View from the Green Room: The day of the Jack L
Jack Lukeman performed at the Theatre Royal.
A packed Theatre Royal is buzzin’ with kidults. The wish-they-were-thirty-somethin’s who started a love affair with Jack Lukeman around the turn of the millennium and have never stopped loving Jack’s anarchic brand of singing.
The keyboard and drums begin to pound out the beat, the audience are on their feet and the Mall is throbbin’. Clappin’…foot-stompin’…cheering. And then through the yellow smoke that hangs in the stage frame, it’s Jack.
Inky black suit with a red tie topped off with his trademark soft red-brimmed hat, he enters with a loud hailer and Jacques Brel’s ‘Jackie’ and I’m in heaven. My favourite songwriter and wordsmith Jacques Brel and his finest interpreter Jack Lukeman. All in the one room for two hours of magic.
When Jack belts out Jackie’s wish "to be cute, cute, cute in a stupid-ass way…if only for an hour", the audience identifies with Brel’s anti-hero’s desire to be loved. It’s an immediate bond between singer and watcher that goes way beyond audience. We’re all part of the Jack’s world now. Intimates…chez Jack…at the house of Jack L.
Jack’s gaffe is a dimly-lit, smoky-red, sawdust-floored, Parisian café with oyster-shelled-ashtrays and a single bottle of Merlot with one glass. A red artisan handkerchief serves as a matador’s cape as song titles and writers appear as ghostly apparitions on the back wall of the stage.
Jack captures all the misfortunes that unite us as human beings in Brel’s ‘Sons’… "where is the child with no complaint?"
He’s singing Cohen now and you know it’s a meeting of poetic minds. "Dance me to the end of love," he promises in a danse macabre that hunts down love because love denied blights the soul we owe to God.
He leans on the ‘luvvve’ to give it that edge of finality then off, wine bottle in hand, with Bertolt Brecht's ‘Alabama Song' from his 1930 opera ‘Rise and Fall of the City of Mahogany’ that’s been recorded by the Doors and David Bowie.
When he reaches Brel’s wonderful ‘Port of Amsterdam’, he’s atop his bar table in a pool of blood wine light like a prophet communing with the Infinite. Tales of drunken-down fights, whiskey-driven rendezvous with Amsterdam’s ladies of the night and "the sailor who only eats fish heads and tails" tumble out like discarded rumours. A plaintive ‘Georgie Ho Ho’ calms everyone down. Somewhat. Before ‘Paint it Black’ from the Stones brings the house down and sends us out into the night.
Jack always brings Epiphany Night and I’m guessing a lot of this middle-aged audience have experienced epiphanies on their journeys with Jack Lukeman. Lukeman touches something deep within this audience’s soul and that’s why they pack out the Royal every winter. He’s got excellent diction, an extraordinary vocal range, a layered individual voice that fills every seat in the theatre (when you’re allowed to sit in it as Jack demands involvement - you’re not simply there to enjoy yourself, you know - and a firm grasp of his short, tall tales.
When he sings, the audience always gets it. It’s what sets him apart. When Jack becomes confidential, the audience lean forward; there is no part of the stage that he does not inhabit. The theatre is his space; we are his intimates.
Everything about Lukeman is theatre. The smoke hanging in the air, the Parisian-café bluesy underground stage and Jack’s journey filling the rear wall projection. His band is a power-house, thumping out a base, pounding, primal drone of noise. The shades, the theatrical angular gestures, the scattering of magic as he walks to the apron of the stage, and the hat that sometimes hangs over the mike. This is one foot on the piano stuff as he soaks up the applause and is battery-charged by the noise. Neutron Man.
It’s the day of the Jack L.
