Dor Harari and Noam Klinstein at a presentation for the musical play "Blues for the Great Holiday" by the Beit Lisin Theater, based on the film of the same name, September 27, 2023/Stills: Rafi Delvia, Video: Redi Rubinstein
I saw the cult film "Blues for the Great Holiday" by Ranan Shor and Doron Nesher for the first time in my teenage years, and since then dozens of times.
It was a natural continuation of another film that I saw a lot in those years - the musical "Hair".
Both deal with a similar period, and use similar tools to describe similar themes: the lust for life and youth in front of a war machine that never stops;
the tools of resistance that are so limited to social institutions;
and the ability of art, and especially music, to disassemble and reassemble, protest and inspire.
The United States' culture war has taken several new forms since the Vietnam War, but the debate between Mossi and Harleh, the two alpha males of Urban High School A in Tel Aviv during the War of Attrition, has changed very little in the 50 or so years since it supposedly took place - and - 35 years since the release of the film.
The cycle of enmity has not yet ended, every boy is still required to stand before the sorting officers, and death is closer than ever.
It's basically a movie about coming of age, which has a variety of ideas.
The desire to live in the moment, and the fear of accomplishing nothing;
The daily, non-national mourning for childhood, and farewell to everything that accompanied it: innocence, friendships, the previous generation;
The sad role of documentation in all these.
Works about youth and the loss of innocence abound, but "Blues" has an element that makes it unconventional, and even daring - its soundtrack, perhaps the smartest soundtrack in the history of Israeli cinema.
He dismantles a host of national icons and turns them upside down.
The Hebrew Regiment, Bialik, Trumpeldor, the Roosters, and Epilet Hana Senesh and Gebirtig's "Kinder Yarn" (!), all these take on new, private, sometimes ironic, sometimes creepy, and sometimes downright subversive meanings.
This joy of appropriation is spectacular, and is part of what makes the film interesting even today.
All of these explain why there is no need for an excuse to bring up "Blues for the Great Holiday" again, and why the choice to present it as a musical is even required, even though it is explosive material.
The raw materials are gold.
The Beit Lissin Theater, which chose to do this this year, encountered a huge obstacle in the form of the October 7 massacre and the war that broke out in its wake, which in advance brings the packed audience to the hall where they talk about bereavement, the dilemma of recruitment and the justification of wars.
But the main thing that fails "Blues for the Great Holiday - The Musical" is the unfortunate decision of its creators to throw away the original soundtrack, and write completely new songs for it.
Apart from a short quote of Rafi Kadishzon's theme tune, and "Yossi my child is successful", nothing remains of the sounds of the original film.
The classic "Leave Me Ami" - out.
"It is good to die for our country" - outside.
The fascinating version of the "walk to Caesarea" is out.
What's left?
A thin, flat and easy to digest version of the story, problematic in itself, which dilutes the interesting ideas in it into a story focused on fragile male ego, desire for attention and hornyness.
True, all this existed of course even then, but not like that.
It is also disappointing because behind it are the forces that created an elaborate musical adaptation of a film like "Zero in Human Relations" and managed to transfer to the stage also "Going over the Wall" which turned from a drama into a musical comedy, and also because it is clear that it was made out of love for the original.
such a shame.
A memorized musical.
"Blues for the Great Holiday", version 2024/Reddy Rubinstein
For those who have never seen the movie - stop reading and go watch.
For the sake of the record, we will say that the plot tells about a group of seminists in 1970, in the midst of the war of attrition: Musi, the talented leader who always follows suit (here he is played by Dor Harari, the "Commander");
Aharleh Hamardan, flirting with pacifism (Itamar Elbaz);
the shy Yossi Tzvilich, the first recruit of the cohort (Aviram Avitan);
Kobi and Shush, the eternal couple that stabilizes the group (Dor Almkays and Eleanor Weil);
And Margo, the lone narrator, is the one who takes pictures of the gang and looks at them from the side (Tal Grushka).
The current production brings him out of the closet, an interpretation that relies, to a certain degree of justice, mainly on a few words from the end of the film ("Mossy, my love").
The group leads the preparations for the final show of the cycle, which is delayed twice.
The first time, after a graduate from the previous batch was killed, and the second time - after the death of Zvilich in a training accident during his apprenticeship.
They debate an issue that is relevant to our time, and in a way affects the play itself: how can one sing and dance and laugh at everything in the face of paralyzing bereavement?
Is it possible to slaughter sacred cows, when mourners are sitting in the hall?
In the background of the argument there is also a romantic triangle between Mosi, Aharahla and a new member of the group, Naomi (Noam Klinstein), which undermines their relationship.
While Naomi is trying to get accepted into a military band, Musi is debating whether to join it or enlist in the war, and Ahra'la is debating whether to enlist at all.
The epilogue of the plot, which comes like a foregone conclusion, comes three years later, with the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War, when an entire country has collectively separated from its innocence.
The musical, directed by Yotam Kushnir and written by Oren Yaakovi, is aided by a minimalist but meaningful setting.
The sports hall as the landscape of childhood, the bus as an arena of farewell and of course: a cypress that appears in the background, and that is all that is needed to signal to the Israeli audience a military plot.
There is something supertemporal, non-specific, that reinforces what is happening on stage.
On the other hand, the text is actually too detailed.
The first song, "Welcome to the Seventies," opens the show with an almost embarrassing exposition with namedropping from the period, and even includes "Bathroom Queen," a symbol of protest far more radical than this scripted musical.
Also the finale scene, the big fight after the final show within the show, is dragged here with far too many words than the original used.
True, musicals are not a genre known for understatement - and that's part of its charm - and still.
The actors are likeable, the characters are diluted.
Harari Valvez/Redy Rubinstein
Isn't it a shame about "Going my way"?
Klinstein and Harari/Redy Rubinstein
One of the most frustrating aspects of the musical remake concerns the main characters, even though the cast as a whole is cute and likeable.
The drama between Musi and Ahra'lah is reduced here to a "quarrel over a girl", and therefore also becomes infantile.
This is especially true of Ahra'lah, an unusual figure in her boldness in Israeli culture, who in fact becomes ridiculed.
Aharleh is a symbol of opposition to militarism - witness the inscriptions "Aharleh Tzedek" that used to be seen in all kinds of places - but the treatment of him in the play actually uproots him from its content, and to a large extent belittles this position.
In the play, Aharleh changes ideologies like socks, and his sensitive ego is marked as his ideological engine.
In the last act, Musi even explicitly accuses him that the source of his criticism is rooted in jealousy.
The very validity of his position is undermined: his founding, brave/naive slogan - "A pacifist has no border behind which there is an enemy. Behind what is called a border there are people like me, like you" - was also thrown out of the show, in a rather cowardly choice.
Instead another slogan, less poignant and more distant, emerges miraculously, "There is no just war. If people don't put an end to wars, wars will put an end to human beings."
It is easier to digest, of course, even in the busy time we are in, but also more cartoonish.
It's infuriating.
More in Walla!
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To the full article
such a shame.
"Blues for the Great Holiday", version 2024/Reddy Rubinstein
More successful treatment is given to Shush and Kobe, two characters in the film who are given a marginal, almost casual place, and the show greatly expands their world and gives them life.
They are the most likable characters on stage.
Margo, Zvilich and Naomi are also slightly expanded, to places that also mainly emphasize the romantic dimension of the characters.
The role of the high school principal Edna, played by Hani Nahmias, is a kind of friction.
In the parentless remake, Edna is practically the only representative of the previous generation, and she turns into a more complex, more maternal and entertaining character than the blocked character from the film.
Nahmias, who has raised generations of children on television and in the theater, is a successful casting for this role.
And the new songs?
Oren Yacovi and Eli Butner, who also wrote the songs in the sequence of the theater's previous musicals, are also signed here.
It can be said that their task is impossible in advance: each new song carries with it the unjustified and scandalous absence of the original songs.
Only one song manages to evoke a different reaction, in the scene of Zvilich's funeral, an original scene that, as far as I can remember, has no trace of it in the film, and is the best in the show.
Butner also corresponds with an iconic text, and angrily mixes the Kaddish for the dead with the death anxiety of the living in front of the gravestone of the fallen, and in fact in front of the audience, in the singing of many.
It's a scene that somehow also reminds of the ending scene of "Hair", when the band members sing "let the sun shine a hand" in front of Berger's grave.
More than any other moment in the show "Blues for the Great Holiday", it truly carries the spirit of the original.
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