This summer, the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Massachusetts, celebrates its sixth annual Yidstock: The Festival of New Yiddish Music, featuring a special performance of A Night in the Old Marketplace, a multimedia folk oratorio by Frank London, a founding member of the Klezmatics.
The four-day festival—July 13 to 16—will also include performances by a diverse group of groundbreaking, innovative bands: the Andy Statman Trio, Ezekiel’s Wheels Klezmer Band, the Hankus Netsky & Eden MacAdam-Somer Duo, the Nigunim Trio, the Alicia Svigals & Lauren Brody Duo, and the Klezmer Brass Allstars, led by London and singer and theater star Eleanor Reissa, known as “the queen of Yiddish cabaret.”
A Night in the Old Marketplace is a musical retelling of the surrealist 1907 play of the same name, by the great Yiddish writer I.L. Peretz, that is part ghost story, part philosophical meditation on the modern Jewish experience. The musical version—which critics have called “beautifully scored and visually stunning” and “wickedly funny”—will feature an all-star cast including London and his Klezmatics bandmate Lorin Sklamberg. The show will be performed once at Yidstock, at 8 p.m. on July 15.
More information: yiddishbook.center.org/yidstock.