The many trials of staging a hip-hop Job
'People have always told stories that rhyme,' says creator

JOB: THE HIP-HOP MUSICAL
Written by Jerome Saibil & Eli Batalion

Job, the biblical dude who pretty much redefines "patch of bad luck" for all time, is entering a new phase of a downer biography that would make Montel Wililams wince. He's starring in a hip-hop musical about himself, alongside two battling MCs, Cain and Abel.

In Job: The HipHop Musical, opening the Azimuth Theatre season tonight at their hip little HQ, our luckless much-put-upon hero works for a hip-hop label. Which means, as co-creator Jerome Saibil points out, that God is the corporate CEO, and "one with ego and anger management problems" to boot. The more Job seems to get screwed around, the more the two competing MCs can't agree on how to interpret his story. "Either God looks bad, completely capricious, or He has a secret master plan," says Saibil. "Cain has a certain animosity to his employer that Abel doesn't have."

You can see why two white Jewish guys from Montreal -- Saibil and his partner Eli Batalion, who together make up Foqué Dans La Tete Productions -- might have Old Testament rapport. All that Jewish day school training shouldn't go to waste. And, besides, as Saibil points out, Job "works perfectly with the financial realities of our time. Cutbacks, people who suffer without reason, bureaucracy that keeps people from understanding what's going on," and other bad things that jerk good people around. Actually, a couple of orthodox rabbis have seen the show and like it, reports Saibil who -- like Batalion -- is a classically trained musician and a liberal arts grad from Brown University in Rhode Island.

What's the deal with hip hop? This isn't the first time Saibil and Batalion, purveyors of touring Fringe shows like 2001's Everything You Wanted To Know About Yourself But Were Afraid To Ask Freud, have undertaken a rapping musical. Joined by a DJ, they rapped on unexpected subjects like epistemology, cooking chicken, etc., and tried out their skills in a bar at Brown.

"Hip hop as an art form goes back forever," says Saibil. "People have always told stories that rhyme, from Homer's Odyssey to Baz Luhrmann. The Elizabethans put rhyming onstage. Now rhymed narrative is out of fashion," unless you count "rappers talking about how good they are, and how much better they are than everybody else, or insulting imaginary listeners. We just think it's an art form that can be cool."

The pair are inspired by "all kinds of rappers" -- Nelly and Dr. Dre "for the way they produce beats electronically"; The Roots for their "analogue-based sound"; Blackalicious for "their great flow, great rhymes."

Job: The HipHop Musical premiered in Montreal at the Fringe, and Azimuth's Chris Craddock was knocked out by it in Winnipeg. But it was in Toronto, "where less than 50 per cent of its audiences were white," that it really caught on. After the Edmonton run, in which Saibil co-stars with Edmonton actor Jon Paterson, the show goes back to those cities, and heads to New York, maybe London. "What we're trying to do is reinvent genres, or bust through them."

— Liz Nicholls