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book by Michael Wex
music by Heiko Lehmann
lyrics by Michael Wex

If Lord Buckley had been a Yiddish poet; if Lenny Bruce had been born in a shtetl in the late-nineteenth century, studied in yeshiva and lived through pogroms, world wars, the sinking of the Titanic and the artistic revolutions which took place in France in the first couple of decades of this century--well, maybe then one of them would have been KALMAN HOLZHACKER, the hero, main character and narrator of GOD IN PARIS. As it is, they were Lord Buckley and Lenny Bruce, and KALMAN HOLZHACKER was KALMAN HOLZHACKER, the living embodiment of Yiddish literature at the peak of its glory, those few brief years in which it truly was the hippest thing going, the only really international culture of any scope in the whole of the western world. There's a reason why the first American productions of Ibsen and Strindberg were in Yiddish (and mounted by Emma Goldman)--and people like Holzhacker (who, with all due respect, makes Isaac Bashevis Singer look like Lawrence Welk) were a major part of that reason. An embarrassment to the Jews, a scandal to the Gentiles, Holzhacker recounts the story of his life from Russian-ruled Poland to the Paris of Chagall and Soutine, concentrating on the events which shaped his life and art, as well as some of his more outrageous pranks. He's speaking in the ghetto of Shanghai in 1943, and could possibly be feeling better.
A tragic laff-riot, GOD IN PARIS explodes most of the currently fashionable cliches about Jewish culture in general and Yiddish culture in particular. The storytelling format lends it an immediacy, a "you are there" feel somewhere in between stand-up comedy and sit-down tragedy. The show has also been through-composed; all the music is original, as are the songs, which are presented as examples of Holzhacker's work (Holzhacker, incidentally, never really existed). GOD IN PARIS presents Yiddish culture as a conscious refusal of all the perks of Western civilization; Kalman adds the necessary pound of flesh to a culture that literally went up in smoke.

GOD IN PARIS was premiered to raucous, standing applause at the Ashkenaz Festival in Toronto in July of 1995. Despite a fixed cast, guest artists appearing in sundry productions have included Lorin Sklamberg of the Klezmatics, Adrienne Cooper and Henry Sapoznik of Kapelye, Stuart Brotman of Brave Old World. God in Paris is about to embark on its fourth tour of Germany, where the Potsdamer Neueste Nachrichten called it "a first class theatrical event" ("muss von dieser Inszenierung Wie Gott in Paris von einem Theaterereignis ersten Ranges gesprochen werden"). The English-language mise-en-scene is the same as the German; the cast, with one exception (Steffen Mensching, winner of a 1995 Cabaret Artist of the Year award in Germany, doesn't speak English), is also the same. This is a rare opportunity to see the play in its original language, to hear most of its words from the mouth of its author (whose voice is described in Steve Zeitlin's book Because God Loves Stories as carrying "a hunched-over, rabbinic presence").

SPECS: Laughably simple. Four old wooden chairs in a space big enough to hold three people.