Tom Tangney cleans up and goes to the theater

Seattle’s three principal theatres – Seattle Rep, ACT Theatre, and the 5th Avenue – are all staging off-beat musicals this month.

The Rep just opened the world premiere of “Lizard Boy,” a musical about a young man trying to make his way in the world with full-on scales. And ACT and the 5th Avenue are collaborating on a revival of a nearly 50-year-old musical revue, “Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris.” Both are worth seeing, for almost opposite reasons.

The Jacques Brel show was a huge off-Broadway hit in 1968. Brel was an obscure Belgian troubadour when a couple of American fans translated his songs into English and turned them into a theatre piece.

There’s no dialogue and no storyline – just a series of unrelated songs, about topics big and small, like love, heartbreak, life, death, and war.

“Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris” ran for four years in New York, spawned a hit album, and had artists as varied as Frank Sinatra, Glen Campbell, Judy Collins, and David Bowie cover some of its songs.

Here’s a quick sample of a song called “Mathilde,” about a young man who finds out the woman who broke his heart is back…

That’s Eric Ankrim, one of the five members of this Seattle cast. The three men and two women all have terrific and very distinctive voices that manage to capture and convey the wit, melancholy, and nuance of Brel’s works. (This may be heresy but I prefer this cast’s singing to the original cast album!)

This revival, now playing at ACT Theatre, is a fast-moving and polished 2-hour show that doesn’t feel dated in the least. Credit for that goes to both 5th Avenue director David Armstrong and Jacques Brel, of course.

If the Jacques Brel show is a polished revival, the Rep’s “Lizard Boy” is a refreshingly raw work-in-progress. A couple of years ago, the Rep commissioned local singer/songwriter and cellist Justin Huertas to create and star in a musical. The result is “Lizard Boy,” an odd show about a gay man who finds living in comic book fantasies easier than real life. It plays like an amalgamation of the musical film “Once,” the Sam Shepard play “The Tooth of Crime,” and a dash of Broadway’s “Spiderman.” Full of local references like the Space Needle, Point Defiance, and Starbucks, “Lizard Boy” has a strong autobiographical feel.

It’s a little too earnest for its own good, and our hero’s lizard skin is too obvious a metaphor for being different. But the music is appealing and catchy. Like with most brand new musicals, I suspect “Lizard Boy” will go through many transformations before it settles. I’m happy to have witnessed its birth but I’m curious what it will become.