Mangerkabaret

Itzik Manger, the poet of many facets. Over the vein of traditional Jewish poetry, both folk and literary, lie Heine-like tones - a macabre repertoire with romantic, mystical and ironic accents - and that slightly uneven, waltzing rhythm so hard to render in Romanian. To this are added a symbolist atmosphere, echoes of a Romanian time and place, and the influence of a social-revolutionary pathos. His singular stance as a troubadour with unmistakable echoes of Villon, and his original reworkings of the Old Testament, place him among the great European poets. In love with nature, proclaiming simplicity yet capable of sophisticated ceremonial bohemianism, pious yet entirely free of bigotry, popular and refined, funambulist and bound in suffering to the nomads and the downtrodden - Manger draws all this together through a powerful personality, through the force of a poet who, for all his protean shifts and his cultural wandering across meridians, sets the stamp of his own time on every guise he takes. The production is built on a script inspired by the poems of Itzik Manger, the national poet of the Yiddish language. His literary work, of a variety hard to match, was addressed in considerable part to the cabaret theatre of the interwar years. In Warsaw and in Bucharest, Itzik Manger championed a poetic theatre in keeping with the biblical tradition, his texts offering an almost postmodern reading of well-known subjects. Manger's name is inseparable from the tradition of Yiddish theatre in Romania, and the production also refers to the period the poet spent in Bucharest." (Andrei Munteanu, director)