original CD (circa 1968) with Eric Blau, Mort Shuman, Elly Stone, Shawn Elliot, Alice Whitfield, and Wolfgang Knittel. I think they honor the music better than the 2006 CD directed by Gordon Greenberg and Eric Svejcar, which strikes me as severe. The voices are razor sharp—not kind or wounded, as they need to be in the ballads. Also, some of the instrumentation is intrusive—such as an overpowering bass or some self-consciously long stops: Look at me, look at me. The performers love themselves more than the music, and that's wrong.

But the Stratford, Ontario 2010 production got it right. Here are the artists’ names, for they were stupendous, and this thimbleful of blog recognition is all I can offer in return.

Director: Stafford Arima

Singers: Brent Carver, Robin Hutton (who was excellent as understudy for the ailing Jewelle Blackman), Mike Nadajewski, Nathalie Nadon.

Musicians: Laura Burton, Anna Atkinson, George Meanwell and Luc Michaud

For further information and some shamefully unflattering video of the rehearsals, you might go here:

http://www.stratfordfestival.ca/OnStage/productions.aspx?id=6046&prodid=31480



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STRATFORD, ONTARIO, THEATER, DYLAN THOMAS

The Force That through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower by Dylan Thomas : The Poetry Foundation [poem] : Find Poems and Poets.

Stratford, Ontario is a city of 30,000 in hilly, prosperous farmland two hours west of Toronto. It feels almost English as England does; otherwise, it’s an unlikely place for first-rate professional theater to thrive, but it does, and about half of it is Shakespearean.

Stratford has four theaters, a thriving downtown, all kinds of eateries, a few bookstores (used and new), a mile-long lake with rich greenery and walkways, just down a hill from the main drag (Ontario Street). There are scores of walkers in both places. In the couple of hours before matinees and evening performances, the place gets pleasantly busy. Families, seniors, middle-aged couples, young couples, along with singles gathering at pubs, it’s a mixed crowd, and everyone seems glad to be there.

I’m back from seeing two plays at Stratford. The first was Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night, a one-man performance with Wyn Davies as Dylan Thomas. I learned a few things about the Welsh poet, and the acting was thoroughly professional, but I’m afraid I was not bowled over the way I expected to be.

I'm not sure what else Wyn Davies and playwright Leo Pownall could realistically have accomplished, but I don’t know or care much more about Dylan Thomas now than I did before the play, and that seems a less than optimal response. The lubricated Welshman struck me as one more sad, self-destructive poet, often gorgeous in his imagery and cadences, but also windy and full of himself, as Wordsworth the philosopher and Keats the sensualist converge in Thomas’ psyche.

Despite some great lines in the script, the play needed more information on just how it was America that lionized, mythologized, and thus killed the poet at the age of 39. We are asked to believe that he alone didn’t drink himself into a fatal “insult to the brain.” American groupies were equally to blame.

That’s the take on his work, life, and death that I’ve heard since college, but I don’t see why we should infer that he would have been a moderate drinker, better poet and healthier man if he’d stayed in Wales. For all its merits, the play does not address that question, or Thomas’ stature in the canon, or how he lived and wrote aside from whiskey, philandering and envy of Shakespeare. Wyn Davies' professionalism as an actor could not breathe life into those vacancies.

Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night makes for a moderately interesting, informative (re)introduction to Dylan Thomas’ work and life, but it merits are tepid and spotty, and might well leave viewers wanting more, especially if they already had some knowledge of the poet’s life and work.

Here is the most famous villanelle of all and Dylan Thomas' most famous poem, the source for the play's title:

Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night by Dylan Thomas : The Poetry Foundation [poem] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.Discover Poetry.

In case this has someone all fired up about Welsh power, Dylan Thomas poems were also discussed here on May 15 an 18, 2010. These poems and the Stratford play do make clear that childhood, nature, time, and death were major concerns in Thomas' poems.

Next time: Stratford’s Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris.



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