By Donald H. Harrison
SAN DIEGO – In the Warsaw Ghetto, a musical called Love Gets a Room by Jerzy Jurandot was performed for several weeks before the Nazis commenced mass roundups. The musical comedy concerned two newlywed couples who were assigned to the same boarding house room in the ghetto, and the attraction the man and woman of each couple had for the person of opposite gender in the other pair.
While these love triangles were being worked out on stage, when the actors were backstage, they were enmeshed in a real-life love triangle featuring the competition of Edmund (Ferdia Walsh-Peelo) and Patryk (Mark Ryder) for the affection of Stefcia (Clara Rugaard). Patryk’s on-stage wife Ada (Valentina Belle) was left out of the backstage action.
The new movie, Love Gets A Room, produced and directed by Rodrigo Cortes, tells the story of both the on-stage production and the backstage drama, with both set against increasing Nazi-imposed restrictions and food shortages in the Polish capital city.
Patryk, who has committed an as-yet undiscovered crime, feels compelled to sneak out of the ghetto to find freedom and wants Stefcia to go with him. He says he has sufficient money to help them escape. However, Stefcia, who prefers Edmund, does not want to go. To her disappointment, Edmund urges her to flee to safety, saying he wants her to live, not die, under the cruel German rule. Besides, says Edmund, he has a little sister Sarah (Dalit Streett Tejeda) to look after.
A great deal of tension is added when a Nazi sergeant (Magnus Krepper) ostentatiously takes a seat in the front row of the theatre, intimidating both the actors on stage and the large audience for whom the theatre otherwise is the only opportunity to take their minds off the cruelty under which they are living.
Before the movie plot is worked out, there are some twists and turns, which of course I shall not reveal, not wanting to violate the anti-spoiler code.
Some of the musical numbers are endearing, particularly juxtaposed as they are against the bleak circumstances under which all Warsaw’s Jews are being forced to live.
After the movie, I found myself contemplating the kind of choices people may need to make when they are living in the worst world they had ever imagined.
Love Gets A Room will open in select movie theatres across the country on Friday, June 23. and will be available on demand one week later on June 30.
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Donald H. Harrison is editor emeritus of San Diego Jewish World. He may be contacted via donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com