Not your average Job Lowe
The Old Testament takes to the hip-hop treatment just fine

Whether you're of the view that the Big Guy looks bad in l'affaire Job or you're willing to take the theory of the Big Guy's mystery plan on faith, how can you resist the idea of MC Cain and MC Abel as the battling rappers of biblical scholarship? Especially since, like Job, they work for a big international hip-hop label. And if you think God works in mysterious ways, just check out the record industry...

There is, of course, something theatrically in-your-face about two awesomely focused guys (Jerome Saibil, Jon Paterson) in track suits ricocheting across a bare stage slinging rapid-fire rhymes and attitude at each other ("don't give it away/ with the dramatis personae"). Judging by the two-man multi-character musical now on at Azimuth, the Old Testament takes to hip hop in limber fashion: the florid storytelling, the incantation quality, the objections to the right way that get argued then dissed, the lists. The great Sondheim has said he carries a rhyming dictionary around in his pocket at all times; it might explode in the heat of the lists of the ologies (philology, epistemology, scientology...) and literary blue-bloods from James Joyce to William Faulkner, that get rattled around at breakneck pace in Job: The Hip-Hop Musical. And that's before you get to the plundering of composers from Bizet to the Beatles.

Job is the poster boy for the bad things that happen to good people for reasons that leave everyone in the dark. As Montreal's Foqué dans la tête Productions points out with this clever little musical, this is an apt model for getting jobbed in the big corporations of the land. Job Lowe, a.k.a. Joe Blow, is the golden boy employee at Hoover Records, witness the fat salary, the Beamer, the deluxe dental plan, the big vacations, the long hours. Things are going swimmingly ("we signed two artists last week/ one's a criminal but we turn the other cheek"), until treacherous Lou Safire (say it fast to know the guy's identity) proposes to CEO Hoover that loyal Job should be tested. Take all the perks away, cut back the salary, then toast the job, and see if the star doesn't end up cursing the prez. He'll "dismiss you/ like a tissue," predicts Lou.

In the generally giddy, unrelentingly prestissimo spirit of the piece we see Job at home having breakfast with his professor wife, we see his exchanges with Hoover ("watching Hoover manoeuvre"), his encounters with the other employees, then we go back to MCs Cain and Abel taking different tacks on their prowess and the tactics whereby Job is getting screwed around.

The visual contrast between small, compact Saibil (a co-creator of the show with Eli Batalion) and lanky Edmonton actor Paterson, is consistently droll, and lends itself to choreographic oddities. They divvy up the other characters, shift back and forth...

The muse is comic; the wit is literate--full of puns and quibbles and nifty rhymes both sneaky and shameless. If it went on longer than an hour your hair would curl. As it is, you're keen to see what Saibil and Batalion would do with the Garden of Eden or the burning bush.

— Liz Nicholls