This is a bonus review of ‘The Pianist of Willesden Lane by Rabbi Ben Kamin, who made a presentation before one of the performances. An article by our regular reviewer, Eric George Tauber, is linked here.
By Rabbi Ben Kamin
ENCINITAS, California — There are but three “characters” on the stage of the deeply-realized, lyrically expressed, once-removed theatrical memoir entitled The Pianist of Willesden Lane, performed con brio by the gifted and passionate Mona Golabek. This extraordinary work is adapted and directed by Hershey Felder and augmented by the creative genius of Andrew Wilder, among others.
The key character (in every sense) is Mona’s mother, Lisa Jura, who as a cultivated if uninhibited Viennese teenager following the Nazi Anschluss in Austria, wound up on the “Kindertransport” to London. As told with a childlike lilt by Golabek, Lisa survived the deportation, several physically and emotionally disconcerting relocations, the relentless Luftwaffe bombing of the city, and, most painfully, grievously missing her parents and sisters left behind in the gathering brutish shadows of the Final Solution.
The second character is the gleaming Steinway piano atop a gilt-edged platform that the classically-trained Golabek plays with astonishing alacrity even while narrating her mother’s story (and her anguished family history)—sometimes at the keyboard but often all about the stage with an alternation of childhood innocence, a struggle against gloom, and an impossibly uplifting smile.
Her eyes, hands, shoulders, and hips mingle with the stage-center instrument; she looks skyward at some intervals, her head turning with rapture and hope and one realizes that we human beings have always defeated cruelty with the power of creativity.
Golabek’s mouth is a harp while her fingers are the tools of angels. It’s hard to believe that Golabek, playing her mother but revealing her profoundly Jewish soul via her own words and her mastery of Chopin, Beethoven, Bach, and Rachmaninoff, is not a trained actor. Yet she need not be: while breaking our hearts with the bittersweet wisdom of her mother’s journey, she appears unable to be anything but herself. This is not a performance; it is a living concert of the human spirit.
The third character, revealed in background imagery and limited noise, sometimes contravened (in Lisa Jura’s strong heart) is the abject brutality of the European war against the Jews. In a sense, the elegant Golabek’s highest feat here is, in heartrending variations from adagio to allegro to elegy, conveying this Holocaust composition, incrementally, tenderly, and without a collapse into musical or spiritual dissonance. There is a veil of fear and dread here that even the Old World repertoire cannot play away, but the work is hardly devoid of laughter and tenderness and deftly-delivered quick tales of adolescent bumbling that tickle your heart and remind you that while the Nazis killed humans, they did not kill humanity.
From the first stanza of this concert for creation till its triumphal finale, this is Mona Golabek’s unique and classical tribute to her mother and to survival itself. Without the normal trappings now requisite in Broadway extravaganzas, the ear-blasting acoustics, the brazenly sexual dances, the hollow patronizing that attends a show immune to storytelling, it delivers an artistic magnum opus.
Full disclosure: Sunday, Sept. 7, at the San Diego Repertory Theater, I introduced the theme of this musical diary in the hour prior to curtain to a group of audience members, fitfully attempting to link Ms. Golabek’s tour-de-force to the inclusive themes of my post denominational rabbinate and my scholarship about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Dr. King would have admonished me to skip the lecture outside and go straight to the music inside.
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Rabbi Kamin is an author, freelance writer and lecturer based in the San Diego suburb of Encinitas, California. He may be contacted via ben.kamin@sdjewishworld.com
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