It was not a good year for Albert Verlinde: not only did RTL Tonight flop, his musical Brel was also horrible and terribly poorly received. Is the show expert annoyed by all those horror reviews?
That year with that toyboy was of course the most terrible, but 2025 will not go down as Albert Verlinde’s best year ever. He has committed a terrible blunder in both television and theater. Exchanging Today Inside for RTL Tonight was embarrassing and the musical Brel produced by him also seems not to be good.
Horror Reviews
For example, the NRC, which had previously been favorable to Albert, gave only one star to Brel. The newspaper spoke of ‘a multitude of hasty, anecdotal scenes, as one-dimensional as possible’, and leading actor Sjors van der Panne was also punished. “He does not build up, places word accents that are poorly suited to the text (…) and does not articulate.”
De Volkskrant was also not positive and gave only three out of five stars: “Main actor Sjors van der Panne is not quite up to the enormous job. (…) The acting is not very convincing and although Van der Panne is an experienced singer, his singing voice sounds a bit thin and difficult to understand in the demanding chansons.”
Albert sad?
What does it do to Albert that those newspaper reviews are so upsetting? “If the reviews of a piece are less positive than you hope, I first think of the people in the production,” he says Weekend. “So I immediately called Brel protagonist Sjors van der Panne to ask: what is happening to you, how are you doing?”
He continues: “But when you notice that 45,000 tickets for Brel have already been sold and people keep coming, then you also think: what are we talking about?”
Jubilant
In other words: now that Albert is receiving negative reviews, he suddenly no longer attaches any value to it. “Reviewers can write whatever they want, but I notice that the public loves it. But of course, you prefer that all reviews are jubilant.”
Is his ego bruised now? “No. I was upset for a moment because you think: is that justified? I also received messages like: ‘I think this is so unfair!’ Also from fellow producers, who do not understand where it comes from. You have to recover from that, because you always want to make the most beautiful thing.”
Not a gift
It also makes you sober, says Albert. “It’s good to think: you don’t always get it as a gift, it remains hard work. We are now already making the next productions, such as We Will Rock You. You just keep going. A football club also sometimes goes through a bad period, so you don’t immediately cancel that out.”
Isn’t it extra tough if things go wrong in both theater and TV? He sees it positively. “We make beautiful performances and the viewing figures are also slowly increasing, with peaks approaching 600,000. However, less is written about that now, but that is also part of it.”