Nava Zuckerman freely admits to having the hots for Leonard Cohen. “I have had an affair with Leonard for many years. It’s probably a good job he didn’t know about it,” she adds with a chuckle. “And I’m not put off by his constant cheating with women, and with himself; I still love him.”
That fuels and infuses the Tmu-na Theater founder-artistic director’s work on Leonard, the forthcoming music-based portrayal of the late lamented Canadian-Jewish poet-musician scheduled for two airings later this month at her home base venue in Tel Aviv (August 28-29, 8 p.m. and 2 p.m., respectively).
Leonard is a poetic performance work that wends its way through some of the most dramatic junctures in Cohen’s life. Considering the fabled troubadour’s well-documented musical career and love life, one presumes Zuckerman was spoiled for choice of reference points for the script.
Following the source material
After catching something of an impromptu gig Cohen gave here in the early 1980s, Zuckerman delved ever more deeply into his peerless lyrics and accompanying scores.
A few years later, while on tour in the States with her play Hamesh Za’akot (Five Screams), she got to grips with some of his discography. “I bought a cassette of his, and we played it all the time in the van as we traveled to our shows,” she recalls. “My daughter and I used to sing all his songs together.”
Fast-forward 20 or so years of gestation, and longtime thespian sparring partner Gil Alon kicks the project into overdrive. “One day in 2022 I ran into Gil, and he told me he’d just come back from Berlin, where he met a director who told him he should portray Leonard Cohen on the stage. I have been working on this production ever since.”
Rather than jumping at the opportunity to have an actor she knew so well on board the Cohen train, Zuckerman was initially taken aback by Alon’s sudden burst of zeal. “I thought, Hey, this is my idea! I don’t want him taking a piece of my action.”
But that was just the knee-jerk reaction of someone who had held Leonard Cohen, the man and artist, close to her heart for many a year. Before long, the two began dipping into the raw material.
Zuckerman quickly thought up a plan of action. “We were doing [classic Greek tragedy] Antigone at the time, and, in between performances, I sat down with Gil and I said: ‘Let’s read everything he wrote – absolutely everything – as long as it takes, and without committing to anything.’ I told him I had to be sure I knew everything there was to know, that I had everything about Leonard Cohen down pat. I wasn’t going to do anything with Leonard, if I was not convinced there was a reason for doing it. We wanted to be faithful to the written word, to Leonard the poet.”
That quest for perfection was spot-on for a project designed to unfold the life and oeuvre of a poet who famously said he sweated blood over every word he wrote.
Zuckerman has stayed as close as she possibly can to the source.
“Every single word that is spoken or sung on the stage comes from Leonard,” she says.
Her referencing the feted troubadour by his given name adds to the sense of intimacy and heightened feelings the director says she has harbored and nurtured for the Canadian icon for so long.
Bringing the show together
This is clearly a labor of love, but it is not just a matter of Zuckerman devising a means for fulfilling a long-held personal dream. In fact, despite her passion for Cohen’s work, she was not completely sold on the idea of getting the show together until the advent of the tragic events of October 7. Things had to fall in place before she would even entertain the notion of a production.
“Gil and I read all Leonard’s books and poems, and the lyrics to all his songs, but there was no premeditated thoughts about writing and performing the play,” she notes. “But when October 7 happened, suddenly every sentence [Cohen wrote] resonated with everything that was happening. It was crazy.”
She provides the literary collateral for that. “Leonard wrote: [in the title track of 1992 album The Future] ‘love’s the only engine of survival.’ Look what’s happening. We’ve thrown out all the news in the newspapers, and we draw all our strength from our own private patch, from home, from our own home.”
I’m not so sure that the majority of us have dispensed with the IV connection to current affairs and breaking news, but I got her point about looking inward for a spiritually and physically healthier way forward.
Alon is joined on stage by actor-musicians Anna Binyamin and Gal Peer, the former a classically trained pianist, while Peer plays viola. Alon also provides the Hebrew translation for the dialogue and performs Cohen’s songs in the original English.
Interestingly, Alon is an advanced practitioner of Zen Buddhism, one of several areas of spiritual enlightenment Cohen explored in his later years.
From experience, the decision to feature two actresses along with the Cohen character seems perfectly natural. The first time I caught Cohen live was back in 1975 when he was supported by two gorgeous female backing singers resplendent in pinstripe suits. The costume design for the Tmu-na production tends less to haute couture, but the gender balance still fits the Cohen cast bill.
Having bolstered her ardor for Cohen and his work with the requisite elbow grease research, it was time to face the music, literally.
“Gradually we began extricating the songs we felt most connected to,” Zuckerman explains. “It was very hard to choose which songs to do, from all the material we’d read.” With 15 studio albums, four EPs, 10 live records, and nine compilations in the Cohen discography, Zuckerman and Alon had their work cut out for them.
A tactical approach was required. “We began to consider the music according to topics – his approach to art, to society, relationships between men and women, fatherhood, everything. We ended up with an hour-long show, with seven songs.”
Bringing Leonard's spirit to the stage
Leonard is not meant as a bio of the great singer-songwriter-novelist-poet. Zuckerman would like her audiences to go home with more than just vignettes of Cohen’s life and snippets of his heartfelt numbers ringing in their ears.
“We bring Leonard’s spirit to the stage,” she says. “It was clear to me from the start that I didn’t want Gil to portray Leonard. This was not a matter of an actor trying to imitate him. It is more about the way Gil connected with the text we chose. This wise man [Cohen] has something to tell us, about war and about love, about God and self-acceptance.”
Cohen, despite all the megastardom he achieved, particularly in the last decade or so of his life, never strutted his stuff. He always gave the impression of being a deep thinker, and never played the guru.
“He never rested on his laurels,” Zuckerman observes. “He said, in the end, thanks for everything, although it may have all been a mistake. He was never satisfied. He was like a bottomless pit. He, for example, said I always worked ceaselessly but I never called it art. It was just comfortable, like a horse in front of a cart. I am just a little Jew who wrote things from the Bible. It’s not my job to explain the history of mankind.”
That may very well have been the case, but Cohen certainly conveyed considered sagacious observations and deep emotion in his work, both of which could do nicely for us all these days.
For tickets and more information: (03) 561-1211 and tmu-na.org.il/?CategoryID=220&ArticleID=6200