CCAE Theatricals to premiere musical about 5 Jewish teen diarists who perished in the Holocaust

Back in 2008, Jordan Beck read a e-book of excerpts from the diaries of five Jewish teenagers who died in the Holocaust. One particular of the diarists, Anne Frank, is a title all people is aware of, but Beck was amazed he’d never heard of the other 4.

Now, 14 several years afterwards, Beck is all set to start “Witnesses,” a earth premiere musical that presents voice to 5 lesser-known Jewish teenager diarists and Holocaust victims. About the several years, he has recruited 5 various songwriting teams to inform every teen’s particular person story in song, as well as Tony Award winner Robert L. Freedman to publish the reserve for the 90-minute musical. It opens July 15 at the California Middle for the Arts, Escondido.

“Witnesses” is the first initial musical produced by 2-year-old CCAE Theatricals, of which Beck is managing producer and J. Scott Lapp is inventive director. Beck conceived the exhibit and co-wrote some of its music, and Lapp is the show’s phase director.

While studying the 2008 ebook, Beck claimed he felt a personalized connection to David Rabinowicz, who was 12 years outdated when he started his war diary in Poland in May well 1942. He was despatched to a Nazi labor camp two several years afterwards. Beck claimed he was struck by how David and the other teen diarists skilled several of the similar concerns that teenagers do nowadays, but they also wrote about having to don Jewish stars on their clothing, getting rid of the suitable to trip community transportation and experiencing their incredibly uncertain long run.

“Today, youngsters get so wrapped up with the very little points and they experience like existence is so hard. In this present, the kids are working with the very same stresses in everyday living, like crushes, not acquiring good grades and getting into arguments with their siblings and mother and father. But then on top rated of that they’re becoming marginalized. What I located so inspiring was that up right until the level they stopped composing, they have been nonetheless holding on to hope,” Beck explained.

A songwriter himself, Beck initially imagined “Witnesses” would be a 15-song cycle, with 3 tracks for every teenager. In 2011, he informed songwriter Adam Gwon about the concept, and Gwon wrote the show’s title tune “We Will All Be Witnesses.” In excess of the following quite a few many years, Beck acquired the musical legal rights for the diaries. Then he hand-picked composer mates whose crafting and thematic preferences he believed had been very best suited to write the tunes for each teenager.

Beck wrote the lyrics and composer Gerald Sternbach the songs for the tracks based mostly on Rabinowicz’s diary. Gwon wrote the songs and lyrics for Moshe Flinker, a Dutch Jew who was 18 when he died in the Auschwitz death camp in Poland. Matt Gould, whose musical “Lempicka” is now running at La Jolla Playhouse, wrote the music and lyrics for Yitskhok Rudashevski, who was 15 when he was shot to dying in a Jewish ghetto in his indigenous Lithuania in 1943. Composer Carmel Dean and lyricist Mindi Dickstein have collaborated on the songs for Romania-born Éva Heyman, who died in Auschwitz at age 13 in 1944. And Anna K. Jacobs wrote the tunes for Renia Spiegel of Poland, who was 18 when she was executed by Nazi police who uncovered her magic formula hiding location.

In 2021, Beck attained out to Freedman — who received the 2014 Tony Award for the guide of his Broadway musical “A Gentleman’s Manual to Enjoy and Murder” — to talk to if he’d be fascinated in doing work on the task. Freedman agreed and produced dialogue, monologues and ensemble times from unused lines from the teens’ diaries.

“What he did brilliantly is find all these little nuggets and gems from just about every of the diaries, a sentence right here and there and weaved with each other dialogue,” Beck said. “I’d look at it to (the musical) ‘Assassins’ in how it normally takes the characters out of their time and location and has them interact. They had shared encounters but did not know each individual other.”

The demonstrate finally arrived with each other in a two-7 days workshop past tumble in Escondido. To assure authenticity, the inventive team worked intently with Jewish specialist and historian Raymond Zachary as properly as Natalie Iscovich, the granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor. Lapp mentioned the workshop was a profound knowledge for absolutely everyone.

“You normally hope they are moved and react in the vogue you hoped they would … and when we ended one particular of the displays of ‘Witnesses,’ we experienced this frustrating aid of emotion and enjoyment and passion for the job that was very worthwhile,” Lapp explained.

Lapp explained “Witnesses” might be about activities that occurred long in the past, but the time to master from them is now.

“We have some serious challenges that have permeated into our society,” Lapp explained. “We all know it and can’t fake that we never. It is named dislike. It’s known as bullying. It is referred to as intolerance. It is called racism. It’s called anti-Semitism. Throughout the program of the exhibit, the viewers will be posed with a question: What will you do? It is these classes that we need to stroll absent from the theater wondering about. We are all witnesses.”