Just as it was the original London cast album for Side by Side by Sondheim that, when I was still a teenager, first turned me onto the riches of Stephen Sondheim — and shortly afterwards, was followed by seeing the original (and shockingly short-lived) London production of Sweeney Todd that turned me into a lifelong fan — it was encountering another revue, Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris, at an even younger age that first alerted me to the genius of the Belgian troubadour. That was while growing up in Johannesburg, South Africa, where a production in the mid-70s of this revue — that had originated off-Broadway in 1968 — had become the longest-running musical production in the history to date of that city. So I have always had a soft spot for this hard-edged collection of vibrantly textured songs of the anger of love and loss.
But though the songs have deepened in meaning as I’ve grown older, it’s also difficult to stay fresh with material that has long become standard cabaret fodder. But in 1999, a dazzling dramatic danced version of the songs, performed by a Belgian troupe called Anonymous Society, came to Lyric Hammersmith from Edinburgh and reinvigorated this extraordinary repertoire as performance art. And last night, I caught a new off-Broadway version of the original Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris that is like a blend of Anonymous Society’s context setting of the songs and a straight revue that brings it a freshly contemporary edge that, in electrifying new orchestrations, sounds hip and new, too.
It’s playing at the Zipper Theatre, one of the city’s newest and hippest off-Broadway spaces that is a ‘found’ industrial space that was once a zipper factory, just as London’s Arcola was formerly a garment sewing shop. Many of the seats are ‘found’, too, from the insides of cars. The place feels as real and inhabited and full of ghosts as the songs do, too. It’s the perfect fusion of theatre and show that makes each as hip as the other.
