Preview
JOB: THE HIP-HOP MUSICAL
Foqué Dans la Tête Productions (Sage Theatre)
Created by and starring Eli Batalion and Jerome Saibil
Runs October 22 to November 1
New Dance/Theatre
Is there a single Old Testament story that is begging to be made into a hip-hop musical?
Consider the story of Job – a good man who has his life destroyed as part of a wager between Lucifer and God to test his faith. Now, throw down some righteous beats. The result? The darling of the North American fringe theatre circuit, JOB: The Hip-Hop Musical, which is heading to Calgary to open a new season for Sage Theatre.
Written and performed by Jerome Saibil and Eli Batalion of Montreal’s Foqué Dans la Tête Productions, JOB tells the story of Job Lowe, an employee of the hip-hop label Hoover Records, who has his loyalty tested by his bosses. The president of the label, J. Hoover (a.k.a. Jehovah) and the vice-president of finance, Lou Saphire (a.k.a. Lucifer), make a wager in which Job first loses his benefits and then, ultimately, his job. The tale of his woes is told by narrators MC Cain (Saibil) and MC Abel (Batalion), who use the allegory to ask that timeless question: Why do bad things happen to good people?
For the past year and a half, JOB has been receiving rave reviews for its original approach to a very old story.
"It was pretty surprising how it all came together," says Saibil. "It just came spilling out over the course of six days. We basically just didn’t sleep for those six days."
JOB made its debut at Montreal’s fringe festival in the summer of 2002 and, at the time, its creators had no idea they had a hit on their hands.
"The first time we performed, we were tempted to cancel because we thought we were going to bomb," says Saibil with a laugh. "Now we are in negotiations for an Off-Broadway series of performances. The response has been overwhelming. It’s like the Little Musical That Could."
The musical’s biblical source is one of the more problematic stories in the Old Testament. The pious and righteous Job, who lives a good life with a loving wife and children, is made the subject of a wager between God and Lucifer. Basically, Lucifer taunts God and says Job is a faithful follower only because he has everything. If his life were ripped away from him, Job would abandon his faith and curse God. God says, in essence, "Bring it on, bitch," and Lucifer wipes out Job’s family and wealth, and curses him with disgusting skin diseases. This leads Job to challenge God to answer for His seeming indifference to the evil in the world. God’s answer has provoked centuries of thought and debate.
In the play, says Saibil, God is revealed as a character with a lot of problems. "He’s a little capricious, he has a lot of anger-management issues and a very large ego."
Saibil says he and Batalion chose the story because they wanted to analyze power structures, and they decided the corporate setting would be a modern equivalent people could relate to. "If you look at modern corporations like Enron and the abuses of power that happen, it is a fairly easy concept to grasp."
The decision to do a hip-hop version of the story grew out of Saibil and Batalion’s backgrounds as musicians. "We were both in a hip-hop group before we wrote the play," says Saibil. "We were called the Graffenberg All-Stars, named after the doctor who discovered the G-spot."
Before turning to theatre, the two were already doing creative hip-hop outside of the commercial mainstream. "We rapped about really weird things like entomology and cooking chicken, neurotic disorders – that sort of thing." |
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