Shtetl Home Companion (SHC), one of Santa Barbara’s most unique performance outfits, presents a brand-new musical/theatrical production, Nights in Smyrna. The show continues SHC’s tradition of vintage radio-drama style storytelling with live musical accompaniment. This original story, by Shtetl Home’s Fred Nadis, plays against a soundtrack of Sephardic music from the last several centuries. Nights in Smyrna is a one-night engagement, running September 5at La Cumbre Plaza’s Fine Line Gallery.
The play takes place in early 20th-century Smyrna, a bustling port city in pre-WWI Turkey. This Ottoman–Empire trading center had a multicultural population of Turks, Greeks, Armenians, and assorted Europeans. “In Smyrna of 1910,” says actor and musician Andrea Fishman, “all of these different communities were living together, doing business together, hanging out together, and making music together.” Smyrna was also home to a population of Sephardic Jews, who migrated to the area after being expelled from the Iberian Peninsula in the 15th century. “They brought with them their language,” Fishman says. “Sephardic folk songs and oral tradition songs that had been passed down for generations and generations.”
Nights in Smyrna is a coming-of-age story that follows a young man who meets and falls in love with a nightclub singer (played by Fishman) while working in his family’s tavern. The plot, say Fishman and Nadis, is inspired by the Sephardic Ladino (old Judeo-Spanish) tavern songs audiences will hear in the show. “Some of these songs go back hundreds of years,” says Nadis, describing relatable themes like the joys of drinking and the devastation of lost love. The music is played by Flor de Kanela, an acoustic ensemble that specializes in Sephardic music…