![Peak Performances Opens 2018-19 Season With World Premiere of "Hatuey: Memory of Fire"](https://www.newjerseystage.com/events2018/Peak-July10.jpg "Peak Performances Opens 2018-19 Season With World Premiere of "Hatuey: Memory of Fire"")
(MONTCLAIR, NJ) -- Peak Performances kicks off its 2018-19 season with the world premiere of Hatuey: Memory of Fire, a rousing Afro-Cuban-Yiddish opera performed in English, Yiddish and Spanish, with music by Frank London, libretto by Elise Thoron, direction by Mary Birnbaum, and choreography by Maija Garcia. Based on an 87-year-old epic Yiddish poem by Asher Penn, a Jew who fled the pogroms in his native Ukraine and found refuge in Cuba, Hatuey: Memory of Fire is a love story that bridges multiple histories of oppression and resistance. Performances run September 14-23. Tickets are $30 (FREE for Montclair State undergraduates with ID).
The opera moves between the resistance movement stirring in a 1930s Havana nightclub and the setting of Penn's poem: 1511, when Taíno chief Hatuey came to Eastern Cuba from Hispaniola, to warn Cuban natives of impending Spanish invasion. London first happened upon the story of this young Jewish writer and his poem while talking with an old friend, Michael Posnick, who began describing his poet father-in-law’s escape to Cuba. Performances of Hatuey: Memory of Fire, the first fully staged new Yiddish opera in almost a century, will take place September 14-23 at the Alexander Kasser Theater at Montclair State University.
In Hatuey: Memory of Fire, the young poet Oscar (as Asher was known in Cuba) is played by Matthew Patrick Morris, whom Le Monde once praised for his “warm baritone voice” and “immense humanity.” Oscar escapes the Ukrainian pogroms of the Soviet Union and lands in Havana. There, he falls in love with a Cuban cabaret chanteuse (Tinima, played by vocalist Jenn Jade Ledesna) with a fierce anti-colonial temper. Shattered by the memory of the gruesome attacks in his home village, Oscar identifies with her cry for freedom, and becomes immersed in her revolutionary activities against the corrupt Machado regime. She tells him of Hatuey (Nate Stampley, of Cats, The Color Purple, and The Lion King), a Taíno warrior of the early 16th century who led a revolt against the Spanish conquistadors in Cuba and lost his own life in a fireball bound to a stake.When asked by his persecutor whether he would go to heaven or hell, Hatuey replied: “Where will you be?” “I will be in heaven,” said the conquistador. “Then I prefer to go to hell,” declared Hatuey, forever memorializing his tragic fate. Hatuey is celebrated to this day as a precursor of Cuba’s ongoing fight for freedom.
Penn’s epic poem, written in Yiddish, suggests a powerful affinity between those who have seen their people oppressed, terrorized and murdered at the hands of conquering forces. In Hatuey: Memory of Fire, Penn and Hatuey’s stories merge, as characters shift in time and place from a Havana nightclub to Hatuey’s storied encounter with the Spanish invaders. London’s “original score combines Jewish and Afro-Cuban music, avant-garde contemporary classical and jazz, and 16th-century Spanish and Italian vocal music … [moving] seamlessly from an Afro-Cuban rumba with Janacek-inspired harmonies, to tunes mixing Jewish holiday liturgy with traditional chants and drumming of the Yoruba as practiced in Cuba” (New Music World).
“I always wanted to write a Yiddish opera, but I didn’t want to write just a shtetl opera,” Frank London told the BBC. “For some reason I had other ideas…[Michael Posnick mentioned] that his father-in-law escaped the pogroms. His family in Ukraine couldn’t get into the U.S. at that point because of immigration restrictions against refugees, so he made it to Havana…and wrote this epic 125-page Yiddish poem. And I said, ‘that’s my opera.’” (Asher Penn would go on to found Havaner Lebn, Cuba’s first Jewish weekly, then immigrate to America, where he worked for the Jewish Daily Forward and penned Judaism in America).
When London began collaborating on the project with Thoron, she suggested the idea of setting the opera in both Penn and Hatuey’s respective times and interweaving them, to celebrate the specificities of the multiple cultures and languages Hatuey: Memory of Fire considers. The full, 110-minute opera makes its world premiere at Peak Performances following an earlier version staged in Havana in 2017 with Opera de la Calle. Jewish Cuban anthropologist Ruth Behar, who played the “matchmaker” between the Hatuey: Memory of Fire team (the “Hatueyeros”) and Opera de La Calle’s director Ulises Aquino, wrote in Forward about perceptions of the performance in a country with an evolving albeit fragile relationship with America, and with a current population of approximately only 1,400 Jews. “The story of how the opera got to the island is one of building bridges between Cubans and Cuban Americans… Bringing the opera to Cuba, where Penn had written his Yiddish poem of empathy for the indigenous people of the island, would be an act of remembrance, showing how deeply the Jews had identified with the independence struggles of the island. The mostly Cuban audience knew nothing of Yiddish and little about the Jews. Yet they rocked to the Yiddish songs.”
“I think this is historic,” Aquino told the BBC of the production in Cuba. “Never before—including before the Revolution—have we seen a collaboration of this kind between Cuban lyrical and musical theater and North American musical theater.”
Hatuey: Memory of Fire, co-conceived and created by Frank London and Elise Thoron,and produced by Music-Theatre Group, is performed by Jenn Jade Ledesna (Tinima), Matthew Patrick Morris (Oscar), Nate Stampley (Hatuey/Lazaro), Martin Sola (Velasquez/Machado), Nicolette Malvroleon (Kasika/Alicia), Gerardo Contino (Ernesto), Ethan Simpson(Behike/Victorio), Jorell Williams (Priest/Hector), Enrique Acevedo (Cortez/Hernan), Sandra Marante (Cachita), Jen Anaya (Ondina), Eliza Bonet (Concepcion), Lauren Cox (Ziomara), Abdiel Jacobsen (Orestes), and Tislarm Bouie (Ramon). The creative team includes Frank London (Music) Elise Thoron (Libretto), Mary Birnbaum (Stage Director), Constantine Kitsopoulos (Music Director), Maija Garcia (Choreography), Camellia Koo (Set Design), Oana Botez (Costume Design), andDevorah Kengmana (Lighting Design).
Performance Schedule and Ticketing
Performances of Hatuey: Memory of Firewill take place at the Alexander Kasser Theater at Montclair State University (1 Normal Ave, Montclair, NJ), Friday, September 14-23. Performances will take place September 14, 20, & 21 at 7:30pm, September 15 & 22 at 8pm, and September 16 and 23 at 3pm. Critics are welcome at performances starting Saturday, September 15.
Tickets, affordably priced at $30 (and free for Montclair State University undergraduates), can be purchased at www.peakperfs.org or 973.655.5112.
Acknowledgments
Hatuey: Memory of Fire was developed in residence at the Alexander Kasser Theater, Montclair State University; with Ulises Aquino’s Opera de la Calle in Havana, Cuba; with Diane Wondisford at Music-Theatre Group in NYC; with National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene; and in residence at both the Sundance Institute’s Theatre Lab at Mass MOCA and in Ucross.
