Alive and Well

Youth dies. Life hurts. Love warms.

Understanding heals. The wounds and balms of the human condition are so commonplace that men eventually experience them without noticing. It is only when art magnifies truth that audiences become aware of it--and of themselves. One of the most powerful magnifiers currently in use is a cabaret show with the unwieldy title, Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris.

Two years ago, when the show opened in Greenwich Village, the logical response to the title might have been: So what? The songs were written by an obscure Belgian bourgeois-turned-chanteur; they were being sung in the dark basement of the Village Gate by four nobodies. But one of these nobodies was a phosphorescent waif named Elly Stone, who breathed life and passion into Brel's hard-edged depictions of soul v. circumstance. Nearly 1,000 performances later, Jacques Brel is still vibrantly alive and well in New York. On an initial investment of $52,000, four companies of Brel have grossed more than $31 million, and this week audiences in Boston are discovering Elly Stone as she continues to discover the songs--as if for the first time.

When an actress appears in a long run she tends to lose her gusto. This is called getting stale. Once in a long while a performer appears who remains as fresh in the road company as she was on opening night. This is called Elly Stone. Oddly enough, in the early years of her career, Elly seemed a sure showbiz loser. In the '50s she sang her way cross-country with her first husband, an itinerant magician. They slept and nearly froze in a Kansas scrap-car lot; they lived on bananas in Florida; they starved; they split. Elly played club dates and even a carnival--all without recognition. She failed in the Catskills. In a Manhattan boite she appeared briefly with Raconteur Jean Shepherd. "Relax," he told her. "These are the good old days."

The good old days got worse. Elly sang in striptease shows, and understudied Barbra Streisand in I Can Get It for You Wholesale. It was like sending a sparrow in for a hawk. Off-Broadway was a better avenue for her talents. In 1961, she found herself in a little musical entitled O, Oysters! Its author-producer was Eric Blau, a minor poet who was to become her second husband. A ghostwriter by trade (for Mickey Mantle, Jim Brown), Blau had a contagious obsession: Jacques Brel. "I was knocked out when I heard his work," he recalls. "I had never known any songwriter to address himself to the human condition. I began to collect Brel." So did another enthusiast, Composer Mort Shuman, who had assisted at the birth of the rock generation by writing tunes (Viva Las Vegas) for Elvis Presley. Together, Shuman and Blau sifted through Brel's 150-song repertory. They settled on an irreducible 25 for Alive and Well.

American Treadmill. Brel's idiom is barely translatable from Flemish to French, let alone from French to English. Blau and Shuman went an impossible step farther, translating English into American. Les Flamandes (The Flemish Women), for example, became Marathon, and metamorphosed from a Belgian character study into a portrayal of the American treadmill. Then came the hard part. Blau wanted the show staged with "everything floating, and the feeling that all was pressed against a tapestry of utter silence." Off-Broadway, utter silence is a phenomenon that usually occurs only after a show closes.

Elly Stone made it an ingredient of her debut. Oceans of eerie quiet still surround Brel's 16-bar novellas at every performance. The narrow, tremulous wraith appears in black velvet pants and jacket, a little lace jabot at her throat. The mordant chords purl from the back of the stage, and she becomes an authentically possessed figure. On the slow numbers, the words are not sung; they seem to float from her throat. The uptempo songs could survive almost any rendition, but when Elly sings them, she charges them with alternating currents of energy and melancholia. She does not interpret the songs, she becomes their owner--and their tenant. In Carousel, she sings in a lazy, wheeling style--until suddenly the merry-go-round lurches out of control. The carousel spins elliptically, dangerously, until the singer reaches an unbearable frenzy --and shatters. Audiences that witness such tours de force know what it must have been like in the '30s, when the young Lotte Lenya sang the works of Brecht and Weill, and cabaret fused with art.

Ironic Couplets. The resemblance to Brecht and Weill does not end with Elly. The elusive melodies seem, at first, to be mere cloaks for Brel's verse. But they bear constant repetition --indeed, some enthusiasts have come to the Brel show as often as 56 times. As for his lyrics, the terse, ironic couplets recognize revelations beyond politics and fashion; they know that every man is an expatriate from the province of youth.

Sons of the thief, sons of the saint/ Who is the child without complaint?/ Sons of the great or sons unknown/ All were children like your own . . .

Those who have heard both Brel and Stone know that Elly is more than an interpreter of the composer; she is a soul sister whose versions often excel those of their creator. That is fortunate; it will be some time before Jacques Brel recrosses the Atlantic. He professes love for Americans in America, but he will not pay a visit to the U.S. until the war in Viet Nam is over. He is--literally--Up in the air about his present career. He has but one important possession, a private airplane, in which he darts about the Continent. He has divested himself of home and wife. He has not appeared onstage since a brief 1968 success in the Paris version of Man of La Mancha. Alone, Brel arrives and takes off where he pleases, an almost fictional figure even to his countrymen. But late next month he is scheduled to land in Paris to appear with Elly Stone in a special for French television. It is one appearance he looks forward to--in contrast to his costar. "Brel is the master," she says. "I'm scared."

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