Job: The Hip Hop Musical - Job Satisfation
“Why do wack things happen to illin’ people?” ask Montreal MCs

Oil and water, red wine and fish, videogames and relationships—few things in this world seem less compatible than Bible stories and hip hop. So why would three guys from Montréal be trying to fuse two such seemingly polar opposites into the same play? The answer is simple: to bring people together.

“We wanted to marry two completely disparate concepts like that because part of our mission as a company is to bring people into theatre who have never thought of going to the theatre before, if that’s even possible,” explains Jerome Saibil, who, along with his friend Eli Batalion, wrote, directed, produced, and stars in Job: The Hip Hop Musical, which opens this Thursday at Azimuth Theatre.

“There’s a conception out there that theatre right now in North America is primarily a middle-class pastime,” he says, “and it also implies that it’s white middle-class. And a lot of white, middle-class people who go to the theatre probably don’t listen to a lot of hip hop. They might be familiar with the Bible, but they don’t necessarily listen to hip hop. And a lot of people who listen to hip hop, who may not be white middle-class, may not be so interested in the Bible; it might not be anything they can relate to because it’s ancient and not modern.

“So we thought it would be kind of cool to just kind of throw everything on its head,” Saibil continues, “and tell a Bible story in a modern way, to use hip hop in the medium of theatre, which is something that might have confused everyone.”
 

Job description
 
For the benefit of those of who skipped Sunday school last week, here’s the story of Job in a nutshell. Job is a wealthy young man who loves that sweet, sweet God. Everything is going great until the Devil shows up one day and mentions to God that Job’s love for Him is only superficial—that if God would let the Devil ruin Job’s life by taking away his family and his worldly possessions, Job would forsake his love for the Lord. God, being a betting man, takes the Devil up on his wager. For a while, Job deals with his hardships, but eventually (and not surprisingly), he renounces God for inflicting so much suffering upon him.

In Saibil and Batalion’s play, the story remains the same, but certain updates were in order. “It’s basically two characters, MC Cain and MC Abel, retelling the story of Job through tag-team rapping,” says Saibil. “The story is set at a hip hop record label; God is the president of the label, Satan is the vice-president of finance, and Job Lowe is the general manager of the label. But the VP thinks that Job is only loyal to the company because of all the shares and vacation weeks and company cars that he has, and he makes a bet with the president to see if Job remains loyal even after losing all his perks.” The idea for the play was born from an old Montréal hip hop project called the Grafenberg All-Stars—named after Dr. Grafenberg, the man who discovered the G-spot—that involved Saibil, Batalion and DJ Paul Bercovitch. “We used to play gigs at bars and house parties,” says Saibil. “The idea was to rap about things that people don’t normally rap about. We had songs about epistemology, eroticism, cooking chicken—stuff that rappers usually avoid. And it was very successful, people really responded well to it and we had a great time with it. So when we were kicking ideas around for a new play... we started talking about a hip hop musical. So we just went for it.”
 

Old Testament, Best New Play
 
So far, the response to the play has been equally positive; Job has garnered sparkling reviews in every city it’s played in—even managing to pick up an award along the way. “We’ve played in four cities so far—Montréal, Toronto, Ottawa, Winnipeg—and we’ve had the best response to any other production we’ve done so far,” says Saibil. “We also just won an award for Best New Play from the Montréal Critics’ Circle, so it’s been a good response and exactly the kind that we were hoping for.”

While it’s all well and good to turn a few genres on their ear, rest assured that Saibil feels this play is more than just an interesting experiment. “We set out to write something poignant about the suffering of innocent people,” he says. “[The play] is meant to resonate with our time right now—cutbacks, downsizing, all these [powerful people] that do things like that to suit themselves and their financial needs without paying attention to how they’re affecting people. “But the play also attempts to raise issues of religion and belief in God,” he continues, “whether or not the story of Job says that you should believe in God because he has reasons for everything he does and he has a master plan, or if the story just shows that God’s an idiot, making stupid bets with the Devil to prove things that he shouldn’t have to prove. It’s a stance that some would say is controversial or even offensive towards religion, and that’s the argument that MC Cain and MC Abel are having.”
 

Dancin’ Homer
 
Beyond acting as an allegory for the ills of our society and questioning the benevolence of God, the play is also an attempt to bring hip hop back to its roots—in ancient Greece. “We’re also trying to revise verse drama,” Saibil says. “I mean, back in the day—Homer’s Odyssey is rap, that’s what rap is. Hip hop goes back to people in ancient Greece, standing on the corner and rhyming as poets, freestyling, telling stories as they rhyme. And that’s what Homer’s Odyssey is; it’s him telling a long epic story that he didn’t write, but he’s just telling it in a really cool way. And so rapping and MCing, freestyling and verse storytelling is an artform that has existed for thousands of years. But nowadays, it really lives on in the form of hip hop.”

Hip hop may live on, but in Saibil’s opinion, the storytelling element has been pushed aside for catchy beats and smooth flow. “Unfortunately, a lot of hip hop is not actually interesting storytelling,” he laments. “Sometimes it flows well and rhymes interestingly, but the content is very repetitive. Rappers are always rapping about how good at rapping they are, or guns and women, and that’s why a lot of people don’t like it. That’s why a lot of hip hop is stagnating. And Eli and I thought that was a shame—that’s why we set out to do that group, the Grafenberg All-Stars, in the first place, to prove that once you get into the groove of rhyming, you can tell lots of different kinds of stories in different ways. So even though it’s ambitious, part of what the play tries to do is make it okay to be rhyming onstage again, the way it was okay so long ago.”

Saibil is interested in seeing how Job’s unique mélange of genres and styles will play with the Edmonton crowds. “It could be enjoyed by many different demographics,” he says, “so it’ll depend on the publicity we end up getting; it all depends on who we reach. It could be a play and playgoers could come and enjoy it. It could also be a hip hop musical and people who enjoy hip hop could come as well. We’ve had different experiences in different cities, so we’ll see what happens.”

— Chris Boutet