Old Stock: A Refugee Love Story

2b Theatre Company (Canada)

PRESENTED WITH TOUCHSTONE THEATRE AND UBC THEATRE AND FILM

“Richly humorous, wildly entertaining and deeply moving.”

—Martin Morrow, The Globe and Mail

Wild, witty and wonderfully inventive, this fusion of concert and drama tells the true tale of Chaim and Chaya, Jewish refugees from the pogroms of Romania. They meet in 1908, while awaiting medical inspection in Halifax’s Pier 21 immigration centre; the story moves forward to their lives as a couple in Montreal and backward to the horrors of the Continent.

Our narrator is genre-bending sensation Ben Caplan, who can shift tones like a master and convey the humorous and the heartrending with equal conviction. The music blends Yiddish Klezmer with modern folk stylings, creating a wistful and energetic tone. What unite the moments of tragedy with those of uplift are steadfast conviction and wry intelligence; too compassionate to be cynical and too clever to be sentimental, this is a radically humane work.

“Darkly funny and moving…it is hard to imagine a more apt time for a production with so clear a moral centre.”

– The New Yorker

“[T]he Old Stock experience becomes irresistible, borne along on a tide of brilliant klezmer music and original song that links us to an old and helps us to live joyfully in a new one.”

—Joyce McMillan, The Scotsman

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