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Friday January 21, 2011
North Adams Transcript
NORTH ADAMS -- In helping to stage a legendary Yiddish play, musician Frank London's first problem has been trying to describe it when someone asks about it.
"I still don't even know how to tell people that one-sentence version of what we're doing," he said. "Is it a theater piece? Is it an opera? Is it a concert? Is it a multi-media work? It's got a little bit of all of this."
The 100-year-old play, "A Night in the Old Marketplace," is the work of writer and folklorist I.L. Peretz. An adaptation of that play will be performed in its new format at Mass MoCA on Saturday, Jan. 22, at 8 p.m.
London, a trumpeter, is a member of The Klezmatics and has played with John Zorn, They Might Be Giants, Mark Ribot, Mel Torme and many others. With a script by Glen Berger -- he wrote the Spiderman Broadway musical, as well as numerous PBS kids shows, including "Arthur" -- and direction by Alexandra Aron, London has worked to wrestle the original work into the modern age.
It took Peretz six years to write and longer for the partners to get to this final stage of their adaptation. Peretz wrote the play because he could see the coming of the modern age and wanted to preserve the Jewish way of life in that era. The 115-character play was his way of capturing a disappearing society by including literally everything about it.
"I very quickly learned it's one of the legendary works of Yiddish theater," London said. "It's written about in every history book of Yiddish theater and constructivist theater and theater in the early 20th century. It's notorious, it's an insane play, it's gargantuan. In the original, there's over 115 different characters, many of whom have one line each. It's been performed less than 10 times in the last 100 years because it is an essentially unproduceable work of art and piece of theater."
London was first introduced to the work when Aron approached him about writing music for...