At first, even playwright Neena Beber was a bit skeptical. After all, the 60-page journal of Rutka Laskier, a 14-year-old Jewish girl living in Poland in 1943, might not seem like the ideal subject for musical theatre. But after hearing the music composed by Jocelyn Mackenzie and Jeremy Lloyd-Styles—music Beber said has “a very soulful quality”—she realized just how much it “felt right to the spirit of the book.” Now Rutka is making its world premiere at Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park (through Nov. 10), with Beber on book and Mackenzie and Lloyd-Styles on music and lyrics, starting a journey with Broadway in its sights.
The source for the musical is Rutka’s Notebook: A Voice from the Holocaust, published in 2006, which documents the months leading up to Laskier’s death in a concentration camp. Despite the setting, there’s a sense of hope in the story, said Beber and director Wendy C. Goldberg, as we see teens come of age and contemplate how to face the world around them. They see that spirit manifested in what Goldberg called “indie rock protest music,” echoing the spirit of young people unwilling to let fleeting happy moments pass by unnoticed.
“They’re just kids, going through their first crush and their first opportunity to spend time independently with friends,” Goldberg said. “Then here they are, trapped in this environment and still trying to do these things under those circumstances.”
Speaking in mid-July, Beber was sitting with a stack of around 10 Holocaust diaries drawn from a list at the end of Rutka’s Notebook. In the journals, Beber said she saw stories filled with the “emotions and rawness” that come with youth. In addition to being a record of the atrocities of the Holocaust, Beber said, the diaries were themselves an act of resistance.
“There’s so much strength and so much love in these diaries,” Beber said. “There is a sense that the arts create our capacity for empathy and hope, and Rutka does resist by writing. She wants it to be remembered because there is that sense that, if we face history, we can maybe change things. We shouldn’t forget these things that have happened as we create the future of our world.”
Jerald Raymond Pierce (he/him) is the managing editor of American Theatre. jpierce@tcg.org
