After two years playing to acclaim around the world, 2b theatre company’s Old Stock: A Refugee Love Story has returned to Halifax for a run at Neptune Theatre.
Fair to say, its growing reputation precedes it.
When Old Stock premiered, only keeners got to see it.
“Just about a thousand people,” said Old Stock director, co-creator and 2b theatre company co-artistic director Christian Barry in an interview at Neptune.
“We had 11 shows and 114 seats.”
While the Klezmer-folk music-fuelled show was away, it became a sensation.
“We were a New York Times Critic’s Pick, which is the kind of stuff you dream about when you’re making a show,” Barry said.
“I didn’t even dream about that,” said Halifax-based musician Ben Caplan, who stars in and co-created the play, which also features Mary Fay Coady, Eric DaCosta, Kelsey McNulty and Jeff Kingsbury.
Old Stock is inspired by the true stories of two Jewish-Romanian refugees who came to Canada in 1908. It is billed as a humorously dark folktale combined with a high-energy concert.
“This is home for the show in more senses of the word than one,” said Barry.
“The first scene of the play takes place in Halifax because Chaim and Chaya, who are my wife’s great-grandparents, they came through Pier 21; that’s where they entered Canada.
“It’s a return home for 2b, it’s a return home for Ben and I, and it’s really a return home for the characters in the play, as well.”
Written by Barry, his wife Hannah Moscovitch and Caplan, and directed by Barry, Old Stock resulted from Barry wanting to do a project with the theatrical singer-songwriter.
“We started kicking the tires on this idea that we wanted to make something about the international refugee crisis,” Barry said.
Around the same time, his wife took their young son to Pier 21 to do some sightseeing.
“She almost literally stumbled across the immigration records of her great-grandparents,” said Barry.
“That was the source of it, and then the three of us collaborated in a fairly organic fashion. Ben and I would write a song, Hanna would write a scene, we’d kind of smash them together to see how they might fit, we’d go away and change some things or come up with another companion piece.”
Caplan’s narrator character, the Wanderer, is on stage throughout the 80-minute show. Performing the role since opening night has been a process.
“It’s changed in thousands of small ways and a dozen bigger ones,” said Caplan.
“When it first opened in Halifax, it was a radical thing for me. It was my first time performing in the theatre in over a decade. To be carrying that size of a role, with both dramatic and music components and dealing with all of these very specific things built all around me, the stakes felt very, very high.
“Now, not that the stakes have gone down, but I’ve done it 220 times, so there’s a slightly different sense of ease, I would say, that comes with it.”
Barry refers to the show as a music-theatre hybrid, not a musical. The intent was to combine the energy of a Caplan concert with a play.
Caplan already had a flourishing music career before Old Stock, and he can see complementary aspects of the two worlds.
“For me, it’s been a really valuable learning opportunity. You can’t speak poetry in languages that you don’t understand. So, having the opportunity to watch how sets are built and loaded in, to watch how lighting designs are created and installed, and to see the way in which those tools are used for storytelling in front of an audience, being on the inside of that has been enormously instructive.
“I don’t know yet what my vision is to do with this information, but I think it’s going to wind up being an importunate part of my journey as an artist.”
Old Stock won the 2018 Lieutenant Governor of Nova Scotia Masterworks Arts Award, but even the prizes it didn’t claim mean something to Barry. The show’s seven-week off-Broadway run in the spring of 2018 garnered it nominations for six Drama Desk Awards, “which is kind of like the Golden Globes of theatre,” Barry said.
“What’s neat about them is they don’t discriminate between Broadway and off-Broadway work, so we were up against these big Broadway monoliths with big Broadway budgets.”
They got to hear the names of winners like Nathan Lane and Tina Fey announced, while SpongeBob SquarePants bested Old Stock in the best musical category.
Coming full circle, Old Stock runs through Nov. 17 on Neptune’s Scotiabank Stage. Check neptunetheatre.com for ticket availability, which is limited.
