Diana Grasselli came to the Twin Cities to visit friends for a weekend and has stayed for 17 years.
When she arrived, the singer and teacher was “looking for a place that was cultural but more manageable and friendlier” than New York, where she lived. She found that here. In fact, that weekend she met two of the people (Bradley Greenwald and Dan Chouinard) she’s working with 17 years later on the new show, “Jacques Brel: When We Have Only Love.”
Grasselli describes the show as a “musical chronicle” that explores the life and career of Belgian singer-songwriter Brel, famous for songs such as “If You Go Away” and “Seasons in the Sun.” It features three singers (Grasselli, Greenwald and Prudence Johnson) and three musicians (Chouinard, Michelle Kinney and Tim Sparks).
“We did a show last year of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht, and it was such a success that we took it to Open Eye Theatre,” Grasselli recalls. “Then they said, ‘Would you like to do another program, maybe something French?’ So we batted around a few ideas, and I started to fall madly in love with Brel’s material.”
The show combines songs (in English and French), commentary and a power-point presentation by Greenwald.
“It’s so much fun!” Grasselli enthuses about the 80-minute show. “We’ve tried to express as much as we could of the complexity and variety of Brel’s work. I think audiences will be really inspired by the contradictions and the beauty of his life and his work.”
“When We Have Only Love” has been inspiring for Grasselli because it gives her a chance to perform. Her career began in performance: As part of Desmond Child and Rouge, she had a hit in the ’70s with “Our Love is Insane,” she appeared on Broadway in “Gilda Radner: Live From New York” and she sang with artists including Cher, Meatloaf and Dionne Warwick. But she has been performing less in recent years as her focus shifted to teaching voice at Chanson Voice and Music Academy, the St. Paul music school she founded soon after arriving in Minnesota.
The school has 250 students, about half of whom plan to pursue musical careers and about half of whom just take classes for the love of music.
“In the next few years, I will be putting more energy and time into my own performance career, I think,” says Grasselli, who says teaching and singing inform each other. “There’s this wonderful old saying: ‘If you want to learn something, study it. If you want to master it, teach it.’ I think that’s very true. A lot of times, you don’t know what you know until you have to try to show someone else how to do it.”
As Grasselli’s answers to our 10 questions reveal, she still has a lot to learn — and teach:
Q. What’s the best thing about your job?
A. As a teacher, it’s watching people grow and find their joy and strength and love for what they do. As a singer, it’s finding out these things about myself and about the material I’m doing — and then helping the audience find those things about themselves.
Q. What’s your motto?
A. I believe that everything that exists, and everything beyond existence, is because of love.
Q. What would you do if you had a million dollars?
A. Hire a fabulous, creative person to run my school and publish my book about my vocal method, “The Vertical Voice Vocal Training Method.” And I would buy a little house in, probably, southwestern France.
Q. Where is your favorite place to be?
A. France and Italy
Q. Who would play you in a movie?
A. I guess it depends on how old I am in the movie. Two people come to mind, just because of similarity in our face shapes: Jane Seymour and Meryl Streep.
Q. What’s the scariest thing you’ve ever done?
A. I’m kind of a daredevil, so I do things even though they’re scary. Physically, I climbed a volcano in Dominica. It was a rainforest, so the slopes were 90-degree slopes and it was wet and muddy. I had to depend on this young guide, literally, for my life several times on these gigantically high precipices.
Q. What are you thinking when you’re about to begin a performance?
A. Most people don’t realize it but, when they get stage fright or are nervous, they hold their breath. It’s a natural instinct when we’re in fight-or-flight states because it helps save us, but breathing relaxes you. So I think about moving air out of my body and then I think about the show and its dynamics. I guess I visualize perfection.
Q. When did you know you wanted to be a performer?
A. I started doing music in preschool. My father was a musician, so I got a chance to do music with him when I was young and I was fortunate enough to be placed in a wonderful children’s choir at 5 — my mother found this great church in Florida, where we lived at the time. When I went to college, I didn’t have any thought about what I’d do but I took classes in what I loved, which happened to be music and theater. My first collaborator, Desmond Child, he and I met in college our freshman year and we started doing recordings and things and then moved to New York and got signed to Capitol Records.
Q. What was your first job?
A. Besides the usual babysitting, my first job was in an ice cream parlor, a little turn-of-the-century place with these old-fashioned ice cream sundaes. I remember the jukebox was playing five songs all the time; “Brandy” played so many times I wanted to shoot myself.
Q. Who do you admire most?
A. Barack Obama. Denzel Washington. I admire courage and honesty and vulnerability.
Chris Hewitt can be reached at 651-228-5552. Follow him on twitter.com/ChrisHMovie.
IF YOU GO
What: “Jacques Brel: When We Have Only Love”
When: Through June 21
Where: Open Eye Figure Theatre, 506 E. 24th St., Mpls.
Tickets: $25-$22, 612-874-6338 or openeyetheatre.org.
