Puppets Tell a Victim’s Story
Wakka Wakka Productions’ latest puppet theater musical, “Fabrik,” insists that puppets can be serious political rabble-rousers, too. Set in Holocaust-era Norway, real-life anti-Nazi activist and Jewish businessman Moritz Rabinowitz takes the stage as a puppet, singing and dancing through the fiercest moments of his life and enticing even those too lighthearted to read about him in a history book.
Rabinowitz the puppet has a flamboyantly Jewish face with intense, diamond-shaped eyes and a nose that points downward into a sharp tip. He enters the stage an all-encompassing entrepreneur, preaching to the audience on the ways of success (Rabinowitz the man owned numerous clothing shops, as well as the largest clothing factory in all of Norway). Running errands from the backseat of a Studebaker limousine, he looks as debonair as ever, but things back home are not always so shiny: Rabinowitz and his family are the only Jews in town and are treated as outsiders, his wife, Johanne, constantly bemoaning her loneliness and feelings of isolation. Johanne soon falls dead, tragically, and Rabinowitz can now spend all his time speaking out against the Nazis. In a radio interview, he breaks out into song about his hatred for Hitler, and this stirs up quite the kerfuffle among German intelligence. Rabinowitz has clearly entered the high ranks of serious political target by now, but he cannot be persuaded to flee approaching German forces and escape to London. The show, which features an original score that blends industrial noise with period and folk music, comes to a whiplash halt when the Nazis capture Rabinowitz and send him to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where he dies from “maltreatment.”
It can be dizzying at times to get lost in a show alternating so much pain with so much restless enchantment, but one has to wonder: Could one emotion pack the same punch without the other?
Urban Stages Theatre, 259 W. 30th St.; $25, $17.50 for seniors and students; Jan. 23-Feb. 17. (212-799-7356 or www.wakkawakka.org
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO