Lonesome Losers of the Night

RAISING THE BAR Lamb lifts Losers’ spirits.

Photo: David Heimann

A few years ago, not long after Theo Ubique’s enchanting A Jacques Brel Revue: Songs of Love and War, the company took down a wall between its resident space, No Exit Cafe, and its neighboring Rogers Park storefront. With the addition came a few extra seats, but also a loss: A tiny café befitting the company’s cabaret aesthetic became a sorta café-theater, not quite either. In revisiting the unique Belgian tunesmith, Anzevino and Johnston have tried to dismantle the wall between musical revue and musical. Caught between the two, Lonesome Losers doesn’t fully live in either place.

In Love and War, the performers simply interpreted Brel songs, which thus resonated with one another in oblique, powerful ways. Here, with a forced narrative frame—in 1959 Amsterdam, two soldiers form a love triangle with a prostitute—the actors must fit (and reduce) each tune to that rudimentary structure. The song “Jef,” in which a guy tries to cheer up his brokenhearted pal, enthralled us when we didn’t completely know—and so had to imagine—the friend’s back story. It doesn’t when that story, as presented here, limits rather than illuminates: He can’t get over the hooker he only just met. “Ne Me Quitte Pas” soared when a gifted singer channeled it; the forsaken-lover classic barely glides when it’s rendered, strangely, a duet. (It ain’t really a song of loss if the lost love object is right there.) A talented trio of male crooners creates some very lovely music, yet in attempting more than cabaret, Lonesome Losers has achieved something less.