“A Night in the Old Marketplace”

Posted by Gail M. Burns - January 2011

(Gail Sez: Technically, what I saw on January 22, 2011, at MASS MoCA was a work-in-progress production of Frank London’s A Night in the Old Marketplace but since the piece has been “in progress” for more than a decade, earlier public performances have been reviewed, and a cast recording is available, I feel it is acceptable to offer some written comments, with the caveat that some of the physical aspects of the production I saw will probably not be replicated in future performances.)

At first MoCA had Frank London’s A Night in the Old Marketplace billed as a musical event or concert. I always check the schedules of places like MoCA and EMPAC very carefully because it is often difficult to discern what is predominantly theatre and what is dance or music or even film in this multi-media age. But as the performance date came closer and I started to read the advance press, I realized that this piece had the 1907 Yiddish play Bei Nakht afyn Altn Mark by Isaac Leib Peretz* as its basis, and that there were going to be a small cast of actor/singers and a narrator. This was going to be more like a concert stage of a piece of musical theatre than a song cycle performed by a solo artist or instrumental ensemble.

Peretz’ play is wild and unwieldy. It has never had a full stage production because it simply calls for too many actors and scene changes to be practical. In essence, Peretz wrote it to be theatre of the mind’s eye, but he referenced lots of folk songs in the text, so the reader could “hear” as well as read and imagine the action. London had access to Peretz’ annotated script with complete musical references, which he found fascinating but claims he ended up incorporating none of them into the current piece.
What London, librettist Glen Berger, director Alexandra Aron, and a crew of video and animation artists have done is streamline Peretz cast and turned the play into a fairly straightforward narrative, while retaining the depth and sense of ancient mystery the original invokes.

I went on a truly Quixotic quest for an English language script of Peretz’ work – if there was a windmill to be tilted at I spurred Rocinante into the breach! – and as of this writing a week after seeing the show have still not laid my hands on one. You can view portions of it in English HERE in The I.L. Peretz Reader but neither of the two hard copies of a book by that title that I have acquired contain it. I slowly learned that the book was reissued with everything EXCEPT the script for A Night in the Old Marketplace in it! There were obviously copyright problems and this production could well be the reason for them. If you are lucky enough to read Yiddish, you can view an electronic copy of the script in the original by contacting the National Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, MA.

Peretz’s hundred plus characters have been whittled down to six, including a Narrator (Isaiah Sheffer – yes, THAT Isaiah Sheffer!). Sheyndele (Sofia Rei) lies dead at the bottom of the well in the Old Marketplace because she was roced into an advantageous arranged marriage with Itzhak, (Steven Hrycelak), who becomes a Recluse after her death, instead of her true love, the poor and dim Nosn (Lorin Sklamberg). The Badkhn (Manu Narayan) – a kind of traditional Jewish wedding jester – appeals to the Gargoyle (Charlotte Cohn) to resurrect the dead so that Sheyndele and Nosn can be married and the world set at rights once again.
I stayed after for the “Talk Back” after the MoCA performance, which featured London, Aron, Sheffer, and Klezmer expert and local arts journalist Seth Rogovoy. (Berger was, as London so aptly put it, “in Spider-Hell” working on the disaster prone Broadway musical production Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark for which he has co-written the book. The following day the producers announced that they were postponing the official opening night of that show for a fifth time.)

Sheffer was anxious to hear feedback from the audience, and London asked point-blank how we would categorize the show, in its current form, for marketing purposes. I was dying to ask what “progress” was still being made on the show after more than a decade of work, but shortly came to understand that the MoCA residency and the production I had seen were all about marketing and production. It is possible that an official video of the show, for marketing purposes, was produced at the MoCA performance, in which case I am a member of the “live audience” of record (whoo hoo!) I actually hope that wasn’t the case because the balance on the live audio was poor – that opinion, voiced by an audience member during the Talk Back, was confirmed by the creative team on stage – but even worse than that, we were a lousy audience and very stingy with our applause.

My answer to London’s question is that right now A Night in the Old Marketplace is more of a “Tell” than a “Show,” more concert than theatre. It would be easier to market if there was a little less narration and a little more interaction between the characters. The performers addressed themselves to the audience, not to each other. If there was more acting, a smattering of dialogue, the piece would become more obviously theatrical. Looking through the excerpts of previous performances available on YouTube, what I saw at MoCA is considerably more theatrical and less concert-like, and I would encourage the creative team to continue to move in that direction.

I haven’t read any of the existing reviews – I never do before writing my own opinion – but several of the pull-quotes I have seen compare this work with Fiddler on the Roof – as if there is no other overtly Jewish piece of musical theatre in existence. While there are many fine works of Jewish and Yiddish theatre, Fiddler… is the one that has found mainstream success, which is obviously what the creative team is seeking for A Night in the Old Marketplace. And I think they could have commercial success if they developed the characters and plot. Klezmer music is certainly popular and accessible and even a shiksa like me can enjoy it, especially when it is as well-sung as it is by this cast.

The actor/singers Aron and London have cast are a fascinating and talented bunch. They said they had wanted to find performers from diverse backgrounds, and they succeeded. The cast was remarkable – I want to buy CDs featuring all of them individually and in ensemble works. I was especially impressed with Narayan – who is both a strong and charismatic actor and a remarkable singer – and with Rei’s vocal presence. He is officially a “Broadway leading man” (Bombay Dreams) while she is an acclaimed jazz and contemporary folk singer from Argentina. She is also the only member of the cast I saw who does not perform on the CD, and so it is not only the creators but also the cast who have made long-term commitments to the development of this piece.

The aspect of the piece that I felt really needed reworking was the visual component. The actors were costumed by Jessica Shay, and there was no set, the stage was mostly filled by the five musicians, their various instruments and the huge hunks of electronic equipment that is necessary for the production and amplification of much contemporary music. There were also many standing microphones and what blocking there was merely transported them from one microphone to the next. The back wall was completely filled with an enormous screen on which the video and animation sequences were projected.

London’s wife, artist Tine Kindermann, Israeli-born animator Mor Erlich (aka Mornography), and Asa Movshovitz and his London-based Key Frame Studios are responsible for the visuals, which are often reminiscent of Terry Gilliam’s early Monty Python work. You can see a snippet here:

Sometimes the video explains or enhances the music, lyrics, and action of the story, and sometimes it doesn’t. During the Talk Back I got the sense that some of the visuals referred to characters or plotlines that occur in Peretz’ enormous original and had initially been a part of this piece by had been cut “on the road” so to speak. None of the visuals, which are mostly in black and white, are “beautiful” in the conventional sense, so the additional characters are just ugly distractions in an already complex and layer artistic environment. I am sure that it will be expensive to reshoot and retool the visuals, but from my point of view revamping the current video, or even tossing it all and reimagining the show visually are necessary to its continued growth and progress.

* There are no standard English spellings for Yiddish words and names. I am using the spellings that appeared in the MoCA program.

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