Location: Marquand Chapel
New Haven, CT
Open To: General Public
Admission: Free
Event Description: New Budapest Orpheum Society, Cabaret Eruv: Outside-In, Inside-Out, and the Long Journey Home. Philip Bohlman, artistic director, Ilya Levinson, music director.
The themes of the eruv form a complex polyphony through the traditions of Jewish cabaret that the New Budapest Orpheum Society bring to the Institute of Sacred Music on October 27th. The performance of Jewish cabaret in modern European and American society took place along the borders and peripheries, those spaces where the sacred and the secular intersected, the Jewish and the non-Jewish cohabited contact zones, and the pressing political dilemmas of the day were turned inside-out, making the tragic comic and the comic tragic.
For the Yale eruv, the New Budapest Orpheum Society has prepared a program that follows historical eruvin across the landscapes of modernity, with musical passage accompanied by folk songs and street songs, Jewish texts with liturgical provenance and secular provocation, songs that rerouted history through the shtetls, ghettos, and concentration camps, linking Jewish film music and musicals as in an eruv of modernity. Jewish cabaret provides a performance space in which selves and others together made eruv their own, a place of meeting and gathering together to undertake the long journey home. For the ISM eruv program, the New Budapest Orpheum Society will select themes from Jewish cabaret repertories in German, Yiddish, and Hebrew, with some English-language favorites spicing up the mix. As a journey through modern Jewish history, “Cabaret Eruv” will follow the path of sacred travelers to Warsaw, Vienna, Berlin, Theresienstadt, New York City, and Jerusalem, marking the journey with songs of struggle and beauty by Hanns Eisler, Friedrich Holländer, Abe Ellstein, Mordechai Gebirtig, Darius Milhaud, and many other great cabaret musicians of the twentieth century.
The New Budapest Orpheum Society is a seven–member ensemble in residence in the division of the humanities at the University of Chicago performing Jewish cabaret music and political songs from the turn of the 20th century to the present, exploring original materials in Hebrew, Yiddish, and German. The cabaret group has released three CDs, most recently Jewish Cabaret in Exile (2009, Cedille Records) and has performed locally and internationally, from Chicago-area synagogues to Broadway to clubs in Berlin and Vienna, with frequent appearances at Jewish community and cultural organizations. The ensemble’s current project draws upon song composed for the golden age of German-Jewish and Yiddish film during the 1920s and 1930s. The artistic director is Philip V. Bohlman and the music director is Ilya Levinson.