Old Stock: a Refugee Love Story comes home
After wandering the earth since 2017, and picking up numerous awards and accolades along the way, Old Stock: A Refugee Love Story, which plays at the Segal Studio to Dec. 19, has arrived home, at least to the city where most of its story of two Jewish-Romanian refugees takes place. Chaim and Chaya, great-grandparents of playwright Hannah Moscovitch, first met when they both entered Canada in 1908 by way of Pier 21 in Halifax (home city of the show’s producing company 2b theatre) but moved to Montreal once they got married. Moscovitch’s love letter to her ancestors is a show with music rather than a musical, its central message, largely inspired by the Syrian refugee crisis, being to keep alive the Jewish tradition of welcoming the stranger. And few are stranger than the show’s frontman, Canadian folk rock musician Ben Caplan. Dressed, by costume designer Carly Beamish, in a spectacular purple frock coat with matching top hat, which almost but not quite draws attention from his epic Old Testament beard, Caplan comes over like a cross between a wild-eyed carnival barker and a sardonically mischievous dybbuk. From the moment he appears in a wreath of smoke, a diabolical grin on his face, you know you’re in the presence of a consummate, irresistibly eccentric showman. Caplan emcees Chaya and Chaim’s story mostly from a raised platform on one side of a shipping container opened up to reveal a jumble of artifacts belonging to Old World people precipitately on the move — hanging clothes, suitcases, a samovar, etc. — and from which four musicians provide lively backing. Two of these, Dani Oore on woodwind and Mary Fay Coady on violin, also play Chaim and Chaya (the others being Graham Scott on accordion and Jamie Kronick on percussion). Moscovitch’s charming and witty script makes a virtue of simplicity while capturing a range of moods, from Chaim and Chaya’s hilariously odd-couple courting to the horrors of a pogrom-anddisease-ridden East Europe in the early 1900s. The klezmer-infused songs, co-written by Caplan and the show’s director, Christian Barry, have more than a touch of Brecht and Weill in their angry sense of injustice spiked with earthy humour. Caplan’s vocals call to mind the Brillo pad-scoured growlings of Tom Waits, though graced with a soaring vibrato, and each musical number is a richly comic (sometimes tragic) drama in itself. Of the many musical highlights, Truth Doesn’t Live in a Book, which has fun contrasting Biblical rules with the need for real world “rabbinical wiggle room,” is perhaps the catchiest. It could almost be a Disney classic were it not for the ribald lyrics, one of many reasons for the show’s 18+ content advisory. Even when the mood darkens and Moscovitch’s script tugs at the heartstrings, Caplan pulls the rug with a sly wink or a mocking quip, which has the effect of anchoring the sense of tragedy rather than undercutting it. One particularly painful moment sees Chaim, after having been refused entry to a Montreal cinema, suffering flashbacks to the anti-Semitic slaughter of his family. Another sees Chaya recalling the loss of her beloved first husband to typhus on the road to Russia, followed by the death of her child. Chaya and Chaim’s anxiety over their sick child, having been refused medical help because of their refugee status, is palpable and genuinely moving. A celebratory ending whisks us through the intervening years to the present, Caplan beaming with relief that Chaya, Chaim and their children finally made it. Living proof of that, written by one of their 19 great-grandchildren, is this wonderful Hanukkah (or, if you prefer, Christmas) gift of a show.