Canada's ex-prime minister resurfaces as a collaborator in musical theater
Los Angeles
FORGET JUDY GARLAND AND Mickey Rooney. At the tail-end of the 90s, their "We have a barn - let's put on a show" routine just won't wash anymore. The new millennium calls for a new kind of show capable of addressing fin-de-siecle concerns only hinted at in "Angels in America" and "Rent."
Enter Kim Campbell, 50, Canada's former prime minister and current consul general in Los Angeles, and Hershey Felder, 29-year-old composer, concert pianist and scion of a noted Canadian rabbinical family. The unlikely collaborators are working on a musical called "Noah's Arc (sic): The Story of a Man Who Had a Chance to Save the World," taking its cue from kabbalistic accounts of the last deluge.
Campbell - who began the collaboration as Felder's "dramaturge," polishing lyrics and clarifying concepts, and ended up composing lyrics alongside him - experienced her own version of the end of things in 1993 when, having inherited a lame-duck premiership from Brian Mulroney, she presided over the inglorious implosion of Canada's Progressive Conservative Party. For his part, Felder, the nephew of the late Toronto Jewish scholar Rabbi Gedalia Felder and a veteran of musical theater in New York, drew on his intent encounter with Auschwitz, where he had been dispatched on behalf of Stephen Spielberg's Holocaust archives.
They met when Felder visited the Canadian Consulate in downtown L.A. to renew his passport for his trip to Poland. The relationship blossomed: They talked, they ate ("Food," says Campbell, "was always a major part of our inspiration") and eventually, they read kabbalah in English translation. After considering the case of Noah - "the first survivor," as Felder calls him - and then identifying parallels between the Flood and the Holocaust, they decided to mount a musical spectacle.
Theirs may be the only account of the Flood as told by a Greek chorus of sexually abused animals. In so doing, the piece takes few prisoners. It assails God for delivering obliteration upon the masterwork He/She deliberately wired with flaws, Noah for lacking the gumption to risk his place on the Ark by protesting God's overreaction, and humankind in general for involving innocent animals. "It's pretty dark," says Campbell.
The play was showcased as a work in progress last June at a UCLA benefit for a Jewish children's museum. An operatic musical that asks whether something good can come out of something evil, "Noah's Arc" featured 26 members of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, a cast of 18 Broadway veterans, and the efforts of anyone else in the music and theater world who either principal could call on for a favor. Hershey says he paid top dollar for the cast's talents, money they raised from private investors. Two performances attracted such luminaries as Norman Jewison, Arthur Hiller and other fixtures of the city's Jewish and expatriate-Canadian communities who came as much out of curiosity about Kim Campbell's reincarnation as about Noah's adventure.
After some reworking ("We're going to focus on who this man Noah really was," says Campbell) the play is set to go into commercial run in Los Angeles next June. Neither Campbell nor Feller expects to make money from the venture.
Sitting with Kim (nee Avril Phaedra) Campbell of Vancouver and Hershey Felder, of Montreal's largely Jewish Cote St. Luc neighborhood in the living room of Campbell's home in L.A.'s Hancock Park, a stately residence owned by the Canadian government, their pairing seems a bit curious. Campbell is a brilliant former lecturer in Soviet affairs, an expert on Stalin's murderous attempt to rewire human nature. After studying political science, she completed a law degree. Within a decade after graduation, Campbell went from Vancouver school board trustee to Canada's native affairs minister, then defense and justice minister, before reaching the nation's top spot.
So how does a former resident of the prime minister's official Ottawa residence at 24 Sussex come off characterizing her collaboration with Felder as bashert, using this and other Yiddish colloquialisms that pepper her speech without sounding affected? Her parents were Scotch-Irish, but her childhood friends were Jewish; she was seared, in her early teens, by books and movies about the Holocaust; and though she is not big enough on dogma to consider converting, her first marriage, which lasted nine years, was to a Jewish academic and she remains close to her Jewish step-daughters from that marriage; she's lived in various Jewish communities throughout the Canadian West, and as justice minister, she pursued Nazi war criminals residing in her native land like no government figure before her and - despite assertions to the contrary by current Justice Minister Allan Rock - possibly no one since.
And since hooking up with Felder here in Los Angeles, she also presides over Shabbat dinners at the consular residence every six weeks or so. These gatherings, which usually attract up to 25 guests, include candle-lighting, Kiddush and the singing of such traditional Sabbath songs as "Eshet Hayil" ("Woman of Valor") and "Shalom Aleichem."
"We run it strictly by the book," says Felder, who has himself been spotted around town assuming freelance cantorial duties when the whim strikes, including Rosh Hashanah services this year.
Campbell's extracurricular activities, meanwhile, raise the question of what brings a woman of her stature and accomplishment to undertake a clearly second-tier position as "cultural ambassador to Hollywood," as the Canadian government's "Prime Ministers" Web page calls her role. The answer: Campbell has come here, like so many others, to reinvent herself.
The 1993 Canadian Federal election defeat was a crushing personal blow for Campbell, who lost not only the premiership and her own seat, but was also saddled with the responsibility for leading the once-glorious Tory party, which had founded Canada and built its national railroad, to a decimating defeat.
Apres LE DELUGE, CAMPBELL left for Harvard, where she conducted a seminar while working on her memoirs, a task she completed in 1995. "That helped me complete a period of life that was very important to me," she told The Jerusalem Report.
"Being in politics is a lot like being pregnant - you either are or you aren't. I needed to decide what I was doing next. What appealed to me about coming to L.A. was that this is a very interesting place if you're interested in public policy. California is on the cutting edge of a lot of trends that are important to Canada and the rest of the world."
Before becoming a lawyer or public servant, moreover, Campbell had distinguished herself as an artist. Once an avid cello student, by the time she was in law school she found herself tasked with scoring and writing lyrics for the yearly theatrical review.
"I brought my cello down with me, hoping to reconnect with the artistic side of my brain," she says. "And it was such total serendipity to meet Hershey when I did. 'Noah' is really Hershey's baby. But I think I was in a place to ask, as I believe the piece must, 'When you have a seat on the Ark, what is your moral responsibility to question the Flood? How do you make a social contract behind a veil of self-interest?'
"Noah preaches that people should repent, but it never occurs to him to say to God, 'Maybe you're overreacting?' "