Daniel Smith is associate professor of theatre studies at Michigan State University and, in Spring 2025, Martha Daniel Newell Visiting Scholar at Georgia College and State University. He is a professional dramaturg and a specialist of French-language theatre and theatre translation.

The 1968 Off-Broadway hit Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris had a long afterlife with numerous revivals and a film version. But the musical currently exists in a state of suspended animation because the Brussels-based Brel Foundation (managed by Brel’s daughter France Brel) has not granted rights for productions since 2017. This talk will explore the complicated cultural exchange in which translator Eric Blau and adaptor/performer Mort Shuman used localization to make Brel’s songs legible to an American audience, while creating a fantasy of Frenchness and maintaining some aspects of Brel’s Franco-Belgian identity.