Dispatches from Israel 20

by Helen Kaye

[My friend Helen Kaye has been sending me articles and reviews from her work on the theater and culture desk at the Jerusalem Post since 2010 (“Help! It’s August: Kid-Friendly Summer Festivals in Israel,” posted on Rick On Theater  on 12 September), just under a year-and-a-half after I started the blog.  Her first “Dispatches from Israel” was posted on 23 January 2013, a little more than seven years ago.  Below is “Dispatches from Israel 20,” the latest in Helen’s line of 23 posts on ROT.

[I’m always glad to post Helen’s reviews from the JP because, first, it’s a window into the theater world of another society, and, second, I get to bring another voice to ROTters aside from my own.  Furthermore, when I read Helen’s JP reviews, for which she’s allowed very few words—I marvel at how clear she is in so little space, while I go on for pages and pages to no more effect and probably less.

[So here, once again (and not for the last time, I fervently hope), is Helen Kaye on the current Israeli theater scene.] 

Spring Awakening

By Frank Wedekind

Translated by Ido Riklin

Directed by Moshe Kepten

Habima Theater, Tel Aviv; 13 January 2020

These 14-year-old kids are dirt-ignorant about their physical selves. It’s not their fault but that of the society in which they live; that late 19th century German society that lays a God-mandated taboo on any discussion of the body, let alone reproduction, that makes a near-sacred virtue of obedience to parental or other authority, that enshrines repression as a virtue.

Wedekind’s Spring Awakening (1891/2), aptly subtitled A Children’s Tragedy, lays out the dire consequences in all their awful detail. Moshe Kepten’s unsentimental, spare production shows us these with restraint, compassion and love. This is a reverberant Spring Awakening that leaves us with the apprehension that our own teens, even though the knowledge of human reproduction is no longer proscribed, must also come to terms with bodies that are undergoing the (always) fraught transition from childhood to grown-up.

“One more summer of childhood,”  Wendla Bergman (Amit Farkash) begs her mother (Miki Peleg), who wants to put her in long dresses as a sign she’s growing up, but it’s not to be. “Tell me how babies come into the world,” she entreats but Mrs Bergman, as quashed, alas, as her child, literally cannot. Even after school-idol Melchior (Nadir Eldar) rapes her (he really, really didn’t mean to), she has no idea what’s happened, a letter he writes her leads to Melchior’s incarceration in a merciless reform school, and a botched abortion later kills her.

The sexual yearnings (unidentified of course), assailing Moritz (Sheffi Marciano), his father’s (Gil Frank) unachievable expectations, physical and verbal abuse, are too much for him and he commits suicide. The Utterly Depraved Forbidden feelings battering Ernst (Kobi Marimi) turn him upside-down; he’s caged, outside, yet sings of another world, one that will allow him to be gay, to be who he is without shame.

And yes, there are songs in this production. The melodies are by Ohad Hitman, the lyrics are by Noam Horev, and their purpose (achieved), is to complement and enrich the action, not to turn the play into a musical. Moreover they are sung wonderfully by Ernst, by Martha (Roni Dalumi) whose powerful “My Own Child” vows that he will grow up free of the verbal, physical and sexual abuse she is suffering, by Wendla and some of the others.

And so it goes. The times they live in bruise and maim these children, and if it all seems a tad over the top, it must be remembered that the play anticipates German Expressionism – an emotionally subjective movement.

The acting is uniformly excellent. You never feel that the adult actors who are playing these luckless children are talking down to their characters, whom each has made special. For instance, Shahar Raz, who plays Hansy – the school sneak – has invested him with a delicious snigger.

Some of the adult roles are deliberate caricatures, such as Frau Knochenbruch (Ruth Landau) or Herr Sonnenstich (Rotem Kenan), the names themselves deliberate parodies, while the others, such of those as Peleg and Frank, are cast rigidly in the mold of their time.

Eran Atzmon’s set comprises 10 chairs, a carpet of dead leaves and a ‘stone/wood cage’ that turns (literally) into a variously lighted (Avi Yona Bueno) arena – a boxing ‘ring’ turned on edge – for many of the variously venued events. To this must be added Guy Rotem’s rich video art that also enhances what’s happening.

Habima’s Spring Awakening? Theater at its most rewarding.

[Wedekind’s Spring Awakening [Frühlings Erwachen] is the source of the rock musical of the same title with book and lyrics by Steven Sater and music by Duncan Sheik that ran on Broadway   Conceived in the late 1990s, it went through various workshops, concerts, and rewrites to open at the Eugene O'Neill Theatre on 10 December 2006; the production closed on 18 January 2009 after 859 performances and 29 previews, winning eight 2007 Tonys (including Best Musical), plus 14 other Broadway and Off-Broadway awards.].

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The Wanderers

By Anna Ziegler

Translated by Roy Chen

Directed by Amir I. Wolf

Gesher Theater, Tel Aviv; 28 January 2020

What makes us tick? Why do we do what we do? How come we’re at once transparent and opaque? Can we really say of somebody “I know you”? Aren’t there things we keep to ourselves, deep within the crannies of the heart? The Wanderers Anna Ziegler’s very accomplished, tightly knit Chinese puzzle box of a play takes a step or two toward telling us because in its essence Wanderers is a play about love, about intimacy, about levels of intimacy among two seemingly disparate sets of people. Among us all therefore?

We meet Ultra Orthodox couple Esther (Tali Osadchy) and Shmuli (Henry David) just after their arranged marriage. Each is holding one end of a black ribbon (the ties that bind?). They have not yet consummated their marriage. We meet Ultra Secular Sophie (Netta Shpiegelman) and Abe (Shlomi Bertonov) at a perilous moment in their not unfraught marriage. Both are celebrity authors. Then Abe’s initially impulsive online flirtation with glamorous movie star Julia Cheever (Lena Freifeld) pushes itself between them.

What subsequently occurs takes place on Michael Kramenko’s admirable set of ramps and screens under Karen Granek’s elusive, evocative lighting, as the connections among these five people slowly emerge.

Mr. Wolf has directed his actors as if in a series of screen close-ups, and they have responded with passionate, precisely nuanced performances that receive the audience’s absolute, totally focused attention.

“When I left Brooklyn, I thought I’d broken through the fence,” says Esther to Shmuli at once point, “but I find it’s inside me.” Osadchy’s Esther is multi-dimensional, at once fearful and courageous, pliant and adamant, hesitant and determined. As Shmuli, David is both a devout and unbending adherent of his traditions, yet willy-nilly starts to question them because he loves, and to him that love is holy. Bertonov’s Abe (Bertonov also wrote the music for the play), runs the gamut from near abject fear to brashness, as he strives to communicate, to acknowledge his heart. “Of course I hide things from myself,” he says to Sophie, whom Shpiegelman portrays with humor, guts, confidence and lack of it. Freifeld’s sensual Julia is part real, part goddess, part illusion.

This thoughtful, very excellent The Wanderers is a treat – perhaps a signpost – for the eyes and the heart.

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Gently

By Shiri Nadav Naor

Directed by Moshe Naor

Lyrics by Shaanan Streett

Score by Amir Lekner

Choreography by Tom Appelbaum

Haifa Theater, Haifa; 29 January 2020

There is a deliberate irony – not forgetting the title – to  this appealing, sometimes raucous, sometimes tender, always entertaining, often hard-hitting musical, not least in its (unintentional, I’m sure), stars. They are the comic relief of Adam Hirsch and Ashot Gasparian as a couple of lazy, benighted, racist cops who have some nifty musical numbers as they bedevil, torment and generally harass the poor and black refugees of Gently. Another irony is that (mainly) Ethiopian Jewish actor/singers, themselves the targets of local cops, and whose Jewishness the all-white Rabbinate questions, are portraying African refugees whom nobody wants in a country built upon the ashes of the Jewish Holocaust so that Jews might avoid persecution by having a place to call their own.

The musical’s title is the name of an intinerant musician, the very charismatic Gili Yalo who charms his way through the character of Malachi Gently. The elegant and classy Esther Rada plays his wife Miriam who has recently been delivered of a white baby – the actual delivery scene being a very effective company number to the Hebrew translation of “Amazing Grace”. When the cops see the white baby, they arrest Miriam – she sings the bitter, hard-edged “Just Shut Up” to help her keep her mouth shut and thus avoid a beating. In desperation Malachi turns to Yaron Brovinsky who has a tour de force of his own, keeping his foot permanently in his trying-to-be PC mouth as he plays TV celeb Michael Fried, whose cleaning lady Miriam is. Fried’s intervention does the trick, Miriam and baby are released, and in gratitude Malachi invites him to dinner. Wouldn’t you know that the cops turn up there too – and things go disastrously wrong.

But you can’t have a musical that ends in tragedy, so for the finale the whole company joins in the Hebrew version of “I wish I knew how it feels to be free” by Billy Taylor and Richard Carroll Lamb that was the anthem of the Civil Rights Movement

Lily Ben Nachshon’s outrageous set of pylons, electronic billboards and skyscrapers behind a scrim is perfectly an urban grimscape. Yuval Kaspin’s costumes are ingenious, often glitzy to vulgar, and therefore wonderful, the songs tell their own story, properly complementing the plot, Bambi’s lighting zings along, the singing by both principals and the group called Liberation is top-notch, and if the choreography is prosaic, it doesn’t matter because – bottom line – Mr. Naor has given us not only a humdinger of a production but also something to think about.

Dispatches From Israel 3

by Helen Kaye

[My friend Helen in Tel Aviv, who, ROT readers will recall, reviews for the Jerusalem Post, has sent me three recent notices from October.  Two are classic plays, Jaroslav Hasek’s The Good Soldier Svejk (sometimes spelled “Schweik,” 1923) and Bertolt Bredht’s Mother Courage (1939), and a recent play that was here in New York City in 2012, One Man, Two Guvnors (which opened in London’s West End in March 2012 and is still running there), an adaptation of another classic play, Carlo Goldoni’s Servant of Two Masters (1743).  I’ll let you read her assessments of the Israeli productions of these plays, which were presented in various theaters in Tel Aviv, but I’ll preface Helen’s reviews by noting that when she sent me the copies, she remarked that these were three of “5 dud productions” she’d seen last month.  “It's exhausting to see bad theater,” lamented Helen, “and even more exhausting to write the reviews.”  (Happily, Helen reports that she did see a “great production of West Side Story, [and] wrote [a] rave review” of it.  Maybe she’ll share that with us, too.)]

The Good Soldier Svejk

By Jaroslav Hasek

Adapted by Yosef El-Dror

Directed by Moshe Naor

Habima National Theatre, Tel Aviv

     (in co-production with the Haifa Theater, Haifa)

17/10/13

The dogs are great. One is a wee toy poodle named Rexi. Max is a lovable brown mutt. They are a sweet spark in this flabby, clumsy, monotone production that does not pretend to be other than obvious, i.e. an indictment of what the program notes call "national paranoia" and "mad patriotism".

Everybody knows Svejk, or Schweik as he's commonly called. He's the hero of Hasek's great anti-war satire written shortly after the monstrous cataclysm of World War I. Good Soldier lambasts the military, the church, patriotism, stupidity, mindless authoritarianism and above all the ghastly futility of war.

Everybody knows the story too. Schweik (Avi Kushnir) is a petty dog thief, and a "certified imbecile". He tumbles and stumbles from situation to situation, leaving havoc and the despairing Capt. Lukash (Nati Ravitz) in his wake, whether before the court, in jail, in the military or at the front, telling his irrelevant tales, seemingly imperturbable. Is he really daft, or is he having us on? Hmmm?

We know war only too well. We do satire with panache. Naor is a fine and experienced director, so how could he go so awry on a piece that has its tongue so firmly in its cheek.

There are consolations. We'll overlook Eran Atzmon's grubby white curtains – screens would have said cover-up just as well - to praise his giant backdrop of silvered file cabinets from which a great cross detaches itself to lend emphasis to the chaplain's (Uri Hochman) smarmy homily. Ofra Confino's costumes are suitably timeless with a nod to the period. There's a cute, if predictable, visual gag with luggage.

But the 'play's the thing' and this is where Good Soldier plummets. As Schweik, Kushnir mops and mows with a wink, wink, nudge, nudge, his (seemingly endless) text unspooling like unbarbed wire. Ravitz can't do much to counter this, and so succumbs to keeping up as best he can. Hochman does brightly glow as the hypocrite chaplain as does Davit Gavish's Mrs. Müller. But the rest get lost in the shuffle.

And shuffle is what this Good Soldier effects. It has the snap and crackle of mushy rice crispies.

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One Man, Two Guvnors
By Richard Bean
Translated by Shlomo Moscowitz
Directed by Moshe Kepten
Bet Lessin, Tel Aviv
24/10/13

Let's see now! British comedy, the best kind of British comedy and Two Guvnors is such, is all about tone and timing. Absent these, and what remains is clunk, not comedy. This production of Two Guvnors doesn't miss a trick of tasteless, bestowing a whole new meaning on 'vulgar'.

Bean's version, set in Brighton, is adapted from Carlo Goldoni's (1707-93) The Servant of Two Masters in which ever-hungry servant Truffaldino contracts himself to two masters to be assured of a square meal. His efforts to keep the two ignorant of each other pile near-disaster on almost-catastrophe until the Happy End.

Goldoni wrote his comedy in commedia style. The largely improvisational commedia del arte exploded from the Renaissance. Bean sites his comedy in the Swinging Sixties when the UK, London and music in particular, exploded from the shabbiness and austerity of the years post World War II.

Here the servant is one Francis (Eli Yatzpan). Master #1 is petty gangster Rosco Crabbe (Dikla Hadar), who's actually Rachel dressed up as her brother, whom her lover Stanley Stubbers (Yuval Segal), and Master #2, has killed, so is in Brighton to evade the cops, but Rachel/Rosco has also arrived to collect a debt from Charlie (Shlomo Mimran), whose blond bimbo daughter Pauline (Maya Bachowski), thinking former-fiance Rosco dead, is engaged to wannabe actor Dick Dangle (Shlomi Tapiero).  Add an ancient coordinationally challenged waiter Alfi (Erez Weiss) to the mix and the pratfall possibilities go up a notch.

Indeed the rubber-limbed Weiss provides a needed bit of genuine hilarity to the three-week long one hour and 45 minute show. Yatzpan provides the other in the two (over-extended) audience interaction improvisations in the show.

For the rest, nobody, including Yatzpan, seems to be having much fun. The actors don't speak so much as recite their text. It flows from them without much variation in tone or pitch and without much change in pace or rhythm.

The show is redeemed in part by Orna Smorgonsky's period-perfect and dazzling costumes but its music provides the true high spots.

The songs, Daniel Efrat's translations, and the quartet performing them are superb. The quartet is Noam Pinhasov, Arnon Siev, Omri Shani and Yuval Adam. The bouquet please!

[I didn’t see One Man (which was nominated for several Tonys and for which actor James Corden won a best-actor Tony) when it was here, but in recent years, I have seen two productions of Goldoni’s original play, Servant of Two Masters: at Washington, D.C.’s Shakespeare Theatre Company in 2012 and in Italian, a production of the Piccolo Teatro of Milan, at the Lincoln Center Festival in 2005.  I posted reports on them both on ROT on 9 (D.C. revival) and 29 July 2012 (LCF presentation).  Curious readers might look back at these posts for comparisons with other interpretations and presentations of this popular classic.]

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Mother Courage and Her Children
By Bertolt Brecht
Translated by Anat Gov
Music by Paul Dessau and Yossi Ben Nun
Directed by Udi Ben Moshe
Cameri Theater, Tel Aviv
29/10/13

"Gotta get back to business," mutters Mother Courage (Tikki Dayan) as she pulls the shoes off her dead daughter's feet and tosses them into her wagon. It's a deliberately ghastly image, perfectly defining what the war has wrought, that ghastly becomes the norm. We follow Mother Courage through increasingly war torn Europe from 1624 – 36 as she and her canteen wagon follow the armies fighting the Thirty Year War (1618-48), changing sides from Protestant to Catholic and back when needs must.

The War makes her a living, drops people in an out of her life - like a shady chaplain (Gadi Yagil), an army cook (Rami Baruch) and camp-follower Yvette (Orli Silberschatz). And the War kills her children one by one; sweet Swiss Cheese (Udi Rothschild), brave Eilif (Yiftach Ophir) and mute Kattrin (Gloria Bess).

But the deliberately chosen 30 Year War as such isn't important. It's a vehicle, not narrative. We're meant to watch Courage who's far less brave than she is a survivor. Her quest is business and we're along for the ride, nudged also by Avi Yona Bueno's multi-hued, sensurround klieg lighting.

Brecht and the play say that neither Courage nor we are willing to acknowledge that history is human beings, not fate, that we are responsible for what we do. That's what the play's structure and songs push us toward. We're not meant to identify with the play's characters (though we do, willy-nilly), but to observe, to sit up and take notice, but here it doesn't happen.

Like the canteen wagon, this Mother Courage kind of drags along. It doesn't build. It has no punch, doesn't bite into or shake us despite Dayan in the title role. She's assertive, a whirlwind of passionate energy, grabs the role in her fists and pummels it under her skin. We simultaneously admire and despise her.

As Yvette, Silberschatz sometimes brings with her a willful wistfulness that recalls the child she was once. Rami Baruch's Cook can get gleefully seedy and an aura of hypocrisy properly invests Yagil's Chaplain – though his white robes are questionable for a protestant priest. He looks realer in his ragged pants and shirt.

There are moments of true anguish and pathos in Gloria Bess' sometimes over-the-top Kattrin, while Eilif and Swiss Cheese are mostly well served by Ophir and Rothschild.

But overall the performance never gets there. In-your-face is what's meant, and this Mother Courage isn't.