I don’t usually record anything that’s two-nights-only, but this one I think will flower and fly, so watch out for it. It’s already looking like turning up in March at TR Haymarket, and any venue with a functioning soul would do well to grab it. Who in these dark days does not need a small, unpretending, explosively joyous, sad ,energetic and topical mini-musical to remind us that art flowers in rough ground?
. It’s devised by and for Golda Amirova, a Ukrainian-Jewish singer and composer: a big figure in Odessa, once chosen to sing “Shema Yisrael” to the visiting Israeli president. She and her director Pavlo Bondarekno are both refugees here from Putin’s invasion. Around them, to tell her true tale as a fable of disaster and redemption, they gather musicians and dancers: Yevhenii the drummer from Mariupol , refugee in Berlin; Kourosh the Irish-Iranian guitarist, Greek Vasilis on saxophone, choice British jazzmen and dancers.
The music is wild: soulful Ukrainian-Russian-Jewish jazz, where klezmer, wedding-songs, ballad and rock and memories of Weimar meld together, in Golda’s extraordinary pure voice and wild effortless energy. You catch moments of scat, rock rhythms, Jewish anthems, a soaring ballad crashing suddenly into vivid jazz dance. It’s hypnotic, never a boring note.
But the show’s point , with short words or translations flashed up where needed, is to tell a story very simply. It opens on a glorious set of sofa, band instruments, lamps, racks of sparkly clothes and crazy stage hats. Golda says “I see a dream. My heart is flying back to my home” because we are in riotously happy memory: a party-cum-rehearsal is under way, singer and players and random guests jumping and joking, then following a power cut with an ironic mashup of Tiger Lillies “The crack of doom is coming soon”, cabaret-style. Behind them a projection shows a great city’s graceful spreading streets. A phone call from her grandmother demands Golda marries soon, and in rapid musical mimeshow she rejects both a millionaire and an Israeli who “talks only Torah” . Instead she dispatches the guests to pretend-busk the front rows for money for a takeout.
When it arrives her eyes meet the handsome pizza man’s , a great gentle love song rises and suddenly there’s a wedding. More wild dancing and celebration round a white cake, guests pressing glasses on the front row.
Until the sirens, the bomb, flashing lights, destruction and darkness and quite another grey projection behind in the smoke. Amirova’s, and Odessa’s, own story. She’s only been here a little over a year.
In the second act the happy living-room is gone. In a black coat, once wild hair pinned severely flat, she is any East European refugee with a suitcase. A sinister short ballet in the gloom expresses panic, collapse, loss, grief, exhaustion. Then Golda suddenly is in a club, working the full Kander and Ebb ‘Mein Herr” from Cabaret, a job. But despondent in a cafe she hears a tune remembered from home; the musicians gather, new friends, respectful, and a great torch-song moment leads to a shared defiance and cry of “L’Chaim!” To life!”.
In the finale, time has passed and she is a star again, introduced on a big stage in golden robes, her song drawing together grief and memory and loss, echoing all the genres of the evening and interwoven strands of Europe’s soul. As a show it’s simple, short, sophisticated; it’ll probably grow and refine. But for two brief nights in a converted church in West London, just after London’s great march of solidarity , it’s an event. It reminds us of the greatness of the continent, the tangled threads which hold us offshore people too, and of the Jewishness pulsing through it all. It’s about the hope that springs in any room where songs and stories come alive. L’Chaim!
Information: http://www.birdandcarrot.com
theatreCat 