Reviews 2003
Reviews 2003
✭✭✭✭✩
written and directed by Jerome Saibil & Eli Batalion,
music by Jerome Saibil, Eli Batalion & Paul Bercovitch
Fouqué Dans La Tête Productions, Tarragon Theatre Extra Space, Toronto
November 18-December 14, 2003
Job: The Hip-Hop Saga combines two Fringe Festival hits in one show--Job: The Hip-Hop Musical from 2002 and Job II: The Demon of the Eternal Recurrence from this year. Seen back to back, it's clear that Job I is a mini-masterpiece fairly exploding with verbal and musical imagination while Job II, though entertaining, doesn't have the same abundance of invention. Nevertheless, the two-act saga has more wit, energy and intelligence than any Canadian musical in recent memory.
Set on a bare stage the focus is entirely on the multitalented Montreal creator/performers Eli Batalion as MC Abel and Jerome Saibil as MC Cain, philosophical troubadours whose medium happens to be hip-hop. In Act 1 they retell the Biblical story of Job set in the hip-hop record industry where executive J. Hoover (Jehovah) tests the loyalty of underling Job Lowe. The re-imagined story is immensely clever in itself, but it also satirizes the music business and the duo's own storytelling processes as they raps to samples of every kind of music from Mozart to the Beatles.
In contrast, Act 2 is more diffuse and less rich in verbal or musical allusion. The ambitious goal may be (believe it or not) to question Nietzsche's idea of eternal recurrence, but the targets of its satire--TV news, the police, health care--are too familiar, the Cain and Abel rivalry not fully explored and the action too often sidetracked by self-referential excursions. What still triumphs in the end is Batalion's and Saibil's joyful irreverence, infectious vigour and amazing virtuosity.
Christopher Hoile
Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2003-11-27.
Photo: Jerome Saibil and Eli Batalion. ©2005 Katie Hawkins.
2003-11-27
Job: The Hip-Hop Saga