Job, a hip hop treat

I caught the fantastic show Job: The Hip Hop Musical at the Edmonton Fringe Festival yesterday. Eli Batalion and Jerome Saibil, the show's creators, donned their track suits and took over a bare stage for their fairly astounding re-telling of the story of Job.

Job is an hour of non-stop beats and rhymes that balances perfectly between frenetic, fun, serious and sublimely absurd. It's organized as a hip-hop concept album, with each actor fluidly switching between the various characters (Job Lowe, J. Hoover, Lou Saphire). The music is great, even though some of it resembles standard musical theatre fare more than, say, P.I.M.P. But the parts that are pure hip hop are excellent, and the rhymes are challenging and dense with musical, philosophical and religious references. Kant, Nietzsche, Eminem and Jay-Z all turn up in one way or another.

Oh, and the brilliant choreography deserves special mention. There's a dance that recurs throughout the show, a sort of jiggy pas de deux, that's hilarious. Highly recommended.