Poignant, passionate, and profound. Powerful, intimate, and emotional. Candid and insightful. Brel’s songs of “sex, death, bruised romance, and equivocal cynicism,” which influenced artists as diverse as David Bowie, Leonard Cohen, and Frank Sinatra, are brought to life by four singers.
Director: Eleanor Crowder
Music director: Scott Richardson
With Richard Cliff, Rachel Eugster, Robin Guy, Rowena Pearl, and Adrian Zeyl.
This is a Canadian Actors’ Equity Association production under the Artists’ Collective Policy.
MEDIA
Review by Barbara Popel for Apt 613
“I’m really enjoying this!” That’s what the woman sitting in the next row said at intermission. Me too. Seeing this musical revue at The Gladstone on opening night made me want to dig out my 1974 LP of the original Off-Broadway production. What wonderful lyrics! What great music! I could see why David Bowie included the cast recording in a list of 25 of his favourite albums, Confessions of a Vinyl Junkie.
Upon entering the theatre, the audience is entertained by several jazzy cocktail numbers being played on an upright piano by Rowena Pearl. She’s splendid in a silvery sequinned dress, but her high heels are kicked off under the piano bench. The revue starts when Scott Richardson takes over from Pearl at the piano and plays the overture. His accompaniment of Brel’s songs is masterful; Richardson is one of the reasons to see this show. Then the lights go down and… Rachel Eugster begins to sing “Marathon” (the English translation of Jacques Brel’s biting “Les flamandes”). She’s joined by Richard Cliff (dapperly dressed as a cafe waiter), with backup vocals from Robin Guy and Adrian Zeyl.
On opening night, Eugster, Cliff and Guy occasionally had trouble with enunciation and projection, but this wasn’t too much of a distraction. And Brel’s music if fiendishly difficult to sing. Zeyl, on the other hand, was uniformly excellent as a singer. He even looked a bit like the young Jacques Brel.
Both Cliff and Zeyl had great stage presence. In fact, although Cliff was frequently “on book” (that is, he used notes to remind himself of the lyrics he was singing), he had such good rapport with the audience that no one seemed to mind. His performance of the witty ditty “Matilda,” the silly “The Funeral Tango,” and the very dark Kurt Weill-ish “Next” got some of the strongest audience reactions of the evening. He and Zeyl had a great time with “The Girls and the Dogs and The Middle Class,” and so did the audience. I hope we’ll see Cliff and Zeyl in future productions.
Curiously, although she has the most academic and professional experience as a musician, Eugster’s singing disappointed me. This was particularly so with her delivery of my favourite Brel song, “Sons of…” It’s a song which has always brought a lump to my throat. Except for this time. The lyrics matter in Brel’s songs, but I couldn’t detect any feeling when Eugster was singing. This was in sharp contrast to the next song in the revue – “Amsterdam” – which Zeyl sang with great passion and bitterness. After intermission, Eugster redeemed herself with another of Brel’s most famous works, “Marieke,” but again I wasn’t convinced that she had considered what the lyrics meant.
Guy had fewer chances to spread her wings than the other three singers, but she shone in the touching ballad “Old Folks” and as the lead singer in one of Brel’s most famous songs, “Carousel.”
This production of Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris is a wonderful opportunity to hear the English versions of a bevy of classic French chansons – some sweet, some tart, some salty, some bitter. It’s a musical treasure trove.
“I’m really enjoying this!” That’s what the woman sitting in the next row said at intermission. Me too. Seeing this musical revue at The Gladstone on opening night made me want to dig out my 1974 LP of the original Off-Broadway production. What wonderful lyrics! What great music! I could see why David Bowie included the cast recording in a list of 25 of his favourite albums, Confessions of a Vinyl Junkie.
Upon entering the theatre, the audience is entertained by several jazzy cocktail numbers being played on an upright piano by Rowena Pearl. She’s splendid in a silvery sequinned dress, but her high heels are kicked off under the piano bench. The revue starts when Scott Richardson takes over from Pearl at the piano and plays the overture. His accompaniment of Brel’s songs is masterful; Richardson is one of the reasons to see this show. Then the lights go down and… Rachel Eugster begins to sing “Marathon” (the English translation of Jacques Brel’s biting “Les flamandes”). She’s joined by Richard Cliff (dapperly dressed as a cafe waiter), with backup vocals from Robin Guy and Adrian Zeyl.
On opening night, Eugster, Cliff and Guy occasionally had trouble with enunciation and projection, but this wasn’t too much of a distraction. And Brel’s music if fiendishly difficult to sing. Zeyl, on the other hand, was uniformly excellent as a singer. He even looked a bit like the young Jacques Brel.
Both Cliff and Zeyl had great stage presence. In fact, although Cliff was frequently “on book” (that is, he used notes to remind himself of the lyrics he was singing), he had such good rapport with the audience that no one seemed to mind. His performance of the witty ditty “Matilda,” the silly “The Funeral Tango,” and the very dark Kurt Weill-ish “Next” got some of the strongest audience reactions of the evening. He and Zeyl had a great time with “The Girls and the Dogs and The Middle Class,” and so did the audience. I hope we’ll see Cliff and Zeyl in future productions.
Curiously, although she has the most academic and professional experience as a musician, Eugster’s singing disappointed me. This was particularly so with her delivery of my favourite Brel song, “Sons of…” It’s a song which has always brought a lump to my throat. Except for this time. The lyrics matter in Brel’s songs, but I couldn’t detect any feeling when Eugster was singing. This was in sharp contrast to the next song in the revue – “Amsterdam” – which Zeyl sang with great passion and bitterness. After intermission, Eugster redeemed herself with another of Brel’s most famous works, “Marieke,” but again I wasn’t convinced that she had considered what the lyrics meant.
Guy had fewer chances to spread her wings than the other three singers, but she shone in the touching ballad “Old Folks” and as the lead singer in one of Brel’s most famous songs, “Carousel.”
This production of Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris is a wonderful opportunity to hear the English versions of a bevy of classic French chansons – some sweet, some tart, some salty, some bitter. It’s a musical treasure trove.
Preview by Allyson Domanski for Ottawa Tonite
It’s been nearly four decades since Jacques Brel was alive or well or living in Paris and nearly five decades since “Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris” played in Ottawa.
Stirred from sleep, the music of the Belgian troubadour will resound once more as Ottawa’s Bear & Co. stages the unabridged revival for a limited run at The Gladstone (November 2-12, 2016).
Brel, once a contemporary of Édith Piaf and Charles Aznavour, died in 1978 and Ottawa’s last mounting of the off-Broadway hit appears to have been in 1969 when it ran concurrently in Los Angeles, London, Paris and Belgrade. For the timeless quality of Brel’s music alone this city is long overdue.
Brel’s life was short—gone at 49, the lungs of the commanding chansonnier destroyed by a four-pack- a-day habit—his oeuvre anything but. The man who wrote such deceptively simple yet catchy melodies has been covered by heavy hitters like David Bowie, Ray Charles, Leonard Cohen, Sting and Frank Sinatra.
The man who wrote rhapsodic and passionate love songs about real people used to throw up before going on stage. The man who wrote honest songs about real life and death gave so intensely of himself while performing a solo in a suit and tie that he trembled and sweat profusely. The man who wrote everything from light ballads, bolero and tangos to thought-provoking political condemnations of hypocrisy and injustice portrayed the resilience of the human spirit that can never fade with time.
This then—a string of 25 independent songs translated and distilled from Brel’s far lengthier repertoire—is the backdrop to the 1968 Eric Blau and Mort Shuman off-Broadway production.
For its 2016 staging in Ottawa, how ever true to the original, this is not its entire backdrop. The always innovative director Eleanor Crowder (who could scarcely have had time to catch her breath between this and Macbeth in October) eschewed the banal manner of sparse stand-up singing adopted by some Brel revues to imbue hers with a more potent backdrop.
To authenticate Brel’s works, she has set her production inside a Paris café in 1968 against the turbulent protests outside on the streets as a conscious recall to when she was in Paris in 1968 as a teenager witnessing the protests and turmoil herself.
“I was 15 years old and travelling with my parents in Paris the day the tanks rolled in,” says Crowder. “I saw the tanks, I watched as cobblestones were hurled and cars turned over. We were aboard a train held up and searched for bombs—twice—which meant they found something.” That first-hand experience now finds fertile ground as context for Brel’s unique fusion of 1960s protest songs with 18th and 19th century cabaret songs, written to be sung fittingly in French coffee houses and clubs.
The characters are revealed by what they sing, the story about that person’s reality is revealed by the song.
Without that backdrop, Alive and Well and Living in Paris has little by way of plot—at its most fundamental it’s a one-man musical with a cast of four—but other layers get peeled away by the order of the songs and the manner in which they’re performed. Two women (Rachel Eugster and Robin Guy) and two men (Richard Cliff and Adrian Zeyl) portray Brel himself—they are all Brel—but not Brel in imitation. Says Crowder: “The characters are revealed by what they sing, the story about that person’s reality is revealed by the song.”
When Jacques Brel himself saw the original New York show in 1969 he said to its producer Eric Blau, “You have really done it. You have separated me from the work. The songs have a life of their own.”
I had the chance to chat with two of the cast and asked about their techniques for learning twenty-five new songs for the ninety-minute show. Richard Cliff(who assumes the role of café waiter) was trained as an opera tenor in Capetown, South Africa in the early 1990s—another tumultuous time—and has built a career as a stage and production manager. He says he has “a ridiculous music memory and music is what lodges first—it’s the hook. The repetition part is what comes after the music goes in.” He has nineteen songs to perform, six in solo, three in duet.
Ottawa native Robin Guy (who enters the café to seek refuge from the riots and assumes the role of a protester not quite committed to the cause) attended theatre school at York University and counts herself among the pupils of Ottawa’s renowned voice teacher Charlotte Stewart. Being “auditorily-focused” she does most of her work while driving. She’s not texting, she’s playing recordings of her singing on her phone while driving to and from her home in North Gower. So as not to waste precious time, she plays back her recordings “belting it out until I get the first line, then the second line and so forth.” Phone playback in the car is how she memorizes scores and scripts.
Rachel Eugster, a regular performer at The Gladstone, assumes the role of café diva/chanteuse, while Adrian Zeyl is another protester who runs for the safety of the café.
Says Crowder: “We auditioned people to sound right together. We have a really lovely mix of four lovely voices.” Music Director Scott Richardson shapes them into a soaring ensemble, capable of all the passion and tenderness demanded by Brel the musical and Brel the man. Crowder’s staging and Richardson’s musical finesse bring us the power of the songs, inviting us into the world of le chansonnier.
Jacques Brel himself might think they too, have really done it.
Allyson Domanski writes about travel, the arts and reviews theatre for Ottawa Tonite as well as for Newswest. She is currently completing a major work of creative non-fiction to be published in 2017. An avid traveller and not-quite year-round cyclist, she and her husband spent two and a half years bicycling around the world before she joined the territorial then the federal public service. The hockey and lacrosse mom, owner of a Husky and une cabane au Quebec hails from Winnipeg and has lived from India to Iqaluit but she and her family call Hintonburg home.
It’s been nearly four decades since Jacques Brel was alive or well or living in Paris and nearly five decades since “Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris” played in Ottawa.
Stirred from sleep, the music of the Belgian troubadour will resound once more as Ottawa’s Bear & Co. stages the unabridged revival for a limited run at The Gladstone (November 2-12, 2016).
Brel, once a contemporary of Édith Piaf and Charles Aznavour, died in 1978 and Ottawa’s last mounting of the off-Broadway hit appears to have been in 1969 when it ran concurrently in Los Angeles, London, Paris and Belgrade. For the timeless quality of Brel’s music alone this city is long overdue.
Brel’s life was short—gone at 49, the lungs of the commanding chansonnier destroyed by a four-pack- a-day habit—his oeuvre anything but. The man who wrote such deceptively simple yet catchy melodies has been covered by heavy hitters like David Bowie, Ray Charles, Leonard Cohen, Sting and Frank Sinatra.
The man who wrote rhapsodic and passionate love songs about real people used to throw up before going on stage. The man who wrote honest songs about real life and death gave so intensely of himself while performing a solo in a suit and tie that he trembled and sweat profusely. The man who wrote everything from light ballads, bolero and tangos to thought-provoking political condemnations of hypocrisy and injustice portrayed the resilience of the human spirit that can never fade with time.
This then—a string of 25 independent songs translated and distilled from Brel’s far lengthier repertoire—is the backdrop to the 1968 Eric Blau and Mort Shuman off-Broadway production.
For its 2016 staging in Ottawa, how ever true to the original, this is not its entire backdrop. The always innovative director Eleanor Crowder (who could scarcely have had time to catch her breath between this and Macbeth in October) eschewed the banal manner of sparse stand-up singing adopted by some Brel revues to imbue hers with a more potent backdrop.
To authenticate Brel’s works, she has set her production inside a Paris café in 1968 against the turbulent protests outside on the streets as a conscious recall to when she was in Paris in 1968 as a teenager witnessing the protests and turmoil herself.
“I was 15 years old and travelling with my parents in Paris the day the tanks rolled in,” says Crowder. “I saw the tanks, I watched as cobblestones were hurled and cars turned over. We were aboard a train held up and searched for bombs—twice—which meant they found something.” That first-hand experience now finds fertile ground as context for Brel’s unique fusion of 1960s protest songs with 18th and 19th century cabaret songs, written to be sung fittingly in French coffee houses and clubs.
The characters are revealed by what they sing, the story about that person’s reality is revealed by the song.
Without that backdrop, Alive and Well and Living in Paris has little by way of plot—at its most fundamental it’s a one-man musical with a cast of four—but other layers get peeled away by the order of the songs and the manner in which they’re performed. Two women (Rachel Eugster and Robin Guy) and two men (Richard Cliff and Adrian Zeyl) portray Brel himself—they are all Brel—but not Brel in imitation. Says Crowder: “The characters are revealed by what they sing, the story about that person’s reality is revealed by the song.”
When Jacques Brel himself saw the original New York show in 1969 he said to its producer Eric Blau, “You have really done it. You have separated me from the work. The songs have a life of their own.”
I had the chance to chat with two of the cast and asked about their techniques for learning twenty-five new songs for the ninety-minute show. Richard Cliff(who assumes the role of café waiter) was trained as an opera tenor in Capetown, South Africa in the early 1990s—another tumultuous time—and has built a career as a stage and production manager. He says he has “a ridiculous music memory and music is what lodges first—it’s the hook. The repetition part is what comes after the music goes in.” He has nineteen songs to perform, six in solo, three in duet.
Ottawa native Robin Guy (who enters the café to seek refuge from the riots and assumes the role of a protester not quite committed to the cause) attended theatre school at York University and counts herself among the pupils of Ottawa’s renowned voice teacher Charlotte Stewart. Being “auditorily-focused” she does most of her work while driving. She’s not texting, she’s playing recordings of her singing on her phone while driving to and from her home in North Gower. So as not to waste precious time, she plays back her recordings “belting it out until I get the first line, then the second line and so forth.” Phone playback in the car is how she memorizes scores and scripts.
Rachel Eugster, a regular performer at The Gladstone, assumes the role of café diva/chanteuse, while Adrian Zeyl is another protester who runs for the safety of the café.
Says Crowder: “We auditioned people to sound right together. We have a really lovely mix of four lovely voices.” Music Director Scott Richardson shapes them into a soaring ensemble, capable of all the passion and tenderness demanded by Brel the musical and Brel the man. Crowder’s staging and Richardson’s musical finesse bring us the power of the songs, inviting us into the world of le chansonnier.
Jacques Brel himself might think they too, have really done it.
Allyson Domanski writes about travel, the arts and reviews theatre for Ottawa Tonite as well as for Newswest. She is currently completing a major work of creative non-fiction to be published in 2017. An avid traveller and not-quite year-round cyclist, she and her husband spent two and a half years bicycling around the world before she joined the territorial then the federal public service. The hockey and lacrosse mom, owner of a Husky and une cabane au Quebec hails from Winnipeg and has lived from India to Iqaluit but she and her family call Hintonburg home.
THE TEAM
Director: Eleanor Crowder
Eleanor has been producing and directing theatrical events since she first saw Jacques Brel in 1968. She tends towards trees, market wagons, and echoing rock faces where audience experience leaves you sopping wet with a sense of survivor achievement. Snow storms from Kenora to Halifax figure in the road stories. Her recent excitements have included fire-spinning witches and all the blood and passion of Macbeth, both outdoors and at The Gladstone. She is delighted to map the vagaries of the heart in this show. Brel’s songs remain a core part of her own love affair with theatre. Favourite achievements: Sandinista’s Prairie tour for GCTC; Central Sudan tour of al Jerrasim for Mussera al Tagadum; Romeo & Juliet True North Tour 2010.
Music Director: Scott Richardson
Scott is active as a freelance accompanist and choir director. He is the pianist for the Ottawa Choral Society and has also accompanied the Carleton University Choir, the Canadian Centennial Choir, and the Ottawa Children's Choir. Since 2007, Scott has been the Music Director of Atlantic Voices: The Newfoundland and Labrador Choir of Ottawa. Scott also directs Musica Viva Singers of Ottawa.
Scott grew up in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, and studied music at Mount Allison University. His graduate studies took him in a different direction, however, and he completed a Ph.D. in English literature at the University of Ottawa. As an organist and choir director, Scott has held various positions in the Atlantic Provinces and in Ottawa, and is currently Music Director at Orleans United Church.
Scott grew up in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, and studied music at Mount Allison University. His graduate studies took him in a different direction, however, and he completed a Ph.D. in English literature at the University of Ottawa. As an organist and choir director, Scott has held various positions in the Atlantic Provinces and in Ottawa, and is currently Music Director at Orleans United Church.
Stage Manager and Set Designer: Jane Vanstone Osborn
This is Jane’s third production with Bear & Co. and coincidentally her third set design. Recent projects include ASM at GCTC The Gravitational Pull of Bernice Trimble, SM for Judith Thompson’s new play, Hothouse, and a production of The Mountaintop, both at Theatre Kingston. Highlights of her cross-Canada career include Women Who Shout at the Stars (Ottawa Fringe and Toronto’s SummerWorks), the Capital Critics award-winning shows And Slowly Beauty (NAC/Belfry) and A Christmas Carol (NAC), along with a Rideau Award for Stage Management on The Turn of the Screw, working with the Shaw Festival, NAC, GCTC, and the Thousand Islands Playhouse. She has also stage managed school tours, puppets, operas, and theatre with the visually impaired.
Cast member: Richard Cliff
Richard is thrilled to be returning to the professional stage after an absence of 22 years. Last seen on stages across South Africa in Marthinus Basson’s production of Boy Meets Boy, he has kept himself very busy in the meantime with a full and satisfying career as a production and stage manager working for theatres and arts organizations across Canada. The time has come, however, for him to further explore his creative side as a singer and he couldn’t be more grateful for the opportunity to do so with Jacques Brel is Alive and Well & Living in Paris, a work of immense power and energy and a true gift to singers. He hopes you agree and that you enjoy the show!
Cast member: Rachel Eugster
Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well & Living in Paris holds a special place in Rachel Eugster’s heart. Shortly after her graduation from the Peabody Conservatory, a newly-minted Master of Music, one of Rachel’s first professional engagements was a production of this very show. Returning to these songs, with this incredible group of people, is both a new exploration and a homecoming. So much has changed; so much is the same.
At the Gladstone, Rachel’s most recent turns have been as Macbeth’s Banquo and Lady MacDuff (and music director), as Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (both Bear), and as three different men in Anton In Show Business (Three Sisters). Last summer, she appeared at the Ottawa Fringe Festival as Æmilia in the premiere of her first original play, Whose Æmilia?, whose central character might have been Shakespeare’s Dark Lady of the Sonnets—or not.
Rachel is a founding member of Bear & Co., and of Dragon’s Tea Trio, and the author of the award-winning picture book The Pocket Mommy (Tundra/Penguin Random House).
At the Gladstone, Rachel’s most recent turns have been as Macbeth’s Banquo and Lady MacDuff (and music director), as Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (both Bear), and as three different men in Anton In Show Business (Three Sisters). Last summer, she appeared at the Ottawa Fringe Festival as Æmilia in the premiere of her first original play, Whose Æmilia?, whose central character might have been Shakespeare’s Dark Lady of the Sonnets—or not.
Rachel is a founding member of Bear & Co., and of Dragon’s Tea Trio, and the author of the award-winning picture book The Pocket Mommy (Tundra/Penguin Random House).
Cast member: Robin Guy
It was the siren sound of musical theatre that ignited Robin’s passion for the stage, and this return to a musical after several years has been a delightful homecoming. Last singing Maria in The Sound of Music, she has also been privileged to sing such roles as Diana in Anne…, Martha in The Secret Garden, and Bella in Rags. She is more than delighted to work again with Bear & Co., having played Jacques in the As You Like It parks tour. She was honoured to be nominated for Best Professional Actress by the Capital Critics Circle for her work as Eve and Lucifer in The Creation of the World with 9th Hour. Watch for her next in The Maltese Falcon Radio Show (December 2016), and Crimes of the Heart (February 2017), at The Gladstone later this season.
Cast member: Adrian Zeyl
Adrian is thrilled to return to his hometown, and the theatre where he made his professional debut. Recent credits include Lend me a Tenor (Highlands Summer Festival), Killer Tunes (Mysteriously Yours), Come From Away (Theatre Sheridan). TV/Film: Civil War Chronicles (American Heroes Channel), Transmission (Famous Motions Pictures), War of the Dead VR (Cream VR).
Adrian is a graduate of the Musical Theatre Performance Programme at Sheridan College.
Adrian is a graduate of the Musical Theatre Performance Programme at Sheridan College.
Interlude pianist: Rowena Pearl
With her unique enthusiasm, Rowena Pearl's talent shines bright she engages all ages in making music. She brings her love of music to audiences as a music director of school, church, and community choirs as well as local theatres. Rowena is a popular music teacher, introducing a love of piano and ukulele to dozens of students. For the past several years, Rowena has been regularly involved in putting together an annual Christmas community musical event, performs period pieces every summer at the Dickenson House in Manotick, is a recurring musical director for The Smith Falls Railway Theatre summer productions, and has performed for the past few years as the music director for the pick-up choir at the Grassroots Festival in Ottawa.
Rowena lives in Kars with her husband Will and three boys, Wilson, Rylee, and Owen.
Rowena lives in Kars with her husband Will and three boys, Wilson, Rylee, and Owen.