Timely reflections from the cast and creative team of Amid Falling Walls
Amid Falling Walls premieres this Monday, November 20; and while the cast and creative team have been busy refining and polishing the production, we asked them to take a break to talk to us. They shared what’s been inspiring them and moving them through this process and also what this production means to them at this moment in time. These are their thoughts as they do the work of bringing Amid Falling Walls to the stage:
Dani Apple, cast
Working on Amid Falling Walls has been a profoundly moving experience. The fact that the writers of the materials were living through incomprehensible times and yet still found a way to escape through music and poetry brings me to tears. With the current rise in antisemitism, we are heartbreakingly seeing more and more parallels. It is so imperative that we hold each other close, keep telling these stories, and allow the voices of these writers to live on.
John Reed, cast
This is a story about heroes of the Holocaust whose names we have never heard of and who made sure to keep our religious and cultural spirit, creativity, our fight and our zest for life to last beyond all the horrific atrocities they endured. We should celebrate them and honour them by hearing their songs and poems and by doing so, know that we shall overcome.
It is all too unfortunate that this show resonates so deeply and I believe to see a Jewish story told by Jewish artists right now gives me all the solace in the world. To know that while there have always been and always will be attempts to get rid of us, we will never die. We are here and we always will be.
It is one of the great honours of my life to be telling the stories of my grandparents and ancestors who went through the unimaginable and still managed to resist in their own way. This will be my first production with an all Jewish cast since my last high school musical at my Jewish day school, so that is incredibly moving to me and to share the stage with this caliber of actors and singers is a privilege.
Avram Mlotek, libretto
Our production arrives at a time when the cowardly face of antisemitism has resurfaced all over the globe. These songs, poems and testimony remind us of the resilient power Jews hold—then and now.
Motl Didner, director
Amid Falling Walls is a reminder that we have always endured adversity. Once again, when we are under attack, we can find a measure of comfort in our culture and performing arts.
Folksbiene is proud to bring Amid Falling Walls—a testament to resilience—to the stage for the first time. To hear these powerful Yiddish songs, knowing their origin, is to experience the capacity of art to express the endurance of the human spirit in the face of horror.
The National Yiddish Theatre’s production of Amid Falling Walls will play a limited engagement from November 14 through December 10 at Edmond J. Safra Hall at the Museum of Jewish Heritage – A Living Memorial to the Holocaust (36 Battery Place).
