Rap saga has legs

JOB II's road test. An off-Broadway gig is being negotiated

Broadway could be just a hip-hop and a few beats away for at least one Fringe act.

Jerome Saibil and Eli Batalion were the breakout hit of last year's festival with JOB: The Hip-Hop Musical, a bolt of energy they took on a year-long tour that included a date at the Tarragon Theatre in Toronto and a successful gig in New York City, where the weekly Bible of Manhattan cool, the Village Voice, hailed the rappers from Montreal as "the hardest working men in hip-hop theatre."

This week, Saibil-Batalion are road-testing the sequel, JOB II: The Demon of the Eternal Recurrence, at Fringe Venue 6, Infinit Bath, at a time when producers of mega musicals are eyeing rap's potential as the next Rent-sized youth magnet.

(Flow, which stars Will Power as a dancing rhymester, was the hit of last week's New York City Hip-Hop Theatre Festival - see www.hiphoptheaterfest.com).

Foqué Dans la Tête Productions' JOB II, at Venue 6 tonight, tomorrow, Saturday and Sunday, is a more nuanced and textured rapsody that continues the story of MC Cain and MC Abel's struggle to keep hip-hop safe from record industry demons and preserve its purity. The president of Hoover Records, Jehovah, is arrested for CEO-style fiscal fraud and the rappers try to save their art with a move to a new spiritual plane. They turn away from the god of the Bible to embrace Nietzsche, the now dead wiseguy philosopher who killed Him. Or something like that, since, like the original JOB, the sequel is a rhyme cherry-bomb that can be hard to follow for anyone not perfectly versed in the intricacies of getting down with the beat.

With a scrapbook of press raves, a celebrity endorsement from Atom Egoyan ("wildly entertaining"), a film documentary under way and a six-part JOB-TV series being pitched for Showcase, this has been a huge year for the Montreal duo, with bigger things to come, like a 16-week off-Broadway gig in a 300-seater next season.

"We're negotiating," Saibil said this week. "But until anything is signed, well, we don't want to count our chickens before they hatch - so far it looks good."

Saibil-Batalion tried their luck at the Montreal Fringe twice before developing the original JOB formula last year. Its success was sudden and unexpected. "We actually thought the show would bomb," Saibil said. "We were freaking out when the Hour gave us their cover last year for the Fringe because we had never done anything like our show before, nor seen anything like it before. We're extremely overwhelmed and flattered that the play has seen some success and we're really excited to come back to the very place it all started."

— Matt Radz