| Edmonton Sun
Edmonton, Alberta August 22, 2003 Job satisfaction in Bible-based musical
At last, the reward for sitting through all of this year's sloppy mediocrity! As hyped, Job: The Hip-Hop Musical is easily the Fringe's finest hour, made extra-special by its original cast, Jerome Saibil and Eli Batalion, two Montreal rhymers with criminal wit and Old Testament imagination. Those of you who went to Sunday school will love this as much as those of you who didn't. But for the latter camp, a quick synopsis: In the original version, our man Satan makes a bet with God that he can lure poor Job away from faith by taking away all the good things the Lord gave him. God, ever the gambler, takes the bet with the single condition that El Diablo can't harm Job, but all else is open. Nice. The setting of this play, and let's just call it a concept concert, has the VP of Hoover Records, Mr. Louis Saphire, make the same bet with his boss, Mistah Hoover, over the loyalty of his general manager, Job Lowe (as in Joe Blow). MC Cain (Batilion) and MC Abel (Saibil) not only narrate the morality play, but switch from character to character using impressive vocal range and, in the case of female characters like Eleanor Hoover, a Ralph Lauren towel over the head. This Job gets a slightly easier ride than the one in the Bible, whose family God allows Satan to kill, just to prove his point. But still, it's ill, the bitterness of the pill poor little Job has forced down his frontal lobe. In the process, Job does a lot of angry questioning of his boss, but, well, I won't spoil the ending. You almost sweat blood just watching the two performers get there, and there's a number at the end called Are You Ashamed Now? that's one of the most dynamic things I've ever seen played on a stage, and that includes a GWAR concert. But beyond the flash, and brilliant face-morphing, what makes this play so enduring are the brains behind it. As the non-religious Saibil himself told me when I interviewed him last fall, "There's a lot of scholarly debate about the story of Job because it makes us question whether God was intended to look like the capricious idiot with an ego that would make the bet with the devil at the sake of a man's life. People who take this point of view don't really understand the point of the story that maybe God made the bet because he has a master plan that we aren't able to understand." So it is written, so it shall be done. The only way to solve this is beer-tent discussion!
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