| Winnipeg Free Press
Winnipeg, Manitoba July 18, 2002
This is one of those shows that leaves you shaking your head at the talent on display, wondering where it will take the young people who possess it. The last time such prodigious ability showed up at the fringe was in the form of a Montrealer voice wizard named Rick Miller -- remember MacHomer -- who was recently profiled on Entertainment Weekly's theatrical It List. Job: The Hip Hop Musical is the crazy inspiration of Jerome Saibil and Eli Batalion, also of Montreal, and yo! this is one trippy way to retell the biblical story of Job for the baggy pants set. It's hip. It hops. It's a hit. As MC Cain (Saibil) and MC Abel (Batalion), the pair tag-team rap 10 tracks of tongue-twisting rhyme at breakneck speed. It's all the audience can do to keep up with the humorous allegory. Those who succeed gain a deeper appreciation of the smart lyrics. Job Lowe (Joe Blow) works at the hip-hop label Hoover Records when finance V.P. Lou Saphire suggests his loyalty should be tested. Promptly Job loses all his perks and then his position as part of company cutbacks. He grapples with the inexplicable downturn in fortunes before he is delivered from economic darkness. Saibil and Batalion, outfitted in tracksuits and kerchiefs, show their brass by sampling The Beatles and Mozart with equal aplomb and rhyming "squishy" with "knishy". The only question left to ponder at the end of Job is whether Saibil and Batalion, the writers, deserve more credit that Saibil and Batalion, the performers. This hip-hop musical rocks.
July 19, 2002
Jerome Saibil and Eli Batalion are true believers in the fringe festival being a stage for the never-seen-before. When the two Montrealers were looking for a theatrical component to accompany a hip-hop show they were cooking up, they asked themselves what would be the last thing people would expect to go with it. The Bible was the immediate answer. They confidently settled on the story of Job, secure in the knowledge it had never before been set to hip-hop music. Within a week, the childhood friends had a clever story told in rhyming verse -- that took three days -- and then whipped up an hour of accessible music -- another three days' work. And what started as a goofy concept in Saibil's kitchen is now one of the most decorated fringe productions on the circuit, having swept through festivals in Montreal, Ottawa and Toronto. It arrives in Winnipeg as one of the must-see shows. "We wanted to offer 60 exhilarating minutes of theatre that will take your breath away," says the 22-year-old Saibil. "I love seeing fringe shows that break barriers." It's almost an act of God that this two-man show could find an audience. Think about it. What hip-hop kids want to see a play updating some hard-luck, biblical character performed in verse reminiscent of that Shakespeare dude. Conversely, what mainstream (read, older) audience member would pay to hear that damnable hip-hop ruin a promising musical? Plenty of people, evidently. "It appeals to a lot of different age groups," says Saibil, who, like his pal, just graduated from prestigious Brown University in Rhode Island. "There are musical references to Prokofiev, Bizet and Beethoven as well as The Beatles and modern hip-hop artists. I don't know if any audience member gets all the musical homage that's embedded in the show but I know there is something for every generation." It's the same with the rhyming. The more you hear, the more fun Job is. "Cain and Abel, Batalion and Saibil, were able to retell the fable straight from the kitchen table," the audience is told early in the show. Their version told by MC Cain (Saibil) and MC Abel (Batalion) introduces Job Lowe, a loyal, much-appreciated employee of hip-hop label Hoover Records. Finance vice-president Lou Saphire (a.k.a. Lucifer) convinces company president J. Hoover (a.k.a. Jehovah) to put Job's loyalty to the test by rescinding all his perks and downsizing him out of a job. Job is tricked into admitting he embezzled company funds, but is eventually returned to his state of grace. "We chose Job because we had both learned it in its original Hebrew version and it was a particularly enigmatic story," says Saibil, who made their debut in Winnipeg last summer with the fringe show Everything You Wanted to Know About Yourself But Were Afraid to Ask Freud. "The ending was strange to us. Why, if Job fails the test, is he rewarded? We thought it fit nicely as a play within a play with MCs Cain and Abel arguing about the ending. The arguments in the play were based on real creative disagreements Eli and I had." Saibil is also performing a solo show called Good Morning, Beijing, based on his 18 months working on a Chinese radio station. The philosophy major discovered that there was much more going on behind the scenes at the French corporation that was renting air time from the government. What later became a sociological project became his fringe play. Winnipeg is the last stop for Job this summer, as Batalion returns to Providence to start a new job as a research assistant in a psychiatric hospital... "Surely fodder for a new play next summer," he says.
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