Whoever comes up with it: imitate the legendary Belgian chansonnier Jacques Brel. Not just his voice, his intensity, his flair, but also his complete life story, his feelings, his thoughts. What a thankless task protagonist Sjors van der Panne has taken on BREL – the musical brought to heel.
Albert Verlinde and Bram Verhaak have previously made biographical musicals: Edith Piaf, Wim Sonneveld and Annie MG Schmidt, among others. Each one was successful, according to this newspaper. But Brel…
Brel (1929-1978) is complex. On the outside: great songs, extreme stage fright, wife and children far away, a legion of affairs, booze. On the inside? That’s what you want to find out, in a biographical musical theater performance.
Don’t you come. What you do get: his life story in a multitude of hasty, anecdotal scenes, as one-dimensional as possible. Brel is a clumsy toddling bastard who mainly thinks about women, his good friend Georges ‘Jojo’ Pasquier (Stefan Rokebrand) an all-knowing philosopher, his wife Thérèse ‘Miche’ Michielsen (Wieneke Remmers) a walking give-me-one-reason-to-stay… okay-I’ll-stay-cliché, and all its affairs almost textless objects.
Songs
Brel’s songs serve as a guideline, except for the biggest hit ‘Ne Me Quitte Pas’ and the encore ‘Amsterdam’, in Dutch. Van der Panne often sings them alone, sometimes ensemble members take over or sing along.
But how do you ever approach Brel’s individuality? Van der Panne has clearly studied Brel’s live performances endlessly. He takes his facial expressions as a starting point, and he does so quite convincingly: many closed eyes, many lips, many chins, many arms, many fingers.
But Brel’s music was not in his body. His body was in his music. Those lips and fingers do nothing if you don’t feel what the music is about. Van der Panne does not build up, places word accents that are moderately appropriate to the text, lets the endings of sentences fall out of the breath – even if that is where the clue lies, uses rubato on words but not on silences and above all: does not articulate. Brel was articulation. Brel could sing a comma. Van der Panne can still wave his right hand so recognisably, but if he does not pronounce g in the translation of ‘Au suivant’ (‘Who Follows?’) (‘Wievoow!’), then you are not yet in the shadow of the man.
All but one player from Brel – the musical: left Stefan Rokebrand, center front Wieneke Remmers. Sjors van der Panne with a dark waistcoat.
Photo Studio Flabbergasted
Van der Panne is inconsistent in this regard. In songs that Brel himself also sang in Dutch (‘Rosa’, ‘De Burgerij’ – here including the rhyming word ‘lul’, the great ‘De Nuttelozen van de Nacht’), he exactly imitates Brel’s charmingly flawed Dutch accent and his timing. In songs that others covered (Herman van Veen, Liesbeth List) all that disappears.
Accordion
Somewhere in the process, Van der Panne must have realized how difficult his task really was. That in itself is not a problem, if he had given his own interpretation to the character. But our own Brel is not finished yet. ‘Miche’ Wienneke Remmers has succeeded. She doesn’t have much to do, but the bright spots of the performance are the moments when she plays and sings.
In order to get to know Brel a little, one of the three ensemble members (Lena Stallinga, Rijanne Mink, Jasmijn Veerman), who go through all the characters around Brel at a breakneck pace, drops a fact that doesn’t fit into the conversation every so often. “Did you know that that record sold a thousand copies?” But who Brel really was, what was the basis for his songs or his womanizing, or what made his music so good? Brel could tell more in one sentence than this performance could do in more than two hours.
It is hoped that they will not discover in Belgium what was done to their hero here. Was there nothing else good? Yes, the three musicians (Lars Visscher accordion, Elsa Le Moigne cello, Neil Foreman piano) are fine. Even if it was a street accordionist who showed how it should really be done after the performance next to the entrance to the theater. Too bad the overflowing audience missed how beautifully refined (with rubato on the silences!) he played Édith Piaf’s ‘Padam Padam’.
Jacques Brel – How he sang
Seen the performance, but don’t you know Jacques Brel himself? Then listen to these songs to really get to know him:
Ne Me Quitte Pas:
The Useless of the Night:
Ces Gens-Là:
Rosa:
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