June 11, 2013
The GazetteJune 7, 2013
By Pat Donnelly
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MONTREAL — The Dora Wasserman Yiddish Theatre isn’t just about preservation of a language, it’s about creating new work — like the coming musical Tales from Odessa, adapted from the stories of Isaak Babel by Derek Goldman, with music and lyrics by Josh Dolgin (a.k.a. Socalled).
Goldman, a noted American theatre director/playwright visited the Segal Centre last year with a show he had directed, Sholom Aleichem: Laughter Through Tears, starring Theodore Bikel.
Goldman got acquainted with Dolgin when he was brought in as that show’s musical director. At the time, Dolgin was already composing the music for the Babel project, having been asked by the Segal Centre’s artistic producer, Paul Flicker, to come up with a musical for the Yiddish company. Flicker had seen and enjoyed Dolgin’s previous musical, The Season, about forest creatures trying to survive hunting season. (It premièred at Pop Montréal in 2011.)
Later, Flicker made Goldman an offer he couldn’t refuse: to write the adaptation of Isaak Babel’s Tales from Odessa for Dolgin’s musical. At first, Goldman was a little concerned that he wouldn’t be able to pull it off: “My Yiddish is spotty at best,” he admitted this week, talking on his cellphone from the Albuquerque, N.M., airport, on his way to a theatre conference in Dallas, Texas.
Goldman, the artistic director of the Davis Performing Arts Center and of the department of theatre and performance studies at Georgetown University and the founder of the Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics, is a busy guy who has written or adapted at least 25 plays and directed 80 productions.
But he said yes to the Tales from Odessa project. “I delivered an English script,” he explained, “which was then translated into Yiddish.” This was done by another American professor, Columbia University’s Miriam Hoffman, who won a Tony Award in 1992 for her Yiddish translation of The Sunshine Boys by Neil Simon.
Goldman said he found the whole process quite fascinating. Since he wasn’t able to read Babel’s stories in their original Russian, he used several English translations as references. “So I’m reading English translations, then adapting it into an English script, which is being translated into Yiddish, but the show will also have English (and French) subtitles. It’s a bit of a hall of mirrors of languages.”
Goldman has been keeping in touch with Dolgin and the company, but not directly with Hoffman. “I was in Montreal for a couple of days early in the rehearsal process. Those were very productive days.”
He brought a draft of the script with him. But after meeting the team and getting first-hand information about the production, he was able to do “a pretty radically revised script” for them.
“Since then, we’re back and forth quite regularly, myself and Josh, as well as Audrey (Finkelstein, the show’s director), about little tweaks and changes and ideas,” Goldman said. “But they’re working pretty much within the framework of the draft of the script that I generated after my visit to Montreal.”
As someone already acquainted with the music of Socalled, he said he was excited by the way that so much of the composer’s work “trades on this kind of exciting collision between the old and the new.”
Goldman said he had been familiar with the work of Isaak Babel before being asked to do the project. But he had to brush up on his Eastern European literature (he had already adapted Dostoyevsky and Kafka) and immerse himself in Babel’s writings to do Tales from Odessa.
Babel, who was executed under the Stalin regime for being “a spy and Trotskyist terrorist” in 1940 at the age of 45, is an iconic but controversial figure in Jewish world literature. His Tales from Odessa is a collection of short stories about Jewish gangsters and gamblers in Moldavanka, a ghetto in the city of Odessa in Ukraine. Most of the stories feature a head mobster named Benya Krik. Not everyone in the Jewish community was happy with Babel’s unsparing portrayals of his own people. (In some ways, he was a Mordecai Richler before his time.)
Babel’s stories seem “very raw and fresh,” Goldman said. “This is not the sepia-toned nostalgic world that we sometimes identify with Yiddish theatre works. Or a loving throwback. This is raw, raucously funny, appetite-infused kind of work. It’s gangster material. That was very exciting to me, because we don’t often think of our Jewish legacy as being saturated with these kinds of stories. They’re action-driven, very raw and elemental, and I was attracted to that.”
In Tales from Odessa, actor Gab Desmond, who recently took over the lead in Sherlock Holmes at the Segal Centre when movie star Jay Baruchel skipped out on five performances to do film retakes, will portray gangster boss Krik. Montreal jazz musician Damian Nisenson will play Krik’s father, Mendel. They will be backed up by a cast of at least 30 actors and singers, plus shadow puppeteer Clea Minaker. Music will be provided by a seven-piece Klezmer band. The set has been designed by John C. Dinning, as usual.
Tales From Oddessa runs June 16 to July 7 at the Segal Centre, 5170 Côte Ste. Catherine Rd. Tickets, $24 to $46. Call: 514-739-7944 or visit www.segalcentre.org.