Home

On first take, the idea of a musical whose subject is the Warsaw Ghetto may be jarring. But Jamibeth Margolis, who is both the stage director of the Broadway-bound "Warsaw" and the granddaughter of two Holocaust survivors, makes crystal clear that the tone of the play is entirely appropriate.

"It is a musical drama, not a musical comedy," she explained. "It is closer to opera than it is to a song-and-dance musical theater piece." For Margolis, the music intensifies the drama of the story.

"It is appropriate for the piece and appropriate for what we are trying to tell," she said.

The music, she suggested, both heightens the emotions of the characters and, with its allusions to Yiddish and klezmer music, expresses the feel of the time.

The show will be offered in a one-and-a-half-hour preview version using 14 Broadway actors on Saturday, Feb. 6, at 7:30 p.m., as a benefit for the Boheme Opera. The show, which will take place at the Patriots Theater at the Trenton War Memorial, will feature 14 Broadway actors and an orchestra of Broadway musicians. The actors will be in costume, but the show does not yet have a set. Book and the lyrics are by John Atkins and music, orchestrations, and additional lyrics by William Wade. To order tickets, call the Boheme Opera box office at (609) 581-7200. For detailed information about group and student rates, go to www.bohemeopera.com.

Margolis, who is also directing the operas "Gianni Schicchi" and "Pirates of Penzance" for Boheme Opera, suggested to Joseph and Sandra Milstein Pucciatti that a production of "Warsaw" would make a great yearly benefit for the opera company. "They loved the idea and felt compelled by the story," said Margolis.

Through her grandparents and her parents, Margolis has lived with the Holocaust and its implications all her life. Her grandmother wrote a book covering every aspect of her Holocaust experience, titled "The Miracle of Survival: Angels at My Back."

"My grandmother, Janet Moskowitz, a survivor of Auschwitz and Ravensbruck, was a special inspiration to me all my life and an example of the bravery and courage needed to survive in the concentration camps," Margolis said on the play's Web site, warsawthemusical.com.

Margolis' parents were both history teachers when she was younger, and as educators they made sure she knew everything about the Holocaust, detail for detail.

"They were not the type who would gloss over subject matter; a lot was very clear to me growing up," she said.

Margolis's intimacy with her family's experiences during the Holocaust has in many ways shaped her worldview. It definitely affects your life," she said. "It makes you look at certain things that go on today differently, especially when the things are about genocide, like in Darfur. I also think it makes you a lot more vigilant making sure something like this doesn't happen again."

Part of "never again," of course, is telling and retelling the story, as she is doing in "Warsaw."

"It is one of reasons I was drawn to this show," she said. "It's another way to have people understand the events of the time and what happened."

Once Margolis signed on to the play in 2004, she has been especially careful to get the tone just right and has worked with Holocaust historians to make sure the historical material is accurate. One of them, Gail Rosenthal at the Sara and Sam Schoffer Holocaust Resource Center at Richard Stockton College of New Jersey, has made substantial contributions to the show.

"She has been amazing, looking up facts, and coming to every performance," Margolis said. "She also funded us to do an academic program with the show there in March 2009."

"The journey of the piece is amazing, because we start the show while the Warsaw ghetto is still in full bloom and watch its decline," Margolis said, describing the trajectory of the play.

Although Margolis finds the whole piece very moving, it is the uprising that is gripping.

"It is the piece where we show how this group of young, young partisan fighters, the Jewish Fighting Organization, was able to band together and, against all odds, stage this rebellion and inspire so many ghettos and other groups to repeat it during the Holocaust," she explained.

The climax of the play begins with a recitative (with words spoken on pitch to music) of the call to revolt -- using a translation of an actual poster from the ghetto; in it, Jews commanded other Jews not to go to the trains, but instead to start an uprising.

Margolis described the response of the audience, many of whom were survivors, to a full performance of the play at the Museum of the Jewish Heritage in Lower Manhattan: "The feedback was that from that point forward it was absolutely riveting -- to see how they were going to do what they did and carry this out, with basically no weapons and no food."

Margolis grew up in Ventnor, outside of Atlantic City. She studied theater and directing at Ithaca College and, as part of her course credits, spent a year as an intern at McCarter Theatre in Princeton. Since she graduated from Ithaca in 1995, Margolis has split her time between working as a stage director and a Broadway casting director. In the second role, she worked on casting for "Les Misérables," "Phantom of the Opera," "Cats," and "Miss Saigon".

Margolis attributes her success in theater to being aggressive in school, getting internships, working for free, and meeting people. She explained, "Show business is a lot about being really talented and knowing what you're doing and also meeting a lot of the right people."

Margolis is also using her skills to help push the show forward on its journey to Broadway. All of the elements of the play are in place and ready to go, she said. They just need to raise more money.

So how quickly would the play be ready for Broadway?

"If we got the money," said Margolis, "as long as it would take to get a theater."