Singer-songwriter Ben Caplan mines Jewish roots to explore persecution then and now By: Erin Lebar Posted: 7:00 PM CDT Wednesday, Apr. 3, 2019

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This article was published 02/04/2019 (2096 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

No one can accuse roots/folk singer-songwriter Ben Caplan of not being able to multi-task.

For more than a year, the Halifax-based performer has been touring two projects simultaneously; a theatre production, Old Stock: A Refugee Love Story, and his third album, Old Stock, which pulls most of its content from the play.

“In order to keep a foot in both worlds, it’s really meant moving directly from one tour to the next over and over again… but it’s been really rewarding and really a lot of fun having the opportunity to change it up from one performance context to another,” says Caplan.

The play is a co-creation from the minds of Caplan, Christian Barry and award-winning playwright Hannah Moscovitch, which tells the story of Jewish-Romanian refugees coming to Canada in the early 20th century. The production — which won top awards at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and had a seven-week run Off-Broadway, becoming a New York Times critic’s pick — explores themes of migration, identity and culture, often through a darkly humorous lens.

Caplan was already known for his theatrical lean prior to Old Stock: A Refugee Love Story; his work is melodramatic and full of charisma and wit. His writing is clever and funny, but also emotional. His deep, gravelly tone would be the ideal choice to voice a Disney villain.

On Old Stock, he’s taken those same distinguishing characteristics and applied them to a serious (and timely) topic, using comedic elements to help carry the emotional load.

“I have been libeled as a wanderer, this is not the case, I have a home, it’s just that it’s an inconvenient place right now,” he sings in the opening line of the album’s first track, Traveller’s Curse, setting the cheeky tone of the rest of the project.

“You know, I think that there’s a reason why people cry at both their most joyful and sad moments. I think there’s something intrinsically linked about joy and sorrow. Just from a very practical standpoint of figuring out how to access the depth of each emotion we’re looking at. I think it requires, to some degree, from a technical standpoint, that dichotomy,” says Caplan.

“On an even bigger note, for me, it’s just such a big part of my cultural heritage having grown up Jewish. Being able to laugh at the darkness and make jokes about nasty things is a survival tool, and a piece of cultural technology that was passed down to me,” he says with a laugh.

)Caplan and his band, the Casual Smokers, will be in Winnipeg on Saturday, April 6 with the concert tour; in terms of the live experience, be it with the play or in a concert setting, Caplan hopes the narrative he and his collaborators have crafted is one that resonates deeply with audiences.

“I think that the goal with a lot of the songwriting and with the creation of this work was to respond to the way in which… there’s a broad way of speaking about refugees and about migrants in terms of numbers or in terms of waves or in terms of hordes, collectives, groupings of people. For me, the process was about humanizing individual stories and thinking about individual lives and trying to make it very personal,” he says.

“So what I hope is that people will come away from listening to this album and from seeing the play and even coming to see our show and will have points of contact with which they can reflect on what it means to be searching, what it means to be struggling, what it means to have to make a new home and to be able to relate to that on an individual level.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9xdD-a1lsA&t=13s

erin.lebar@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @NireRabel

Erin Lebar
Manager of audience engagement for news

Erin Lebar spends her time thinking of, and implementing, ways to improve the interaction and connection between the Free Press newsroom and its readership.

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