Directing Brel: Monomania & Other Virtues

(Brel played its four-day run this past weekend. Today's article was originally scheduled for Friday; due to a reading period mix-up, it appears today. Though the writer regrets the delay, the article still remains the history of a remarkable drive for perfection.)

SINCE HE first saw Jacques Brel...--three times in one week--Guy Rochman has known that someday he would direct that musical revue. "It was a traumatic point in my life, the fall of '68... I was taking drivered and breaking up with my girl. I saw the show and fell in love with it." He wanted to sing 'Amsterdam', but he wanted to direct it even more. When the lights went up on Wednesday night's black tie Patron's Preview, Guy had brought off the first non-professional staging of Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris.

Guy insists with the faith of a visionary that everything has run as scheduled since kickoff. But as he chronologues his show's history, fate clearly helped those who helped themselves. Simply to get the show was an act of will: "I wrote to 3W Productions who said yes, referring me to Blau and Shuman (who put Brel together) who said yes, referring me to their agent, Music Theatre International, who said no." Guy waited til February, meanwhile casting and then scrapping an all-women production of Waiting for Godot ("another long story"). In February the agency said yes, but backed down ten days later when Boston's professional production failed to close.

THEY SENT me catalogues for Oklahoma! and Bye-Bye Birdie, but it was Brel that I was going to do." Guy started calling people and soon discovered that the folks at MTI had legally committed themselves when they gave the earlier promise. "I sent them a telegram, a night letter about 150 words long, politely asking 'Why are you fucking us over? Why won't you let me do the show?'" The next morning Guy got his phone call, and he had won.

Guy grins triumphantly, as if to explain that that's of course how it would come out. Around him the Mather House dining room is converting to its night-time role: a small forest of music stands has popped up; guitar amps, an organ, and drums are lugged in; the pianist is jamming with the two flutes; the crew checks the stage lighting, fading in and out on the three performers doing their warm-ups. Tom Johnson, the music director, stops by to check details, as do five others in the next fifteen minutes. The room is noisy and alive, but not chaotic. Everything focuses towards the metamorphosis into Brel.

"Excuse me," Guy says, and clapping his hands, calls out, "Okay, places everybody. We're working on Act One, then running straight through... Oh, by the way," he turns back. "I'm doing the part. Yeah, Amsterdam--but not on purpose, I'll explain later." He joins the other singers--Curt, Patty, and Paula--behind the backdrop, and the overture begins for Tuesday's rehearsal.

II

BEFORE HE could do anything, Guy needed funding. Off went 250 letters to House associates, overseers, friends who owed favors--"anyone who I thought had money and might write a check." Figuring that regular mail might be ignored, he sent fifty-odd registered letters, which arrived in New York around 6:30 a.m. Guy's bleary-eyed friends wrote profanities on the receipts; they also sent money. In three weeks he had $2000. Royalties claimed a major chunk, the stage construction another. Even the xerox bill came in at an astronomical $150.

Next Guy scouted about for a music director, ruling out everyone who wasn't reluctant, who didn't see the problems. Someone recommended a "Tom Johnson" at New England Conservatory. They met over drinks, hit it off, and prepared for casting. Later, it no longer mattered when Guy learned that, by chance, he's called the wrong Tom Johnson at the music school.

One thousand casting notices went out, and ads played on the hour at WBCN. Guy and Tom stayed up til 5 a.m. the week of casting. After auditioning 104 people and running call-backs for twenty-four, Guy had his cast. "I looked for emotional involvement, not merely talent or intellectual response, because I loved the show and wanted the cast to also." After collecting a set of musicians from the conservatories and gently coercing friends into his production staff, Guy was ready to put together the show.

The cast rehearsed 12 hours a day throughout spring break, doing acting and singing exercises, working into a unified group of equals with no star and no self-consciousness. Three days in, Len (who played Male One) realized that his Polish-accented English would trip up the show and bowed out. His understudy took over but became embroiled with his other (professional) show and opted out the next week. Guy re-cast the part, but by then the show was one-third blocked, voices were more developed, and more importantly, the cast had become close. The others asked Guy to take over Amsterdam. "I figure I'll get torn apart for being an actor-director. The egocentricity, after hearing 104 other people!" But it was, after all, how fate had manipulated it.

III

GUY fulfills as totally as possible his vision of Brel as a cabaret piece with its type of audience involvement. "I feel I'm inviting the audience to see it. I can't see charging people for anything that's not perfect." This translates into a multitude of minor amenities like vacuuming the floor before the show and ultimately into the overall production.

The stage, an irregular stack of three circular platforms, thrusts into the middle of the room. "I wanted a shape more than a stage, something with plenty of movement yet undefined. I wanted it to be out into the audience; when you have a proscenium at the end of a room, you have people looking at the show; you forget they're there." The platforms rest on steel pipe legs, specially cut and threaded because the usual machinery couldn't handle such short legs. Guy proudly shows off his banged-up finger, still recovering from his carpentry. "And I have a very low tolerance for pain."

Surrounding the stage are different sized tables with red checked tableclothes. Each table has its centerpiece, its basket of fruit, its wine, and its waiter. "I want to make this a festive occasion. I'm hoping people will come early, be served, drink a little, get to know the table next to them. That's the reason for starting at nine. It's more, uh, celebratory to drink at night as opposed to evening."

In the name of perfection and celebration Guy wants extra large tickets and shiny paper for the 14-page program. It's why he has built a 25-foot marquee and paid extra for the especially bright posters. It's why he went through the phone book until he found a deal to get the wine ("The DiSabatos in the South End. I went down to meet the whole family. Wonderful people."). Guy's devotion, which borders on monomania, almost seems pretentious. But as he works to perfect the show and explains the hundreds of carefully executed details, his devotion is clearly just that: total dedication coupled with the knack for infecting others with his own enthusiasm.

IV

I THINK of Brel as a celebration of life--as it is. There's an amazing coherence in the show. The characterization is pretty much evident in the script. There's a division between the introspective and the outgoing. It's always song-countersong: Curt sings about marriage, I sing of brothels; Paula sings 'Timid Frieda' while Patty sings 'My Death.' It's really twenty-six scenes, not just songs. It works as theater because it limits drama to a minimum, cutting out the extraneous. It gets down to a core....

"Each song has to have a center, has to build to something. Each presents a coherent idea that has to have coherent blocking. I think of blocking this show, not choreographing it. The challenge is to stage both the characterization and the song. It means getting inside the songs: sometimes Brel says the song should end at the front of the stage. You have to listen for those things...

"Hands are very important. Hands are used as a vehicle for communication, to give the show continuity. They can carry emotion in slightly unnatural gestures; for instance, you know it has to be crossed hands at one point, but close in or away from you?

"We beefed up the sound to make the music an equal part. Brel says he's not a poet, the verse has to come with the music floating about. We've got ten instruments instead of four. We'll have a trumpet, too, if they send the music. We wanted the band to change color with the pieces, as Brel does; with just piano, guitar, bass, and drums it would all be the same.

"Brel says some pretty hard things. You know. 'There are truths you've never told.' His truths are real, not theatrical. Brel's philosophy is if we only have love we can get it together--maybe. I played 'Amsterdam' for a good friend of mine; he was a merchant marine. When this guy gets misty-eyed, it's a real tribute to Brel (and to him, too). We're feeding and wining our audience, then singing to them about how the middle class gets fat and gets drunk. It's only half-serious, but it's half-serious...

"Act Two has more appeal than the first act. It's more gimmicky, the songs are better known... maybe it's because they're better. I don't know. They hold up remarkably well. We've been singing them six hours a night, and they're still good. So many things are perfect now that took hours. And now we suffer from diddly-shit things like a fuse overloading. It's frustrating, like a yellow light on a blue diamond. We've got to get it perfect. I love the show now more than when I started it--and I loved it when I started."

V

FRIDAY EVENING the cast works on rough harmonies while the last colored gels are put over the lights. Patty sings 'Old Folks' again and again while the others work on blending the background. Several instrumentalists start giving impromptu voice lessons; Tom reiterates that they have to keep the rhythms clear. At 9:30 the Phoenix and Independent reviewers are to arrive.

Guy shows off the advertising banners; he's not sure where he'll put them. "If only we could hang them out of Mem Church, but..." He has the same problem with the marquee, but isn't worried. Paula has found another possible outfit, which still is not what Guy wants; Curt comes in wearing tuxedo pants, and Guy's face lights up. "They're absolutely perfect! Where'd you get them?" He has sent back the programs to be reprinted; they were on the wrong kind of paper with the wrong print. Tomorrow will be the final decisions on costumes and painting the platform. It's down to finishing touches.

Each rehearsal Guy has prowled around, checking on the final details, encouraging the cast to keep it fresh and not to forget what they've perfected, concentrating on keeping his own voice in tune. Although ultimately confident, he continues to worry (Sore throats menace both Patty and him. She pops cough drops while he swigs from a bottle of honey.) When on Tuesday Guy stopped the opening chorus to change a lighting cue, Curt had turned to the girls and said. "Opening night we'll be up there and Guy'll go 'Wait!' and charge off to correct something." They had all laughed, knowing how close to truth that was.

"You know, you have to realize when you just have to sit back and let it be," Guy had said the night before. But as curtain time approaches for the first of the press previews, he continues to polish the last bit of sparkle into his blue diamond of a show.