Coming from a different way Across town from a Broadway hit, another refugee musical shares a different but equally moving story By: Jill Wilson Posted: 5:01 PM CDT Friday, Oct. 28, 2022

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 28/10/2022 (1349 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Over at the concert hall, Come From Away is telling the feel-good tale of travellers who landed on the East Coast of Canada on 9/11 and were greeted with open arms, a testament to this country’s (well, Newfoundland’s) welcoming nature.

At the Berney Theatre, it’s a bit of a different story. In Old Stock: A Refugee Love Story, two Jews fleeing Russian pogroms in Romania in 1908 arrive in Halifax, N.S., where they find the welcome not so warm.

In the season-opener of Winnipeg Jewish Theatre’s 35th season — a co-production with 2b Theatre Company — we’re introduced to our young couple by the Wanderer (Halifax singer-songwriter Ben Caplan), a bearded character looking like a shabby Willy Wonka in a burgundy top hat.

He pops out of the top of a sea can to greet us with a line from Vancouver songwriter Geoff Berner’s The Traveler’s Lament: “I have been libelled as a wanderer; this is not the case / I have a home, it’s just that it’s an inconvenient place… right now.”

The doors to the shipping container (a nod to the forced peripatism of the Jewish people) swing open to review a little jewel box of a set, draped in scarves and stacked with suitcases and hung with twinkle lights. Inside there’s a band: Shaina Silver-Baird on violin, Eric Da Costa on woodwinds, Jacques Arsenault on keyboards and accordion and Andrew Wiseman on drums.

Silver-Baird and Da Costa also play Chaya and Chaim, who meet in a line at immigration — he has a rash (could be typhus), she has a cough (could be tuberculosis). He is 19 and she is 24; he is travelling alone and she, a recent widow, is with her extended family.

They meet again in Montreal, where young Chaim vies for her hand; she is reluctant, given their age difference and her bereavement. He plans to stay in Canada and she doesn’t want an ocean between her and her late husband’s grave.

The show (which runs about 15 minutes longer than its advertised 80 minutes, no intermission) uses the real story of playwright Hannah Moscovitch’s paternal great-grandparents to rebut the notion that refugees aren’t part of the fabric of Canada. The title is a reference to then-prime minister Stephen Harper drawing a line between immigrants and “old stock” Canadians in 2015, when Canada’s doors were closed to Syrians trying to escape civil war.

If that sounds didactic or dull, rest assured Old Stock is anything but. It’s irreverent, bawdy, crude and hysterical; it’s also shocking, sweet, tender and tragic.

The action — such as it is; it all takes place within the cleverly lit container and on two small side stages attached to the open doors — is mostly narrated by Caplan. A boisterous, outsized storyteller, he’s one part huckster, one part troubadour, with a growl that must inevitably be called Tom Waitsian, but with less gravel and more velvet.

One moment, he’s dispensing wisdom — it’s hard for Jews to be happy because they’ve spent years “preparing for a worst that usually came” — and the next reeling off a list of increasingly outlandish euphemisms for fornication.

The klezmer-inflected songs, penned by Caplan and director Christian Barry, are a similar mix of contemplation and comedy, giving full rein to the singer’s vocal range, which encompasses bombast, lullabies and incantations.

The rollicking Truth Doesn’t Live in a Book pays hilarious homage to the oral tradition of the Bible, in which some of the best bits weren’t written down (“Don’t count your eggs before they’re chicken / ask for consent before you put your d— in / ain’t nothing wrong with homosexuality”), while What Love Can Heartbreak Allow? is a lachrymose lament layering “a tangle of traumas / a rash of regrets / a bundle of burdensome yesterdays.”

Da Costa is a delight as Chaim, smitten and a bit goofy, but haunted by his past, while Silver-Baird gives Chaya a biting, sardonic edge to her pragmatism born of loss.

And if the Moscovitches’ early days in the new country are mostly set in a minor key — the couple’s rocky relationship is plagued by illness, prejudice and unspeakable trauma — they prevail; in fact, they go forth and multiply.

While we certainly can’t pat ourselves on the back too vigorously in this country, Old Stock is a wondrous, moving testament to what can happen when doors are opened to those fleeing oppression.

jill.wilson@winnipegfreepress.com

Twitter: @dedaumier