A Night in the Old Marketplace
Thursday May 4, 2017 at 8 PM
Saturday May 6, 2017 at 9:30 PM
at the Museum of Jewish Heritage

Created and directed by Alexandra Aron
Composed by Grammy winner Sir Frank London
Lyrics and text by Glen Berger (Spiderman: Turn off the Dark)

Narrated by the legendary Downtown performer, Edgar Oliver.

After being presented by John Schaefer and WNYC’s New Sounds Live at the Merkin Concert Hall, and then traveling the world, the iconoclastic post-modern musical oratorio, “A Night at the Old Marketplace,” returns to New York for the premiere of an enhanced full-length version fusing music, projections and storytelling.

A hallucinatory reinvention of Yiddish writer I.L. Peretz’s equally phantasmagoric verse play “Bay Nakht Oyfn Altn Mark” (first staged in 1907), this two-night-only phenomenon spans an eclectic range of musical styles — from rock to jazz to klezmer. Though performed in English, the adapted story is pure Yiddish — a wild ride through a fun house of mystical theology, blurred identity, and dangerous transgressions with vaudevillian overtones.

“A Night in the Old Marketplace,” tells the story of a badkhn (a traditional Jewish wedding emcee) who tries to right the tragic ending of a wedding that happened 20 years ago. Challenging the laws of G-d, he sets forth to resurrect the deceased bride and marry her to her true love before they are once again parted by death. .

The show’s eclectic cast of singer-performers: Manu Narayan (from Broadway’s “Bombay Dreams,” and Mike Myers’ “Love Guru”); Charlotte Cohn (“La Boheme” on Broadway, “Handle with Care” Off-Broadway); the internationally acclaimed Latin-jazz singer Sofia Rei; Trinity Church’s featured bass soloist Steven Hrycelak, and the world’s most in-demand Yiddish singer — the voice of the Klezmatics, Lorin Sklamberg.

The avant-traditional Marketplace Band brings together some of New York’s premiere ethno-punk virtuosi: tubist Ron Caswell (Slavic Soul Party), guitar shredder Brandon Seabrook (“an apocalyptic, supersonic general of the banjo” according to Spin Magazine), klezmer drum master Aaron Alexander, Brazilian accordion wizard Rob Curto.

The mind-shifting projected video is by Kate Howard, Tine Kindermann, Mornography, and Asa Movshovitz.

90-minute performance, no intermission