RAPSODY IN TWO

JOB: The Hip-Hop Saga combines two Fringe Festival hits into one show -- JOB: The Hip-Hop Musical from 2002 and JOB II: The Demon of the Eternal Recurrence from earlier this year. Seen back to back, it's clear that Job I is a mini-masterpiece fairly exploding with verbal and musical imagination while Job II, though entertaining, doesn't have the same abundance of invention. Nevertheless, the two-act saga has more wit, energy and intelligence than any Canadian musical in recent memory.

Set on a bare stage, the focus is entirely on the multi-talented Montreal creator- performers Eli Batalion as MC Abel and Jerome Saibil as MC Cain, philosophical troubadours whose medium happens to be hip-hop. In Act 1 they retell the Biblical story of Job set in the record industry where executive J. Hoover (Jehovah) tests the loyalty of underling Job Lowe (Joe Blow). The re-imagined story is immensely clever in itself, but it also satirizes the music business and the duo's own storytelling processes as they rap to samples of every kind of music from Mozart to The Beatles.

In contrast, Act 2 is more diffuse and less rich in verbal and musical allusion. The ambitious goal may be to question Nietzsche's idea of eternal recurrence, but the targets of its satire -- TV news, the police, healthcare -- are too familiar, the Cain and Abel rivalry not fully explored and the action too often sidetracked by self-referential excursions. What still triumphs in the end is Batalion and Saibil's joyful irreverence, infectious vigour and amazing virtuosity.

— Christopher Hoile