Also this issue: Take Three A day trip to Princeton reveals a trio of compelling exhibits of Asian art. -Susan Hagen Unbecoming: The Private as Public Spectacle -Robin Rice From Good Evening to Good Night -David Anthony Fox Webber, Wildhorn and Weill! -Debra Auspitz Making Porn -Steve Cohen

August 8-14, 2002

artpicks

Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris

Thirty-five years ago in New York, a musical opened that featured translated songs by Brussels-born Jacques Brel. Born in 1929, Brel had an extremely prolific and eccentric career (at one point he even changed his name for six months to "Jacques Bérel, the Eccentric"). Brel was a composer, a musician, a singer, a film director and actor, not to mention a pilot and a sailor. His tunes, immortalized for American audiences in the 1967 musical Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris, are mesmerizing, from the dizzying "Carousel (La Valse a Mille Temps)" to the ditty "Madeline" to his most famous work, the schmaltzy ballad "If We Only Had Love (Quand on n'a que l'amour)." The show is a four-character revue of Brel's songs. Brel wrote music rich with a mid-20th-century European sensibility that still managed to be timeless. In honor of the American tribute to Brel turning 35, Classic Theatre Productions opens a run of Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris this week. Director Barry Brait uses the original translation by Eric Blau and Mort Shuman, and the four performers are Rene Goodwin, Jennifer Governor, Zebediah Homison and John O'Hara.

Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris, through Aug. 18, Classic Theatre Productions at the Playground at the Adrienne, 2030 Sansom St., 215-563-4330.

—Debra Auspitz

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