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Underscored by music, the montage of photos has a visceral impression; we don’t want language to grasp it, or to suppose and really feel in response. (Projections are by Brad Peterson, sound design by Dan Moses Schreier.) “Amid Falling Partitions,” although, depends closely on lyrics and spoken textual content, nearly all of it in Yiddish; non-Yiddish audio system, like me, will spend the efficiency studying supertitles, that are in English and Russian.
The location of these titles, far above the actors’ heads on a set by Jessica Alexandra Cancino, essentially thwarts this fast-paced pageant, whose arc takes it from the Vilna Ghetto, in what’s now Lithuania, to a displaced individuals camp in Germany. It turns into a fragmented expertise: Take our eyes off the titles and we’re misplaced for that means, however learn solely the titles and we miss the present. Both method, the fullness of the manufacturing’s emotion and artistry stays out of attain.
Curated by Avram Mlotek, who wrote the libretto, and his father, Zalmen Mlotek, who’s the present’s music director and arranger in addition to the corporate’s creative director, “Amid Falling Partitions” sounds attractive. Its 28 musical numbers — people music and cabaret, elegies and anthems — are performed by a nine-piece orchestra tucked away upstage. And the present has an ace in its advantageous eight-person ensemble: Steven Skybell, who starred as Tevye within the Nationwide Yiddish Theater Folksbiene’s glorious Yiddish-language manufacturing of “Fiddler on the Roof.”
One in every of Skybell’s songs right here, Reuven Lipshitz’s “Motele From the Warsaw Ghetto,” is the uncommon quantity within the present with a tempo sluggish sufficient to permit each studying the titles and watching the efficiency, which in its restraint is totally searing: the story of a boy, not but 13, doing his half to withstand the Nazis — sneaking out and in of the ghetto — and dying for it.
“Humanity’s most true historical past is written solely in blood,” Skybell says in English close to the highest of the present, and it’s an arresting line. However earlier than bloodshed comes the method of dehumanization that options in all ethnic hatred, and “Amid Falling Partitions” delineates that vividly.
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