Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris (Charing Cross Theatre)

The title of this 1968 show places Brel in the French capital rather than Brussels – reasonably enough since Paris was where he made his career – and suggests a dramatic element that the evening itself does not deliver. For Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris is a compilation pure and simple: a hook on which to hang 28 of his best songs.

Using translations by Brel’s Paris-based American friend Mort Shuman and co-created with him for the stage by Eric Blau, the songs are grouped into rough thematic clusters such as war or death; but it’s a necessarily loose fit. Many of Shuman’s translations are faithful to the original lyrics but others, like the untranslatable (and almost unsingable) "La Valse à mille temps" – here called "Carousel" – are reconstructed for English. Anyone with a passing acquaintance of Brel will know at least a handful of the numbers, if only in recordings by Scott Walker or David Bowie.

'a worthwhile revival of a half-forgotten show'

Eve Polycarpou, who of the four Charing Cross Theatre performers has the most apt voice for the chanson idiom, takes on Brel’s signature song "Ne me quitte pas" in the original French – doubtless because its regular translation as "If You Go Away" was by another hand. It’s a great number in any language, despite Polycarpou's dodgy French vowels (would an hour with a pronunciation coach have stretched the budget?), but director Andrew Keates‘s staging of it is one of several misjudgements in his fitfully entertaining production. He has it delivered as though by a busker on the Underground, which is the last place such an interior song would ever work. It's a notion, moreover, that dislocates the singer from Brel’s aching poem of pain and love.

If Keates's attempts to make theatre from the songs sometimes misfire, at least the players give it their all. Two of today’s brightest musical theatre talents, Gina Beck and Daniel Boys, run through as many costume changes as songs as they shoulder much of the hard work, while David Burt‘s lived-in voice makes for evocative renditions of dissolute classics like "Jackie" and "Amsterdam".

On balance, then, it's a worthwhile revival of a half-forgotten show. Dean Austin‘s five-piece band is tight, Sam Spencer Lane‘s choreography is a delight and Brel’s songs are timeless wonders. Most of all, for the English-speaking world it keeps the torch alive.