Summary
The J2 Spotlight Musical Theater Company presents this powerful musical about a spirited vagabond and his timid friend in Crete. A story of friendship, love, and embracing life.
Friday, April 25, 2025 at 7:30 PM Apr 25, 2025, 7:30 PM
I so badly want to give this a better rating. This production of “Zorba” is delightful in many ways. For the uninitiated, this is a lesser-known 1968 musical of impressive pedigree, with book by Joseph Stein (three years after “Fiddler on the Roof”) and songs by Kander & Ebb (two years after “Cabaret”).
It boasts a pretty heady set of themes. The opening number proudly announces that “life is what you do when you’re waiting to die,” and our leads explore that idea at length, with particular emphasis on who we love, when and how we let them in, and the consequences of our decisions. Zorba lives in the moment and confronts life on his terms, brash, flirtatious, drunk, with a proud traditional masculinity. Nikos is deliberative, bookish, and a little naive, allowing life to come to him. They go through some things together and both learn a little something from the experience.
Stylistically, “Cabaret” is definitely the best point of comparison, and you can feel its fingerprints all over this show. The excellent score has little echoes of “Wilkommen” in the instrumentation. The humor is similarly lewd. Tonally, both shows start in a lighter, sillier, almost aimless place before much darker story beats start to creep in.
Where the shows differ, of course, is in the key story conceit. “Zorba” swaps out the metaphorical trappings of the Kit Kat Club for a plot and setting inspired by classical Greek dramas and epics; a brief framing prologue explicitly introduces this as an old Greek story and gives us an omniscient chorus. Most events take place in one location. Our male protagonists are philosophical archetypes flanked by women who have no agency and are defined only by their relationships to men - one of the female leads is named only as “The Widow.”
I think you probably see where I’m going here, but I want to take a second and note that I really appreciate that this production exists. Staging things like this off-off-Broadway is clearly a passion project for someone and a wonderful resource for the community, especially for someone like me who’s new to theater and wouldn’t otherwise have a chance to see something like this. The company is talented and they get a ton of mileage out of the small stage. I had a genuinely great night at the theater and plan to return for more of their productions.
That being said, it would be hard for me to recommend seeing this for anyone other than theater geeks. It’s a worthwhile show with some real strengths (the OBC recording is great), but, ultimately, it’s about two men manipulating women for sex, destroying the lives and livelihoods of a small village, and walking away shrugging with moral relativity. It’s niche for a reason.