STAGE REVIEWS : Admiring, Revealing ‘Adieu’ to Jacques Brel

What are the shows that touch us the most? Not the ones that tell us about other people. The ones that tell us about ourselves--our pain, struggles, contradictions, our secret dreams. Sometimes through other people.

That is surely the case with Noel Harrison’s “Adieu, Jacques . . . !,” a melancholy salute to Jacques Brel, an old friend of the heart. The standard Brel show in America is “Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living Paris,” a bouncy, forward-looking encomium that acquaints the theatergoer with a repertoire of striking, playful and emotional French songs written by a venerated Belgian songwriter and sung in English. It is cabaret revue stuff, to be delivered at top energy by a quartet of performers.

Now, starting with the almost audible sigh in its title, listen to Harrison’s moody “Adieu, Jacques . . . !,” playing at Theatre/Theater and sung entirely (and articulately) in the original French. Rather than a triumphant affirmation of the man, it examines Brel through a glass darkly, catching his complex reflection in Harrison’s own tortured soul.

The singer-songwriter who died of cancer at 49 was an unshackled optimist who refused to go gentle into his good night. Harrison, who met Brel once, admits he envies and admires such defiance and decisiveness, “completely committed to the fierce, implacable victory of the heart,” which he feels he can never attain. Thus, “Adieu, Jacques . . . !” informs us about both men--their differences harmonically joined at the psyche in what turns out to be a raw and disarmingly naked evening.

Harrison gives us a couple of the stunning Brel standards (“Marieke” and “J’Arrive”), but mostly talks to us about the man and delivers a passel of splendid songs new to American ears: the laconic “Next to Gauguin,” “Vesoul” (word-play about familiar marital spats), “Rosa” (a schoolboy’s inclination to love in Latin declinations), the humorous “Comment Tuer L’Amant de Sa Femme” (“How to Kill Your Wife’s Lover”), “La Chanson Des Vieux Amants” (“The Old Lovers’ Song”) and the nostalgic “Mon Pere Disait” (“My Father Used to Say”).

That doesn’t make it all good news, however. Harrison’s interpretation of the Brel is low energy communion and catharsis. Often too low. And the device he has chosen for speaking and singing to us is at the very least cumbersome: memories triggered by receipt of a packet of letters written to a deceased friend and returned by another.

This opens the floodgates of reminiscence, yes, but also requires too much moving to the small desk in the dark, disheveled room, folding and unfolding of letters, putting on and taking off spectacles, which mostly interrupts the stream of consciousness.

The set, lights and direction go uncredited, suggesting that Harrison did them all himself. At some loss. Because as penetrating as the piece can be, it also feels a bit scruffy and untended. It is one thing to wander through another artist’s soul, illuminating both the explorer and the explored, and it is another to give the journey coherence (as opposed to slickness). A better grip on what’s there would produce louder reverberations.

At 1713 N. Cahuenga Blvd., Thursdays and Fridays, 8 p.m. until Dec. 22. Tickets: $13; (213) 871-0210.

Late-Night Pipeline Series --Neuroses With a Grin

“Two Heads” at the Saxon Lee Gallery is another in the Pipeline company’s late-night series that can accommodate short, offbeat performance fragments for a dedicated crowd. In “The Night Driver,” Scott Kelman serves up a dramatization of a delicious Italo Calvino treatise on the neuroses of love, as a man races along the autostrada towards the woman he wants to leave but isn’t quite ready to surrender.

It is a hilarious exploration of the complex permutations of the event, subtly paralleled by the hostile automotive environment and humorously underscored by Jay Green’s music and sound effects. The whole affair is beautifully suited to performance, but Kelman will have to shed his New Yorkish colloquialisms for us to accept him as an urbane, complicated and terminally self-tortured Italian.

There is no lack of self-torture in “Help Me Out of This Head With Peter Bergman,” which constitutes the second half of this bill. Bergman is a certifiable zany, erstwhile with the sorely missed Firesign Theatre, and his Woody Allenish lament on the fate of the Earth and its inhabitants, especially one Peter Bergman, is not new but enduringly funny and perpetually updated.

At 7525 Beverly Blvd., Saturdays, 10:30 p.m., until Dec. 16 (No performance Nov. 25). Tickets: $12; (213) 933-5282 or 629-2205.