Refugee romance blossoms through musical comedy

Canadian folk musician Ben Caplan plays the ‘wandering Jew’ narrator.Credit:Fadi Acra

MUSICAL
OLD STOCK: A REFUGEE LOVE STORY ★★★★
Arts Centre Melbourne, until February 2

It was Holocaust Remembrance Day last Sunday and we shouldn't forget that the horror of the Nazis sprang from a long history of violent anti-Semitism. Pogroms in eastern Europe in the early 20th century prompted an exodus of Jewish refugees, many settling in the New World.

Musical theatre might seem an unlikely choice to portray such subject matter – at least until you remember the enduring popularity of Fiddler on the Roof.

This boutique musical from Canada is set in the same decade, but is less stippled with nostalgia and finds a finer balance between looking forward and glancing back than its Broadway cousin does.

Dani Oore and Mary Fay Coady.Credit:Prudence Upton

The show follows an unorthodox romance between two Romanian Jews, Chaim (Dani Oore) and Chaya (Mary Fay Coady), who escape persecution in their homeland, disembarking on Canadian shores in 1905 where the trauma of the past lingers, before yielding to life in a new land.

But the star of the show is Ben Caplan, playing a larger-than-life “wandering Jew” narrator. He’s an extraordinarily gifted performer – with vocal thunder, lightning-fast comic delivery and a beard any man might envy, who sings up an electrifying storm that encapsulates the immense vitality of Jewish culture and its adaptability.

You’ll hear the strict conjugal duties prescribed in the Torah, jauntily sung, but also a subversive patter-song that looks behind the stark commandments of the Bible to allow for the vicissitudes and complexities of life in the real world.

Ben Caplan sings up an electrifying storm that encapsulates the immense vitality of Jewish culture.

Black wit and gallows humour leaven the heartache; one Jewish lullaby goes something like “You’re cold. You’re hungry. You’ll probably starve. Go to sleep”. And the neo-klezmer band, which plays from inside a shipping container, lets loose a frenzied torrent of laughter and tears on violin (Coady), accordion and keyboard (Graham Scott), drums (Jamie Kronick) and woodwind (Oore).

Between the lively songs and sharp lyrics, the finely worked comedy and the call for compassion – Australia’s own treatment of refugees who arrive by boat, let’s not forget, is a source of national shame – it’s a rousing, poignant and often darkly funny evening of entertainment.

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