Miranda Musical Society show attracts theatre legend Geraldine Turner

The society’s patron Geraldine Turner will direct their production of ‘Jacques Brel is alive and well and living in Paris’ which opens at the Sutherland Memorial School of Arts on June 17.

To further enhance the local feel, the entire cast as well as the show’s musical director, Mark Cranston Reid, are all from the St George district and Sutherland Shire areas.

Turner, who received an Order of Australia medal for services to the arts in 1988, is well-known across Australian stage and screen in a career that spans five decades.

As well as her stunning stage career that has included roles in Sweeney Todd, Into the Woods, Oliver! and the original Australian cast of Chicago, Turner starred in the 1983 AFI Award winning Careful, He Might Hear You and enjoys a recurring role on hit television series House Husbands. 

Turner has now turned to directing Jacques Brel, a musical revue of the songs of the late Belgian singer, songwriter and actor.

Brel was part of the French-language art-song movement that reached its peak of international popularity in the 1950s and ’60s, led by such revered performers as Edith Piaf, Charles Aznavour and Yves Montand.

Brel too was beloved in his adopted home of Paris, and around the globe.

But the riveting performer and prolific songwriter was an individualist, whose music ranges from the rhapsodically romantic to the caustically political.

A born storyteller, his odes are often compressed mini-dramas and often mused in a world-weary but uncynical fashion on the rapture and agony of love.

But he also addresses the madness and waste of war – both world wars, and the French and US military wars in Vietnam. 

Brel’s fever-grade ballads about love’s vagaries have been widely covered by artists from Judy Collins and Frank Sinatra to David Bowie.

The show is an intoxicating musical revue that is naughty, funny, dark and romantic.

Over half a century after they were written, the songs are said to retain all of their edgy vibe.

While the show is still lauded as a must-see for fans of musical theatre.

Tickets are available online at mirandamusicalsociety.com.au or by phoning 8814 5827.