Review: JOHN & JEN at La Grange at Bruxellons!

Every summer, Festival Bruxellons! stages its big, brassy Broadway title in the open-air arena of the Château du Karreveld — this year Kinky Boots, next year Jekyll & Hyde — but tucked inside the château's own barn, La Grange has quietly built its own, very different tradition: a smaller, more intimate second show, closer in spirit to off-Broadway than to Broadway itself. John & Jen, Andrew Lippa and Tom Greenwald's two-hander, is about as perfect a fit for that mission as the festival could have chosen. Lippa composed the show early in his career — it premiered at the Goodspeed Opera House in 1993 before an Off-Broadway run in 1995, and returned Off-Broadway again in a revised 2015 production — and its scale (two actors, three onstage musicians, one relationship stretched across four decades) suits La Grange's close quarters in a way the courtyard's big ensemble musicals never could.

The show is built in two halves that mirror each other with real precision. The first act follows the fierce, protective bond between Jen and her younger brother John, growing up in the shadow of a violent father in 1950s America; the second jumps forward some thirty years to Jen as a mother, raising a son she has also named John, and watching herself unconsciously recreate the very relationship — and the very mistakes — of the sibling she lost. It's a structural device that could easily read as gimmicky, but here it does something genuinely worthwhile: it makes the case, without ever announcing itself as doing so, that a musical can carry the same weight of psychological complexity as a play or a novel. This is Next to Normal and Jagged Little Pill territory — contemporary musical theatre using the form not to decorate a story but to excavate one — and John & Jen holds its own in that company.

Lippa's score serves that ambition by all but disappearing into it. The show is close to sung-through, and deliberately so: there's barely a moment where a number announces itself as A Song rather than simply the next beat of the conversation. Taken out of context, little of it would register as instantly hummable or built for a cast recording; heard as intended, inside the story, it's exactly the right kind of music — unshowy, emotionally exact, and structured to serve the scene rather than interrupt it for applause. Guillaume Nozach's staging matches that instinct: his set is deliberately cluttered, a jumble of accumulated domestic objects that never quite gets tidied away, a physical correlative for two people who can't fully clear out the emotional debris of their shared history either. Nozach, whose own body of work runs largely through French operetta — he founded the Zolibrius company and has staged several Offenbach revivals, including a prize-winning Monsieur Choufleuri at the 2016 Avignon Fringe, alongside more recent work at the Grand Théâtre d'Angers — has spoken about wanting the piece to land on something ultimately hopeful, audiences leaving, in his words, wanting to call the people they love. That's precisely the note the production hits.

It helps enormously that both halves of the two-hander are so capable. Marion Preite's Jen carries the show's emotional throughline from teenager to mother without a single false note — a performer whose own credits include a Trophée de la Comédie Musicale for Best Female Newcomer for Comédiens!, and a run in Les Aventures de Tom Sawyer at the Théâtre Mogador. Loaï Rahman, trained at the Studio International Vanina Mareschal and previously seen in the Evita repertoire and at Disneyland Paris, plays both John and, in the second act, Jen's son with enough differentiation between the two that the doubling never confuses, even as the show is explicitly asking the audience to see the echo between them. Musical director Arnaud Tibère leads the three-piece band — himself on piano alongside Simon Drachman on percussion and Eline Duerinck on cello — from an arrangement that stays as unobtrusive and well-judged as the songs it's serving, while Sophie Hazebrouck's scenography, Dimitri Shumelinsky's costumes, Vincent Debongnies' sound and Nicolas Fauchet's lighting all work in the same register: nothing here is reaching for spectacle, because spectacle was never the point.

It's a modest show by design, and Bruxellons is right to have found a home for it apart from the courtyard's bigger titles. But modest doesn't mean minor: John & Jen is a quiet, well-argued reminder that musical theatre doesn't have to choose between depth and tunefulness, and this production honours that argument in full.

Recevez l'actualité de Broadway sur WhatsApp

Recevez les dernières mises à jour, les nouvelles de dernière minute et une couverture exclusive directement dans l’application.