{"id":45262,"date":"2024-10-25T01:58:40","date_gmt":"2024-10-25T08:58:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/?p=45262"},"modified":"2024-10-24T13:58:26","modified_gmt":"2024-10-24T20:58:26","slug":"more-than-an-edgy-cabaret","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/2024\/10\/25\/more-than-an-edgy-cabaret\/","title":{"rendered":"More than an edgy cabaret"},"content":{"rendered":"

Left to right: Shane Baker, Sasha Lurje and Michael Wex in The Last Night at the Cabaret Yitesh (Di Letste Nakht Baym Yitesh), which closes this year\u2019s Chutzpah! Festival Nov. 9-10. (photo by Shendl Copitman)<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cThe final sketch in the show, \u2018The Last Jew in Poland,\u2019 is based on a real 1930s cabaret sketch of the same name that got Ararat, the famous Yiddish cabaret, closed down,\u201d said creator Michael Wex of The Last Night at the Cabaret Yitesh (Di Letste Nakht Baym Yitesh)<\/i>, which plays at the Rothstein Theatre Nov. 9-10 as part of the Chutzpah! Festival.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe sketch, however, hasn\u2019t survived,\u201d he continued. \u201cShimon Dzigan (of Dzigan and Shumacher), who was a member of the troupe, describes the general set-up of the piece in his autobiography, but doesn\u2019t give many details, except to say that everybody involved expected to be arrested the next day (and was surprised not to be). I\u2019ve tried to reconstruct something that would have bothered the censors of the 1930s as much as the original.<\/p>\n

\u201c\u2018Di Endekuvne,\u2019 one of the genuine old songs in the show, was actually banned following its first performance,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

The Last Night at the Cabaret Yitesh<\/i> is set in Poland in the spring of 1938. With only one performance left before the censor\u2019s office closes the cabaret, and with their visas secured to leave the country, the performers decide to put on a show of forbidden material and greatest hits.<\/p>\n

The idea for The Last Night at the Cabaret Yitesh<\/i> came from Andreas Schmitges of Germany\u2019s Yiddish Summer Weimar, who called Wex with a request.<\/p>\n

\u201cSince 2019 was the 100th anniversary of the Weimar Republic, Yiddish Summer was planning a commemorative program and Andreas wanted to know if I could put together a Yiddish-language cabaret revue that would reflect the way Yiddish culture absorbed and was influenced by the zeitgeist of the Weimar era,\u201d said Wex.<\/p>\n

\"photo<\/a>
Michael Wex (photo by Zoe Gemelli)<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Wex, who is Canadian, is an internationally recognized expert on Yiddish. He has many nonfiction books to his name, including Born to Kvetch: Yiddish Language and Culture in All of Its Moods<\/i>, on the history of Yiddish, and Rhapsody in Schmaltz: Yiddish Food and Why We Can\u2019t Stop Eating It<\/i>. He\u2019s also a translator, novelist, playwright, columnist, public speaker and performer. His creative process involves much research. For Schmitges\u2019 proposed project, Wex first sought out surviving Yiddish cabaret material.<\/p>\n

\u201cI dove into scores of books, listened to even more recordings, in search of authentic material that would still resonate with a 21st-century audience,\u201d he said. \u201cMuch of the older material just didn\u2019t \u2018read\u2019 anymore: there were a lot of jokes about local politics and references to long-forgotten celebrities. There was fairly strong political censorship in interwar Poland, especially in the years following the Nazi takeover of Germany, which means that much of the surviving satirical material is pretty bland. I deliberately sought out lesser-known Yiddish cabaret songs, including at least one that was never recorded.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy next resort was to see what was going on in non-Yiddish Polish culture at the time. I went through newspapers from the period to try to figure out how much international pop culture was available in 1920s and \u201930s Poland and was delighted to find that Hollywood movies that would have played in Vancouver in, say, 1934, were playing in Warsaw at pretty much the same time, and that Louis Armstrong records were on sale in Warsaw record stores. I looked at the pop music charts: the most popular song in Poland in 1928 was \u2018Ain\u2019t She Sweet\u2019 translated into Polish. This information widened the range of material that could plausibly be presented as being performed at the time and gave me the licence I needed to adapt and translate some well-known pop songs of the era into Yiddish.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"photo<\/a>
Patrick Farrell in The Last Night at the Cabaret Yitesh (Di Letste Nakht Baym Yitesh), which is at the Rothstein Theatre Nov. 9-10. (photo by Shendl Copitman)<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Wex wrote some songs and sketches to round out the show, then came up with the storyline that adds context: the performers whose cabaret is about to be closed, but who have ship tickets and visas to leave the country.<\/p>\n

\u201cSuddenly, they\u2019re free to perform what they want to, not only what they\u2019re allowed to,\u201d said Wex, who also directs and acts in The Last Night at the Cabaret Yitesh<\/i>.<\/p>\n

The other people involved \u2013 Shane Baker (United States; co-director, performer), Patrick Farrell (US\/Germany; original music, arrangements, piano, accordion, percussion), Regina Hopfgartner (Austria; vocals), Daniel Kahn (US\/Germany; vocals) and Sasha Lurje (Latvia\/Germany; vocals) \u2013 \u201care the people for whom the show was written,\u201d Wex said. \u201cIt\u2019s like an A-list of contemporary Yiddish performers and I recall telling Andreas that I wouldn\u2019t do the show without them. It was my one diva moment \u2013 but I think it worked.\u201d<\/p>\n

The current incarnation of the show premi\u00e8red at the Ashkenaz Festival in Toronto in 2022. It had changed so much from the 2019 Yiddish Summer Weimar production that, Wex said, \u201cWeimar could almost be seen as a workshop.\u201d<\/p>\n

For Wex, giving audiences an idea of what 1938 Poland was like is important \u201cbecause the whole world is looking more like 1938 Poland with every passing day.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cArts and culture,\u201d he said, \u201cincluding but not limited to comedy and music, is really the best way we have of trying to find a common ground from which to understand conflict, stand up to tragedy and, ultimately, seek out ways to mitigate or ameliorate the feelings and attitudes from which such conflicts and their accompanying tragedies have grown. As we see every day, shouting slogans might make us feel good and brave and involved but it does nothing to establish the common ground necessary to arrive at any kind of understanding with our opponents. Arts and culture, comedy and music \u2013 they\u2019re all bulwarks against dehumanization.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Last Night at the Cabaret Yitesh<\/i> is in Yiddish with English supertitles. For tickets, go to chutzpahfestival.com \u2013 where you\u2019ll find the whole Chutzpah! lineup \u2013 or call 604-257-5145. The festival runs Nov. 1-10.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Left to right: Shane Baker, Sasha Lurje and Michael Wex in The Last Night at the Cabaret Yitesh (Di Letste Nakht Baym Yitesh), which closes this year\u2019s Chutzpah! Festival Nov. 9-10. (photo by Shendl Copitman) \u201cThe final sketch in the show, \u2018The Last Jew in Poland,\u2019 is based on a real 1930s cabaret sketch of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":45263,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[785],"tags":[23580,573,53,23579,3036,3597,175,9011,186],"class_list":["post-45262","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-performing-arts","tag-cabaret-yitesh","tag-chutzpah-festival","tag-holocaust","tag-michael-wex","tag-music","tag-politics","tag-rothstein-theatre","tag-social-commentary","tag-yiddish"],"blocksy_meta":{"styles_descriptor":{"styles":{"desktop":"","tablet":"","mobile":""},"google_fonts":[],"version":8}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45262","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=45262"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45262\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/45263"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=45262"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=45262"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=45262"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}