Raise Your Spirits Theater is an all-female theater company, which performs for women only.
By RIVKAH LAMBERT ADLERRaise Your Spirits Theater(photo credit: LAURA BEN-DAVID)
Raise Your Spirits Theater was born by email.Fifteen years ago, when Israel was in the midst of a second intifada, the communities of Gush Etzion were hit hard. Deadly terrorist acts crippled the main road leading to Gush Etzion and people stopped going out at night. The general atmosphere was heavy.A group of English-speaking residents wanted to raise the spirits of people in their communities. A discussion on the local Efrat email list began with them asking one another, “What can we do to get out of the doldrums?” Eventually, Sharon Katz suggested, “Let’s put on a show!” Toby Klein Greenwald volunteered to direct.A hundred other women volunteered – to act, create costumes, sell tickets and more.That show, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat by Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber, launched the Raise Your Spirits Summer Stock Company, which later became Raise Your Spirits Theater. Originally, there were two performances scheduled. The demand for tickets was so great that in the end the company performed 12 times.By special invitation from the Rehovot Municipality’s Department of Women’s Empowerment and the mayor of Rehovot, the all-female theater company, which performs for women only, will reprise its ninth Bible-based musical show. Called Sisters! The Daughters of Tzelofchad, it is based on a story of five sisters, as told in the Book of Numbers.Toby Klein Greenwald, author of Sisters!, is one of the powerhouse women behind Raise Your Spirits Theater.She’s a cofounder and the artistic director of the company. She’s also a teacher, playwright, journalist and photographer.Raise Your Spirits Theater gives Klein Greenwald an outlet for two of her lifelong passions – Torah and theater.Her theater career started first, when she began producing neighborhood shows at the age of 10. A few years later, her love of Torah intensified.
“I grew up in Cleveland and went to Yavne [High School for Girls]. I knew at 16 that I wanted to study Torah seriously. I went to Michlalah in Bayit Vegan, the first post-high school program for higher Torah learning for women. I had studied under Nechama Leibowitz at Machon Gold before Michlalah.”Today, she studies with Jewish scholars Shani Taragin, Dr. Bryna Levy and Erella Yedgar. When she’s writing a new show, she consults with them on nuances of biblical stories.It takes Klein Greenwald and her writing partners, including Arlene Chertoff, Sharon Katz, Yael Valier and Avital Macales, about 12 to 18 months to write a new show.“When I write a show, I know that the learning that I put into it is the learning that I received at Michlalah and at the other schools I was in. Being able to combine love of Torah and love of theater is a dream come true,” Klein Greenwald acknowledged.Torah and theater is not a natural pairing – especially for religious women who generally do not perform in front of men.“My great joy is watching women and girls bring out and develop their talents. Sometimes they are shy, but you know it’s there, and you want to help them find it. I love watching them on stage, taking a bow, to see how far they’ve come. This gives me great nahat [pleasure] to see young people come out of their shells and gain confidence in themselves.”Klein Greenwald pointed to a distinctive accomplishment of Raise Your Spirits Theater.“We have given religious women a voice through a medium that was not regarded as a religious medium.Giving them a voice in what was not previously considered something that religious women did opened up new vistas.“My vision has always been to include as many different types of women and girls in the show as possible. For example, we have an eclectic group of Sisters! choreographers, including one who was carried on her mother’s back across Ethiopia, a few born here, one who studied at the Broadway Dance Center, and more. In Sisters! we had two actresses who were not Orthodox.“This coming year, when we’ll be doing a revival of Ruth & Naomi in the Fields of Bethlehem, we have cast members who are not religious, some who are haredi, and some from the national religious community.“For the character of Ruth, I specifically sought out converts. We’ll have three converts in the show, including one from Italy who was a professional hiphop choreographer/ musical theater writer before she made aliya. Playing Ruth is a newly religious woman whose family made aliya 12 years ago from Morocco.Another cast member is a convert who attended a music academy in Moscow and lives in Jerusalem today.”All Raise Your Spirits productions are musicals.Although she has been known to belly dance on stage, Klein Greenwald generally limits herself to speaking roles. “I recognize good singers, but I’m not a singer myself.”Instead, she spends most of her time upstairs with the sound and light crew. The crews tend to be men, largely because, as she explains, the equipment is heavy. “The next frontier is women doing sounds and light,” Klein Greenwald predicted.Raise Your Spirits Theater is run by women for women, but there is one man whose work is absolutely critical to the success of the company. Klein Greenwald writes the lyrics and Mitch Clyman composes all the songs and records all the music used during performances.Sisters! is his sixth production.In collaboration with Klein Greenwald, he’s acutely aware of “working with an extremely creative, talented person.” For Clyman, the content of the shows exposes him to a female perspective on classic biblical stories.Klein Greenwald calls Clyman’s music “magical.”Torah teaching mixed with creative expression are crucial to the success of every original production of Raise Your Spirits Theater. But that’s not all it takes.Someone has to take care of all the logistical and technical aspects of the show, like booking rehearsal space, deciding on dates and locations of performances, overseeing the graphic design, getting posters printed, supervising the production of the playbill, coordinating the volunteers, submitting the newspaper ads and much more. That’s the job of the producers, who this year were Eudice Spitz and Tamar Rubin.Despite insisting “I don’t do any of the creative stuff,” Spitz takes small character parts in some of the shows. And she takes pride in her ability to solicit ads in support of the production.“I happen to be good at asking people for money,” she said with a laugh.Spitz has been involved almost from the beginning.She saw the company’s first production. The next year, when the notice came out announcing auditions for Esther & the Secrets in the King’s Court, the company’s first original production, Spitz was going through a tough time with her mother and her sister, who were both hospitalized with serious illnesses.“Maybe being in it will raise my spirits,” Spitz thought.“I wanted to do something other than thinking about hospitals, sickness, doctors and work. I got into the first show and it helped me get out of my everyday life. It was very therapeutic.”Spitz was invited to join the advisory board, and in 2010 Raise Your Spirits Theater became a non-profit organization. “Just recently, we got our tax exempt status, so we’re very official now,” Spitz boasted.“It’s really all about sisterhood,” Spitz explained, “To raise spirits of ourselves or anyone who comes to see us. It evolved into a support group. This is what keeps me going.“I’ve known Toby since the age of 12. We grew up in Cleveland and now we both live in Efrat. But when you work intensively together, then you become closer.What keeps me in the group is really friendship.”“It’s a tremendous amount of work and I say every time I’m not going to do it again.Because you feel a certain tremendous commitment to my friends and to the group, I feel it’s a worthwhile endeavor. I do know that we do something very special for women at large.”The biblical story of Sisters! The Daughters of Tzelofchad is not as wellknown as other stories Raise Your Spirits has produced.Klein Greenwald explained, “I’ve loved this story ever since I can remember. I named a daughter Noa for one of the Bnos Tzelofchad. In 2011, I saw that Dr. Avivah Zornberg was giving a shiur on Shavuot. That shiur was the first time I heard the daughters referred to as sisters; it really inspired me.”She also acknowledged that “some scenes in the show, and the character of Achla [wife of Tzelofchad] were inspired by the book The Daughters Victorious by Rabbi Shlomo Wexler.”According to Spitz, the message of this show is, “Sisterhood.The power of women. A message for Jewish women for the generations. That women, from the beginning of the Jewish people have a place, rights.They always have and should continue to stand up and speak out. Five strong women get together and assert their rights before Moses, the greatest of men, and they get their wish.”“The women who play the five adult sisters have been bonding in a way that’s really like sisters. The actresses have so gotten into their roles, they act like sisters.” Klein Greenwald observed.Spitz encourages “every female from the age of someone who can sit in a seat without squirming,” to come see the show, which has both English and Hebrew subtitles.She recalls that her mother’s Filipina caretaker came to a previous show and loved it.“You don’t have to be religious or even know the Bible. You’ll learn the story through the songs. You don’t even have to be Jewish. It’s an extremely enjoyable feel-good show.”After seeing the show in Gush Etzion earlier in 2016, Valerie Pessin of Efrat shared her reaction with Klein Greenwald.“It made me think about the story in a new and deeper way – how brave these women were, driven by their intense love and longing to be in Eretz Yisrael.As an olah, this theme really struck a chord with me, as did many other messages in the show – the importance of family, of keeping your family legacy going, standing up for what is important to you. And all of this is conveyed through amazingly beautiful music and heavenly voices.”Sisters! was written and directed by Toby Klein Greenwald.Music by Mitch Clyman. Produced by Eudice Spitz and Tamar Rubin. Sara Orenstein is the lead choreographer and Dalia Uriah HaCohen and Aviva Karpel, assisted by Grace Chana Woolf, serve as the music directors.The special performance is scheduled for September 12 at 8 p.m. at the Heichal Hatarbut in Rehovot. For tickets, contact Lotus at (08) 946-7890 or Sylvia at (08) 649-0847.