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A CurtainUp Review
Gimpel the Fool/The Lady and the Peddler
With only a few props on stage (a pail, a tombstone, a baker’s table) and Ron Wiseman’s original music featuring Stuart Olsberg on clarinet, Rypp, with his mournful face and expressive voice, recreates the daily life of Jewish townsfolk before the Holocaust. Gimpel goes to work, plays with his children, consults the wise men and tries to live an upright life. All characters but Gimpel are offstage voices. But despite the simplicity of this play and its production, its lessons are profound. In the end, it is Gimpel the fool who understand the transitory and unreal nature of life. Singer is telling us that success on earth may have nothing to do with eternal salvation, something fools know best. The Lady and the Peddler, the other half of this double bill, is directed by Geula Jeffet-Attar and performed by Victor Attar and dancer/actress Ilana Cohen. It is based on a story by Nobel Prize winner S.Y. Agnon, adapted by Yosefa Even Shoshan and translated by Avraham Leader. It is a cautionary tale about a peddler who meets a strange lady living in the woods, sells her a knife and is so ensnared by her mystical charm that he marries her and forsakes his religion. Before long he finds out that this exotic Christian has devoured her previous lovers and it is only by returning to the faith that he can save himself. The Lady and the Peddler is told mainly through dance and movement. The Lady is only heard as Guela Jeffet-Attar’s offstage voice. The foreboding and forbidding mood is set by Yuval Mesner’s music and Uri Rubinstein’s excellent lighting. For a play with such a thin plot, The Lady and the Peddler goes on a bit too long. But Cohen’s dancing and Mesner’s music are as enticing as the Lady herself. Though originally written in other languates these tales about the consequences of evil and the virtues of faith in a world we do not completely understand are still intriguing and instructive.
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Anything Goes Cast Recording
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