Old Stock: A Refugee Love Story NYC Reviews and Tickets
Member Reviews (101)
See it if If you like one act musicals with a talented artist in the show. If you like something different, a little corky but satisfying.
Don't see it if If you don't like an unconventional show or a show about immigrants.
See it if Persecuted jews immigrate to Canada around 1900 and make a life. Couple struggles w their relationship due to past traumas. Good music.
Don't see it if Graphic descriptions of violence and starvation in Europe. Lyrics of songs sometimes difficult to hear above the instruments. Read more
See it if you enjoy Klezmer music used to tell a refugee love story and immigrant experiences at the turn of the last century. Good staging.
Don't see it if you do not like Klezmer style music or story about immigrants. Read more
See it if you think you might like your klezmer cut with a little bit of jugband--& just a pinch of Jewish ritual—sung by the Yiddish Tom Waits.
Don't see it if you want a full-blown book with your musical: here the drama is stripped down. Read more
See it if Ben Caplan’s energy and talent soar; the band is great and the story is both heart warming and heart breaking. I was totally absorbed.
Don't see it if you don’t like jazz, rock and prayer with your Klezmer music; you don’t care for immigration stories or a musical sung mostly by one person.
See it if you like shows that are a bit off center.This show is delightful.Very engaging performances.Story is told through song.Thoroughly enjoyable
Don't see it if you hate musicals, or don't like quirky inventive shows.This is a gem.
See it if you are interested in a clever, quirky & relevant folk musical portraying historical experiences of refugees. Both funny/entertaining & sad
Don't see it if you don't like folk or klezmer music, are opposed to some expletive and raunchy lyrics, or disinterested in immigration and Jewish themes.
See it if your enjoy an interesting immigrant story with a message, combined with great Klezmer music and singing.
Don't see it if you don't like Jewish themes or music, or you are opposed to immigration.
Critic Reviews (30)
"A work of mingled genres and strong flavors...By and large Mr. Caplan is a noisy treasure...Overwritten, the book and lyrics both. It’s alternately sentimental and lewd and strains too hard for universality, spelling out its metaphors in marquee lights...Still, it succeeds. A near catastrophe teaches Chaim and Chaya to care for each other, and it teaches us to care for them, too."
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"Shows about immigrants are hardly new ground in theater, but they’re seldom as bewitching as the Canadian import 'Old Stock.' This quirky one-act musical—more like a concert with accompanying dialogue—uses playwright Moscovitch’s Jewish-Romanian great-grandparents’ refugee romance in early-20th-century Montreal as the framework for a series of rollicking neo-klezmer songs...Caplan sells this old family folktale as our collective history."
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"A perspective we rarely see in the musical genre: It does not take place in America, but Canada...Where the piece falters is in its own sense of place. Moscovitch's script is on the quest for universality, but it skirts around the show's single most interesting (and different) aspect: its setting. Why did these Romanian émigrés decide to settle in Canada?...'Old Stock' feels like a cool first draft of a work that is daring enough to think outside the box but not to really dig deeper."
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"There's no other production like it. Compelling storytelling and outstanding music bring to life the stirring tale...Caplan's spirited performance displays his amazing versatility as a musician and a storyteller. Mary Fay Coady as Chaya and Jamie Kronick as Chaim bring genuine depth and some humor to their roles...An enthralling story for our times. Chaim and Chaya's enduring faith and hope for the future are the values held by millions...Experience this unique theatrical marvel."
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"The coming-to-America story has been worked over so many times...However, the resourceful people behind 'Old Stock' have found all sorts of ways to freshen it up...Has a structure and narrative method all its own...Economically, almost elliptically, written...Something positively Brechtian about this two-part then-and-now structure...Could have gone wrong in all sorts of ways. Yet it succeeds...It's a deeply moving saga, made more so by the fact that it is never over."
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"It is a quiet and bittersweet family saga that is full of soft humor, sweet joy, dark despair, and blessed hope. It is also underpinned with a diverse musical score that runs the gamut from klezmer to jazz to Hebraic melodies of faith, all blended into what its effusive narrator calls a 'Yiddishkeit music thing'...Not some Canadian version of 'Fiddler on the Roof'...'Old Stock' has a great deal more to say about the realities of the immigrant experience...A remarkable journey."
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"What's also surprising is the number of times that The Wanderer states something, only to add that, 'This isn't real,' and then to contradict himself again, saying, 'That's a lie.' It makes for an extremely unreliable guide, navigating us through the long saga of these two Romanian refugees, culminating with a long list of their many offspring: 'eight grandchildren and sixteen great-grandchildren.' But in the end, what exactly are we to believe, given the many contradictions in what we're told?"
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"Caplan, a true showman, has a dynamic voice and is entertaining to watch...It's unfortunate that the book and song scenes aren't more balanced, but when they all play together, the show really comes alive...There is one section about euphemisms for sex that goes on too long, becoming less and less funny, but apart from that, it's refreshing to see a show dealing with religion that is so upfront about sex."
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