I love your show, but I feel it should be completely changed.”

With those words from Moshe Kepten, Artistic Director of the National Theatre of Israel in Tel Aviv, I set to work on the show that would become Masada 1942.

Originally the brainchild of composer Shuki Levy, who had begun work decades before on a musical about the biblical account of the rebel Jews on a mountain fortress in the Judean desert who died fighting off the Romans in 70 AD, Masada became Imagine This, from an idea by Glenn Berenbeim wherein the story would be told from the perspective of a family of Jewish actors in the Warsaw ghetto of WWII, where it played the West End of London in 2008 before finally coming back to me 10-to-12 years later to do a page-one rewrite of the original book by Glenn, refocused with new songs by me and Shuki, to be called Masada 1942.

By the time I arrived in Israel to attend my first tech rehearsals of Masada 1942, Moshe Kepten and I had met several times in New York (always for days at a time) over the two years since he uttered his immortal (if all too familiar to a writer) dictum. The sessions had been enormously fruitful, and efficient. Moshe was decisive about what he liked and what he didn’t, what worked and what didn’t, and whether it was the language barrier or the man himself, the distinctive lack of bullshit or coddling in English was the perfect fit for the amount of time we had and the task at hand. I adored working on this new script and lyrics with Moshe Kepten. After about a year and a half, we more or less had a draft we liked.

But as I walked down the aisle at the Habima Theatre, my collaborator/partner/friend/brother Shuki intercepted me in the aisle. “Kepten is an incredible editor,” Shuki began, taking great pains to reassure me. “He’s moved some things around, just made some other things clearer… you will love it.” Of course… my work had all been translated into Hebrew, a language I had not brooked since my Bar Mitzvah, and that was some… thousand years ago, and I pretty much had faked my haftarah by pronouncing it all phonetically anyway at the time, so it could have been a musical about dancing hamantaschen and I wouldn’t have known the difference. But something in Shuki’s reassurances felt more like a pre-emptive strike.

What I could see and make out, however, was beautiful. What Kepten was able to accomplish visually was breathtaking in its beauty, conceptual elegance and simplicity. And the actors… all of them, a revelation. They had taken this material, internalized it, and were delivering it from a place of great depth and pain.This was their story. I could see that there were moments I couldn’t quite reconcile with what I had sent from America to what had reportedly been a rehearsal process that had been protracted by budget dilemmas, governmental interference, and, of course -- bomb strikes. 

The show opened and was an immediate success. Whatever it had taken for Moshe Kepten and his company to get it to opening night and into the theatre’s repertory had been worth it. The show was to be filmed on six cameras and subtitled for future productions. I would soon receive the back-translation to script the subtitles.

And that’s when the schmaltz hit the seder plate. No, that’s wrong. It wasn’t schmaltz at all. What it was… was uncanny. Kepten’s liberties with “editing” and “moving things around,” even going so far as to write some moments with the company to fill in a hole here or a transition there, made the story flow the way it needed to.

Normally, I would have hit the roof. You can’t just make changes. That’s against the rules. That’s against… everything. But I understood. Bombs are being shot out of the sky while you’re in pre-tech. Maybe a back and forth between an American writer in New York City and a translator in Tel Aviv (the great Daniel Efrat, brilliant as he was) is not the most efficient way to stagger across the finish line. It couldn’t have been (that much) better had I been there. I made some adjustments after that to the translation, but seriously, I can think of no other director who could have gotten away with what Moshe Kepten did, not just with me, but with the show he so clearly understood and loved, that would ever lead me to trust them with one of my babies again. And I can’t wait to place my trust in Moshe Kepten again.