This transcript was automatically generated and might contain errors.

[0:00] Pauls Macs: Ever wonder what it takes to make a new musical sing? Our mission is to give you an inclusive look behind the scenes. We are interviewing the creatives who are changing musical theater one 11 o'clock number at a time. This is your Backstage Pass.

[0:43] Pauls Macs: Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Backstage Pass. Hello, Barnacles. It's Pauls. And actually tonight, it's just Pauls. Our dear friend, our most beloved, cherished, brilliant co-host, Teresa Attridge, could not be here with us tonight. We miss her dearly. But I am pleased to say that of all the podcasts we've ever recorded, I think this might be the one that I'm uniquely qualified to try to handle on my own. We're so excited to have the team from Vilna today. Kevin and Lisa, would you please say hello?

[1:12] Kevin Cloud: Hey, everybody. Thanks for having me.

[1:14] Lisa Kenner Grissom: I'm so excited to talk about your piece today because I read it and I found it to be really, really inspiring. And if the listeners have been listening to our podcast for a while, they know that I'm Latvian. If people don't know the geography of Eastern Northern Europe, so Latvia and Lithuania are next-door neighbors, or actually they're kind of in like a sandwich with Latvia in the middle of what we call the Baltic States. It's like a Baltic sandwich where Estonia is on the top, Latvia is in the middle, and Lithuania is on the bottom. I felt very connected to this piece. I think people would say, if they are Latvian or Estonian or Lithuanian, that those countries are good friends and there's a lot of solidarity in the experience of both World War II and then being occupied by the Soviet Union shortly after World War II.

Well, before we go too much further, we're going to do the bio segment so everyone can get to know you. This is very uncomfortable, we find, for a lot of people. Teresa usually helps people cope and get through it, but I'm just going to go for it. I'll see you on the other side. So I think actually we're going to do Lisa first.

[2:15] Lisa Kenner Grissom: Lisa Kenner Grissom is an award-winning playwright, book writer, known for creating multi-layered characters and finding moments of levity in discomfort. Lisa has been a finalist for the Ashland New Play Festival, The O'Neill, The Lark, Playwright Center, Princess Grace Fellowship, and the Heidemann Award, among others. In 2024, her critically acclaimed play, Here Comes the Night, was an O'Neill semifinalist, received the Award of Excellence at the SHE LA Theatre Festival, and won the Stage Raw Award for Best Two-Character Performance. Lisa also wrote and produced the award-winning short film, Tattoo You, based on her published one-act, which has been screened at 15-plus film festivals, nationally and internationally.

Since visiting Vilnius, Lithuania in 2019, Lisa has embarked on several projects, including Following Fania, a short documentary about the role of Jewish female resistance fighters, which closely aligns with the subject matter of Vilna, a Resistance Story, the new musical she's developing with composer and lyricist Kevin Cloud. A two-time O'Neill Kennedy Center Fellow, Lisa's work has been developed and produced across the country. For more info, visit lisakennergrissom.com.

[3:16] Pauls Macs: Kevin, let's do you next!

[3:20] Kevin Cloud: Kevin Cloud is a composer-lyricist whose songs have been performed at the Abel Theatre in Los Angeles, the Green Room 42 and Rockwood Musical in NYC, the White Theatre in Kansas City, the Black Box KC, and the Illinois Holocaust Museum in Chicago. His most recent musical, the one we're talking about today, Vilna, a Resistance Story, has performed sold-out concerts in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Kevin graduated with a music degree from the University of Kansas and studies songwriting at Berklee School of Music. He is a member of the NMI Musical Theatre Workshop at LA. He's a proud member of BMI and the Dramatist Guild.

[3:49] Pauls Macs: All right, Kevin, Lisa, it's such a pleasure to have you join us today. I know the listeners will be very excited to hear more about this piece. First off, can you talk about how you two met and came to collaborate? And then we'll talk later about how you chose Vilna, a Resistance Story, as your subject matter.

[4:03] Kevin Cloud: Well, actually, the answer kind of is really connected. So I think I'll answer both questions at the same time because they're really—

[4:08] Pauls Macs: You are allowed to do that. This is a very free-form podcast.

[4:11] Kevin Cloud: So my wife and I, we write musicals, and we were looking for a new project. I stumbled across this article called, The Song So Powerful That It Beat The Nazis. And so I immediately was really interested in this idea, and I read this article, and it was all about this young poet from Vilna. His name was Hirsch Glick, and while he was in the ghetto, he basically kept writing, kept creating, believed that his art and his writing and his music was a way of resisting his Nazi occupiers. And he wrote this song called Never Say, and it ended up spreading throughout ghettos all over Eastern Europe, and eventually to the partisan fighters out in the forests, who were taking up arms and fighting the Nazis.

I just was immediately so inspired about this idea of this young writer, who, in the worst possible circumstances, continued to write and believed that his creative work could make a difference in the world and do some good in the world. I immediately just started doing a deep dive into this town, Vilna, and just absolutely fell in love with the people there, the characters that we read about, the real-life stories of resistance. Amazing stories, which I know we'll get into. As far as Lisa, how we connect with her. So my wife, Alice, and I, we began writing the piece. I was writing a lot of songs, and my wife is a book writer, and so we were working together. But we knew long-term that we needed to bring a Jewish artist onto our creative team.

My wife and I are not Jewish. We were trying to figure it out, and we actually had talked to a couple people, and it didn't work out. But then we were doing kind of a closed workshop in Kansas City at a theater that had commissioned us to do Vilna for a workshop production there. We were doing a workshop. Our friend who was directing it, who is also friends with Lisa, had seen posts of Lisa in Vilna. He was like, Oh my gosh, what are you doing in Vilna? You need to meet the Clouds. The Clouds are writing this amazing new musical, and you're a great book writer, and you guys need to connect. So he kind of connected us, and then we very quickly realized we had done a lot of the same research and had a lot of the same familiarity with the story. So then Lisa came on, and then we just kind of hit the ground running from there.

[6:00] Pauls Macs: That's amazing. Lisa, do you want to share anything from your perspective?

[6:03] Lisa Kenner Grissom: Sure, I'd love to chime in. Yeah, so I'm going to take us back just a few years before I met Kevin and Allison. So in 2019, I went to Belarus and Lithuania on a cultural fellowship. I was looking for a subject to write about, but I've kind of given up, actually. And then on the very last day, it was like the last thing we did before this fellowship ended, we went to this elderly woman's apartment. It was a Russian-style apartment, and I met 97-year-old Fania Brunczowski, who was one of the partisan ghetto fighters from the Vilna ghetto. It completely transformed me. I just didn't know anything about the resistance movement in the ghetto. I didn't know about resistance fighters. I'm Jewish. I didn't learn about any of these things, and I had no idea that women played such a role in this resistance movement.

So I came home, and COVID broke out, and I did a ton of research. I just basically read book after book after book. So while I'm doing my research, not knowing Kevin and Allison, they're doing all of their research. And then we flash forward to 2022, the moment that Kevin described, and I had gone back to Vilna. I'm calling it Vilna, because that's the name it was called at that time before the war, to do some work on a film that I had started about Fania. And this director friend of ours connected us, and the amazing thing is that Fania was in the same brigade as the people that we're writing about. So she was a little bit younger.

[7:29] Kevin Cloud: Yeah.

[7:30] Lisa Kenner Grissom: So it was really wild, and I always throw in this Yiddish word, which is beshert, which means meant to be. So it felt very meant to be that we came together in this way. I mean, what are the chances? And I also like to say that it was sort of social media for good, because you're posting, you think, oh, I'm posting too much about what I'm doing. Everyone's getting sick of these posts, but it actually was the thing that led us to meet and to start working on the project.

[8:01] Pauls Macs: That's amazing. I'm going to say a few things to respond to that. I can totally relate to the idea of social media for good, because anytime I see someone in Latvia, I'm like, what? What are they doing there? Or people are like, you're in Latvia? Well, people kind of expect that from me, but when they know I'm Latvian, or they find that out, they're like, oh, I was in Riga, or I was in Latvia 10 years ago, and there's such an excitement, because they are these really small countries, but they are very loved. But it's just so serendipitous, or beshert. It was meant to be. So I think that's so great. That's how you connected, because people love it when I post stories of my Latvian culture, because it's just so different from United States culture, for example.

The other thing I just wanted to say, maybe this will be my general disclaimer for the rest of the podcast. The countries of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia are three very separate cultures that have these amazing commonalities. So I never, when I'm speaking about them, want to equate them. Like, all of it's the same, because there are three very different cultures that have their own flavors and own personalities. But what I can say is something that's very, very present in Latvian culture, and it's a very beautiful idea, is the idea of using art, and especially song, as a weapon to overcome oppression. One of our favorite songs that we sing, it's memorized at this point, is called Bevarinjas Zyadonis, which means The Singer of Bevarin Castle.

But it's this idea of the Latvian castle is being invaded, and there's a singer, and he sings this song that casts a protective, magical spell of music over the castle. But it just seems to be such in the fabric of Latvian culture, Lithuanian culture. I don't want to comment on Estonian culture, but I believe that to be the case. But it's just so interesting that you definitely, Kevin, resonated with that idea, even though you're not from these places. There's a DVD that is all about these resistance fighters in Vilna. One of the really powerful scenes for me as I watched it was these friends of Hirsch Glick that were talking about how when he started playing the song and sharing the song with people, even in the ghetto, how it literally changed the entire atmosphere in the ghetto.

It went from a place of a lot of hopelessness and darkness, and then the song changed the emotional temperature in an amazing way. So yeah, the idea that music has the power to do that, that music has the power to inspire and lift our spirits and change how we see the world, I mean, that for me as a songwriter and composer, that was like the initial seed of inspiration, certainly for this piece. And then the more we learned about this story and all of the different ways that the people of Vilna resisted, like I said, we just fell in love with this place and fell in love with this story.

[10:14] Pauls Macs: Well, before we get too much further into our conversation, I do want to read a synopsis of the show so everyone can see what story we're talking about. Vilna, a Resistance Story, is an exciting new musical about Vitka Kempner, a 19-year-old Jewish girl who inspired the heroic Jewish resistance movement in the Vilna ghetto during the Holocaust. After the Nazis invade Poland, a fierce and fearless Vitka escapes to the free Bohemian city of Vilna, Lithuania, where she meets a group of young artists led by the visionary poet Abba Kovner and inspires them to form a resistance. But when the Nazis invade and confine Jews to the ghetto, Vitka and the group must find creative ways to fight back. With the Nazis bearing down, they make a daring escape to the forest where Vitka blows up a Nazi train, the first act of sabotage by a Jewish partisan in World War II, paving the way for their return to reclaim their beloved city. With a vibrant klezmer-influenced pop score, Vilna tells a forgotten and inspiring story that speaks to our times.

[11:03] Lisa Kenner Grissom: I read, I think, on the website that there's a song, a partisan song, that was written that helped really inspire people to really stand up against their oppressors. So, Never Say, which is a song in our musical, is a beautiful reimagining of the partisan song that was written by Hersh Glick that Kevin was just talking about. In Yiddish, it's called Zog nit keyn mol. Like I said, I grew up as a Reform Jew. I wasn't in a place where people were really singing this song, but as I got older and went to more Holocaust Remembrance Day events and that sort of thing, this song is sung at the end of almost every commemoration event. And it just so happened that I live in Los Angeles. West Hollywood has a very large Russian immigrant population, and they sing the song after every event.

And just like Kevin was saying, it's a rallying cry. It's a moment of inspiration and community. I just think it's a beautiful thing that this song is now reinterpreted for a modern audience and is going to be heard by so many more people than just the Baltic community or the Lithuanian community or the Jewish community.

[12:08] Pauls Macs: I've heard the song. I totally agree with you. I'm really excited for the audience to hear it. I've never said this on the podcast before. I'm part of the Seattle Latvian Choir. And sometimes I hear these melodies and I think they're just so good. This could be in a musical or there's like certain cultural memory to it. I was like, I remember hearing this when I was three years old. And they're such small countries. It's really exciting when you get to share these pieces of culture with the rest of the world. So you decided to write this musical. You've contacted each other. You're like, yes, we're going to do it. But where do you start? The reason this podcast exists is so people can get that behind-the-scenes look, both people who are just interested in the process in general, but also musical theater writers who are looking at, okay, I'm taking this historical event.

How did you begin to write this show? How does it kind of start to grow and become a world? And I know there are real historical people in here. So I'm very curious to hear about that aspect of the process.

[12:56] Kevin Cloud: Our process was kind of backwards from most processes of writing a new musical. Again, my wife and I kind of got excited about this content and this idea and I just kind of started writing songs and was almost writing like a concept album and just playing around with the idea. Allison was kind of writing some scenes and putting some things together. But we had a very, very early version of this thing. And there's a theater here in town called the White Theater that is a part of the Jewish Community Center here in town. They had just started a New Works program. They hadn't picked their show for their upcoming season for their New Works, but I had been working on another show called Roar. The music director from that show was connected to the White Theater.

[13:29] Kevin Cloud: At the theater, and they were like, "Hey, you need to meet this Kevin guy. He's writing a show about a Jewish resistance story. It should be a part of your deal." And so I met with these guys and I pitched the story to them. I could tell they were interested, and then they had me back in a couple of weeks and they wanted to hear some songs. So I literally played two or three songs, shared the story, and they were like, "This is amazing. We're gonna put it in our season. You know, 12 months from now. We're going to do it on our stage 12 months from now." And it was just like, "Oh my gosh, like 12 months? This is crazy. We don't even have a script yet. Like we just have some songs." That's a really insane development path.

And I think that's something that's so fascinating about musical theater. It can take 10, 12, 20 years to develop a musical. You wrote something, you're like, "All right, next season, you're up." So we were going fast. We knew it was fast. But these opportunities also don't come along, right? You know, if we say, "Well, we were not ready," and we're, you know, maybe we get bumped. And maybe we never get that again. So it was just like, we have to absolutely make this happen. And so we brought Lisa on, you know, we had some plot points, we had probably 12 songs that we had written, but we had a very fast process. And we were also holding intention the idea of like, yes, this is fast. We also told the theater, "Hey, this is a workshop production.

This is not like a world premiere. This is the first time we're doing this, this is going to be rough, this is not going to be a fully realized polished script. But we're going to just, you know, put something together that's gonna be great. And it'll be what it is." You know, we had an entire year's worth of table readings and stage readings and bringing Lisa on to kind of reimagine the book. And I mean, we worked really hard and really fast for what we call this workshop production in Kansas City. Looking back, though, it was an amazing opportunity. It pushed the project so far down the road. I mean, there's projects, there's people like us that work for years and years and years and never get a theater that says, "Hey, we want to put your show up on our stage."

And it was received really well. We sold out performances, people were super excited about it and saw the potential in it. And again, it was rough. And they understood that this was like a very early version of this very early draft. But it was a great kind of launching point. And at least I'll let you talk about a little bit about kind of the next steps and what we did after that.

[15:23] Lisa Kenner Grissom: Yeah, so that was incredible. I just want to share that what was so great about it is that we were at the White Theater, which is affiliated with the Jewish community there and the Jewish Community Center. Because it's such a great theater, it attracts such a diverse audience. So it's so great to know as a creator that you're not just reaching like a Jewish audience. And we've always said that this is a universal story. But we kind of we affirm that in this process that we had there. So it was great to leave knowing that actually Kevin had this great idea that we should do some concert readings. So we did, I think the first one was at the Green Room 42. And that was amazing. And then we went to the Illinois Holocaust Museum and to Chicago and everywhere we went, it was, you know, sold out or close to sold out people coming up to us afterwards, always Jewish folks sharing stories and telling us of their family stories, which I think, okay, that's great.

We're really connecting with people. And then also non-Jewish people coming up to us and saying, "I didn't know about this subject matter." And that to me is really gratifying. So we did that. And then sort of flash forward to last year, we have a relationship with the Ebel Theater here and Holocaust Museum LA and Writers Block, which is another organization here. Similarly to the White Theater, they said, "We want to be part of this. We want to help you." And that's something I'm sure in the podcast, whenever anybody talks about somebody helping them, it's just such a great thing to share because it does happen. And these folks said, "Yeah, let's do a concert at the Ebel," which is this beautiful theater in Los Angeles.

And again, we sold out. And then we did a workshop right after that. You know, again, we pushed the project further. It was like another step further in the revision process. And Kevin, if you do want to take it from there and catch us up to today.

[17:06] Kevin Cloud: Yeah. So after that, we brought on a director to the project. Hannah Ryan is directing with us. She was the resident director of Hamilton for, I think about five or six years, maybe. And then basically decided she wanted to go out on her own and kind of develop her own new projects. And so we're thrilled to have her on. And we went back to New York with her last spring and we did just kind of a closed workshop where we brought actors in and just kind of heard it out loud and got some feedback. And then we did a pretty massive rewrite. We spent nine months and we took characters out. We focused the story more on Vicka Kempner, who now is our, you know, real lead protagonist. We, you know, rewrote songs, took stuff out.

I mean, it was a major rewrite. And then we just did another stage reading at the Abell Theater in April. And they wanted to have us back out again. And it's just this beautiful space to rehearse in. And, you know, it's sunny and 80 degrees every day. And then you go into this beautiful professional theater where we presented the entire show. And again, it feels like once again, you know, you hear these stories. It's funny. When I first started writing musicals, I heard these stories like, "Oh, it took seven, eight, nine, 10, 12 years to get to New York." And I'm just like, "Come on. There's no way that's possible. Like, there's no way it's going to take." And now I'm into it. And we're like, "I don't know, year three, I guess."

Every step takes nine months to a year to raise the money and to find your next opportunity and to find a theater that wants to give you a slot, even for a tiny little reading. Right? I mean, we even had a premiere yet or a professional, you know, a fully professional production of this thing yet. Even these small little steps in the early stages, it's six months, it's nine months, it's a year between one step and the next step sometimes. And so it just takes so long. And I'm really not a patient person. And but I've learned to just kind of like, "Okay, it just it is what it is and it's going to take a long time and it's going to go slow." And but that also is what the I mean, musical theater is such a collaborative process.

There's so many people involved with it. Part of what takes so long is you really do want input from all these different people and everybody has different ideas and thoughts and you have to give time for that to settle and you have to give time to figure out what the team thinks is the right direction to head. And it just takes a really long time. So we've been at it three years and feel really encouraged about the traction we're getting and the way that the story and the songs are landing with people. And we are having conversations with some theaters now and possible producers that are interested in some off-West End and London potentially. And there's a professional theater in Kansas City where I live that's kind of interested in the piece. We're talking with them. So, again, we've got a lot of opportunities that we're pursuing, you know, just excited to see what the next opportunities that come our way.

[19:29] Teresa Attridge: Absolutely. That's all really fantastic. I just got to say, I really resonated with the idea of you developing this musical in 80-degree weather. I've always wanted to go to Goodspeed so bad in Connecticut. Absolutely. I would love to go there. But also, when I see people developing a new musical at the Oslo Theater in Florida, and they're like, "Oh my gosh, day after rehearsal, and they're at the beach," I get a little jealous of that. Developing musicals is a very long, hard journey. I'm sure we'll do it in whatever conditions there are, but it doesn't hurt when there's 80-degree weather. I definitely want to give the listeners a chance to hear what the show sounds like. So I think the first song we should set up very appropriately is "Vilna, My Vilna."

[20:07] Kevin Cloud: Yeah, so "Vilna, My Vilna." The idea of it is we wanted to give people a taste of pre-war Vilna. So we wanted to capture the joy and the vibrancy and the life and the creativity of this amazing city. So Vilna was this artistic city. It was known as the Paris of the East or the Jerusalem of Lithuania. It was a city that had this amazing creative impulse. Writers and artists and painters and scholars all lived here. And it's kind of like a modern-day New York or Nashville, Tennessee, maybe. This wasn't the first song we ever tried in the opening slot, but we kept coming back to this idea of trying to write something that captured the vibrancy of the city. And so "Vilna, My Vilna" is actually, there's a poem from this book of poetry that I stumbled across from Vilna.

And there's this famous poem called "Vilna, My Vilna" that's this love song to Vilna. And so that was kind of the idea behind the song. There was a famous club called Velfkies, where all of the performers and singers would go hang out in the back of Velfkies after their performances and stay up late dancing and drinking and being together. And so we just kind of, again, tried to capture this nightclub, fun, bohemian, artistic vibe with this opening number, "Vilna, My Vilna."

[21:11] Lisa Kenner Grissom: I was just trying to remember who wrote that poem, Kevin. Do you remember?

[21:14] Kevin Cloud: It's a collection of stories by Abraham Karpenovitz.

[21:17] Lisa Kenner Grissom: Yeah, I would just say it's such a, it's just an incredible opening to this world that Kevin was describing. And it's where we meet all the players. And we're really drawn into this environment, this bohemian environment. You know, I think a lot of people just don't realize what Jewish life was like before the war. So it's this beautiful, joyous moment that I think people really need to become part of. You know, they come into the audience and they don't know what they're about to see. It is a Holocaust-related show. And so it's just such a lovely surprise for them to be drawn into this world that is so inspiring. So it was important for us to make sure that we showed that before piece.

[21:59] Kevin Cloud: I totally agree. That's fantastic. And who is performing this song?

[22:02] Lisa Kenner Grissom: So this song features Samantha Massell, who has done a number of different things with us as we've developed this piece. And she's just a lovely singer, an amazing human, and just does an amazing job on this song.

[22:12] Teresa Attridge: Here is "Vilna, My Vilna," performed by Samantha Massell and the ensemble of Vilna: A Resistance Story.

[22:43] ♪ Musical number: "Vilna, My Vilna" — performed by Samantha Massell and the Ensemble of Vilna: A Resistance Story ♪

[26:59] Teresa Attridge: When I listened to this song for the first time, I wrote the sentence, you can feel Vilna in this song. And I've never been there. Funnily enough, on the last episode we recorded, we recorded with a show called The Bubble, and that show's set in Tel Aviv, in Israel. And one of their songs is called Love, Love, Tel Aviv. And they were talking about the best way in a musical to meet a person or a place is through music. That song has a completely different flavor than this song. And that's what I think is so beautiful, is I feel like I know Vilna just from listening to the song.

[27:47] Lisa Kenner Grissom: Vilna is a character in the show. Obviously, it's called Vilna, but we really wanted to make sure that people felt that way. So it's so wonderful that that's coming through to you.

[27:56] Kevin Cloud: Another thing I feel very intensely in the song, and this is something that can be a little hard to describe or sound a little lofty, but I'll do my best. There is a love of place and location that I feel as a Latvian that I definitely see in this song for Lithuania, for Vilna. I was talking about earlier the difference between nationalism and patriotism. As someone who lives and was born, I was born in the United States. It's so common for so many of my friends to post on Instagram, I hate this place. I hate this country. And don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that every Latvian loves Latvia. And the other thing you'll see is God bless America. America is the greatest country on the planet.

There can be really toxic nationalist tendencies too. I think what this song is communicating is a sense of patriotism and love for a place that's not necessarily our place is better than your place, just that we love our place. And we hope you love it too, because it's someplace we should love. And I think that's something that's communicated in the song. There's a line that says it's more than a place. It's an idea. And I love that. I think that's absolutely correct. You can just feel this love of life. It is a bohemian city at this point. This idea of living life, enjoying life, toasting to life. That's very clearly communicated in this song.

[29:09] Lisa Kenner Grissom: Yeah, I love hearing that because that certainly was intentional as far as the vibe of the song and the spirit of the song. People felt about Vilna the way that New Yorkers feel about New York and people from Nashville feel about their town. They feel this special creative energy of this place that just creates this amazing kind of love and care for the place. And so it's part of what makes our story so heartbreaking is what happened in Vilna after the song when the Nazis show up and obviously everything that happens then. But yeah, there certainly was this deep love for this place, this deep love for this artistic culture, this creative spirit that was at the very center of what it meant to be from Vilna.

[29:48] Teresa Attridge: Fantastic. Well, I totally agree. We all know the history of the Holocaust, how Hitler and Nazi Germany started to invade Europe. But I think what listeners might not know is the way that invasion took place was different in different places. And so as you're investigating building this musical, as you're investigating the history, can you talk about what happened in the Vilna ghetto? We talked a little bit about the unusual forms of resistance. I'd love for you to talk a little bit more about how that came about or what you learned as you were creating that part of the musical.

[30:20] Kevin Cloud: Yeah. So one thing that we learned in the process of developing this musical is that there were different forms of resistance. There was creative resistance, which was singing, writing songs, creating art, things like that. There was spiritual resistance, which meant Jews keeping their traditions against all odds, lighting Shabbos candles, that kind of thing. And then there was armed resistance, which comes later. This underground movement that was forming in the ghetto that Vitka Kempner and Abba Kovner and others formed, initially their goal was to provide medicine and food, that kind of thing, to provide the basics for survival. At a certain point, they needed to rise up against this enemy.

It was becoming an untenable situation where Jews were being, as to quote the line in the song, they were being taken to their deaths en masse. So before the concentration camps, and I think this is what you're alluding to, that Vilna was really different in that there were these killing fields, and the killing fields were the first step. And then they realized, wow, it's really hard to kill a lot of people. We're going to create these concentration camps. So once the underground found out about that, they decided we have to take up arms. We cannot wait. We will not go like sheep to the slaughter. The crazy thing about what happens in Vilna, there's this park outside of town called Pinar. There's a picnic.

And then the Soviets had dug these huge pits, I think for fuel, fuel tanks that they use for it. So it became this spot that the Nazis identified as a place where they could commit mass executions. But in my reading, and I'm not 100% sure this is accurate, but what I read and what I think is true is that Pinar was truly one of the first sites of the final solutions. You know, all these people in the Vilna ghetto are getting snatched off the streets and taken away. And the people of Vilna are told they're being taken to work camps, and they're being taken to serve the German war machine. But really, they're being taken to be executed. And what happens is a young woman is shot and left for dead in the pits.

And she actually survived. She isn't killed. And she crawls out of this pit and she comes back to Vilna. And she starts telling everybody what happened there. And at first, they don't believe her because it was so far-fetched. Like this hadn't been done before. I mean, literally, the people in charge were thinking, why would they kill us? They need us for the war effort. This doesn't make any sense. This woman's obviously crazy. But then more and more reports are coming in. And Abba Kovner is one of the first people who realizes the scope of what Hitler is trying to do. He's one of the first people to realize that Hitler is trying to annihilate European Jewry. And so Abba is the one that comes up with his gives his famous speech where he tells the people of Vilna that we will not go like sheep to the slaughter and that the only response to murder is resistance and that they cannot stand by idly without fighting back no matter how slim their odds are.

In fact, Abba had no hope of surviving this resistance. He believed that they were going to die either at the pits of Pnar or that they were going to die fighting and that he wanted to lead the people to die with honor by fighting back against their Nazi oppressors.

[33:15] Teresa Attridge: Something I'm so struck by and I mean, the history is just, you know, it's terrifying. I'll only speak for myself here. But I've grown up always knowing or at a certain point, I learned the Holocaust was a thing. I learned that it happened. And I was like, this is a history of humanity that we must never repeat. One of the darkest, if not the darkest chapter in humanity. If you did not know the Holocaust had existed and someone told you it was happening, it would be so hard to like wrap your head around it. That's insane. What are you talking about? They're just mass killing people. That can't be right. And we talked about cultural resistance being something that Latvians and Lithuanians have in common or just the power of cultural resistance.

But when extinction becomes the endgame, that's when arms are taken up. I also want to mention, I forgot to mention this part, and this is in our show too, you know, the underground, they would save any kind of documents they could save. They buried them, they put them in hiding places. And so in our show, there's a song and a scene where they go to what's called the Yiddish Institute. Well, then it was called YIVO. And now it's it was moved. YIVO was actually moved from Vilna to New York. It is this Institute of Jewish Culture. They did everything that they could to save aspects of their culture, exactly for the reason that you're stating that if it's all gone and destroyed, then there's no evidence of this culture existing.

So it was really important to them to resist in all these different ways. People are interested, it's called the paper brigade. These writers and artists hid all sorts of documents. And they're still being found today in basements, in churches. There was just a few years ago, the Lithuanian government reported that they just found a treasure trove of documents. And that's how these diaries, I mean, we all know about Anne Frank's diary, but there's a diary from the Vilna ghetto that was saved. And that's a huge part of this story.

[35:01] Teresa Attridge: Well, I think that's a good moment to talk about the song, Not Like Sheep to the Slaughter. So would you please set that up?

[35:04] Kevin Cloud: Yeah. So this is the moment where Abba has kind of put the pieces together of what's happening, and that all of these thousands of people that are being snatched off the streets of Vilna are being led away to their deaths. And so Abba calls a meeting and basically tries to inspire this group of people to say, hey, they're killing us, they're going to kill all of us. And we can either die in the pits of Pnar, or we can fight back with honor. And so he had this famous speech called Not Like Sheep to the Slaughter that he gives. And that's kind of the motivation behind this song. He inspires some of the people of the Vilna ghetto to take up arms with him and to fight.

[35:40] Teresa Attridge: Amazing. And who is performing this song?

[35:42] Kevin Cloud: The ensemble. The vocalist on this song, featured vocalist, his name is Kyle Anderson. He's a great friend of the show. He was in one of the initial readings we did at the White Theater and is just a close personal friend and a super talented actor and singer. So.

[35:54] Teresa Attridge: Fantastic. Here is Sheep to the Slaughter, performed by Kyle Anderson and the ensemble of Vilna: A Resistance Story.

[36:04] ♪ Musical number: "Sheep to the Slaughter" — performed by Kyle Anderson and the ensemble of Vilna: A Resistance Story ♪

[38:40] Teresa Attridge: This is a really, really fantastic revolution song. One thing I love is when I'm listening to a musical and I'm moved, I don't even realize that I'm learning real history. I mean, I knew that aspects of this show were based in reality, but I didn't know that this song until our conversation just now was actually based on a real speech, a real historical event. That's really inspiring and really exciting.

[39:03] Kevin Cloud: Yeah, the other crazy thing about this speech that doesn't make it into our show, but this speech was passed around to different ghettos in Eastern Europe. And so the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising is inspired by Abba Kovner and his speech of we will not go like sheep to the slaughter. And so it's just amazing all the different ways that Abba in this speech inspired people to fight back and the difference that that made. So this is the act one closer. And you know, there's obviously certain songs in a musical that you know have to just be absolutely great. And it takes multiple iterations to get there. But when we were in the studio with this song, we had this amazing bass player that played on all these tracks.

After he played this one, he kind of looked at me like, yeah, man, this is my favorite song. This song's cooking. And I was like, oh, good. I think we finally have the right version of this one where it's good enough to be the act one closer. But no, it's got a great energy and it's such an inspiring source material, obviously. But it's a really great way to end act one where basically all these people now are joining Abba and they're going to take up arms and they're going to fight the Nazis. And so then everybody gets to come back for act two to see how that's going to go.

[40:05] Teresa Attridge: Thanks for joining us on New York Theatre Barn's Backstage Pass. Join us next time as we continue our conversation with Kevin Cloud and Lisa Kenner Grissom about their new musical Vilna: A Resistance Story.