JOB: The Hip-Hop Saga

If Jason Sherman and the Beastie Boys had a love child, it would probably look something like JOB: The Hip-Hop Saga, the monumental pairing of Eli Batalion's and Jerome Saibil's two hip-hop musicals, inspired by the testing-faith story of Job in the Old Testament.

Sherman, of course, took a stab at the same source in Patience, his 1998 philosophically and emotionally erudite adaptation, last seen at CanStage in 2000. Batalion and Saibil, both 23-year-old nice Jewish boys from Montreal who have studied music and philosophy, are more than happy to share their erudition with us. The result is their wildly clever musical based on the aesthetics and rules of rap.

From the viewpoint of someone whose last personal encounter with rap was Blondie's 1981 single Rapture, rap strikes me as an extremely limited genre to sustain two acts of a musical. But the fact that this show succeeds in transcending its musical roots is a testament to its talented creators and performers, whose rhyming-rich allegory evolves into a what's what and who's who of popular culture -- with the added benefit of a moral commentary.

The framework is that of two duelling rappers, M. C. Cain and M. C. Abel -- that's what it says on their bling-bling, goes one line -- commissioned by the head of a hip-hop label to update the story of Job into a corporate fable. They do so with much music sampling -- from Prokofiev to the Beatles, thanks to the score of DJ Paul Bercovitch -- and repeated and well-placed disruptions of their show-within-a-show enactment. The performances underscore the tensions between the macho posturing of rap and the campy performing style of musical theatre.

The second part, subtitled The Demon of the Eternal Recurrence, has larger philosophical ambitions but is the more complex, both musically and textually. It's less enslaved to rhyming and has set our M. C.s loose into the godforsaken universe of Nietzsche, creating some tensions between rap's supposed amorality and that of a world where businesses and the media condemn it but are only to happy to cash in on it.

— Kamal Al-Solaylee