Bringing Noah’s Ark into the modern age

For Ari Jacob, October 7 was this generation’s biblical flood. We are all Noah, scrambling our way through the waters, trying to find our breath again. It’s part of what led him to write the new Jewish Australian musical, After the Flood. The other part is his fascination with Noah.

“Here is a man described as righteous, given extraordinary clarity and an enormous responsibility. Yet his story ends with him drunk, naked and diminished. That feels painfully human,” Jacob told The AJN. “We can have moments when we understand exactly what we’re here to do, and then lose our way completely.”

After the Flood, starring Deborah Conway and Simon Starr, follows a contemporary Melbourne Jewish family as they are forced to confront their differences. Jacob said he set the musical in Melbourne because it is the world he knows and the one his audience can best relate to, particularly when it comes to family dynamics.

“At a Shabbat table, you can have several generations of Jewish history sitting alongside anargument about someone’s boyfriend or whether they’ll put on a kippah. Something apparentlysmall can carry an enormous weight,” he said.

Before writing the musical, Jacob conducted extensive research with a cross-section of the local community, from rabbis and mothers to converts, artists and teachers.