Hatikva Workshop Theater started as a group of artists that made protest acts; after Yom Kipur in October 1973 they started to have other aims including wanting to bring hearts close.
“Because of Plastic Flowers, the first act of the workshop, I was turned to by gangs from the neighbourhood, who asked me to bring their problems to the stage as well as in the shape of an act”, says Bezalel.
‘Suspect Always a Suspect’ is about these criminals and their relationships with the Police. If a person who was once a suspect and got in trouble with the law – then he will be a suspect over and over, every time a house gets broken into, every time someone gets caught with drugs and the police are looking for those responsible.
The story of the suspect who is always a suspect begins when one of the guys sees the news with a report on another burglary. “The immediate suspect” starts to pack his bags and leave town; even though he has nothing to do with the burglary, he knows they will come directly to him.
It all stems from a past mistake—when he was under 18, he broke the law and ended up serving two years in prison in place of someone else. Now, every time a crime happens in the area, he is the first person the police suspect. He looks for someone to help and advise him, but each time, he is turned away.
Despite his troubled past, he is recruited into the army. There, he meets a girl from a good family, and they become friends. However, when he returns to his neighborhood, nothing has changed. Every cop still sees him as a criminal, capable of arresting him at any moment.
One day, his friend comes to his home and finds her boyfriend with a packed bag, waiting to be arrested. She decides to stay with him, despite warnings from his friends that she, too, could become an immediate suspect. She starts asking questions, trying to understand his situation, but instead of giving her direct answers, each of his friends tells her their own stories.
It becomes like an act within an act. One of them tells her about a lawyer who was charged with a diamond robbery. The lawyer convinced someone from the neighborhood to take the fall, promising that he would help get him a reduced sentence. Trusting the lawyer, the suspect confessed to a crime he never committed, only to find himself completely abandoned during the trial and sentenced to a long prison term.
Another story follows, detailing how the police manipulate people into informing on their friends and neighbors. They tell her about life in jail, the betrayals, and the endless cycle of suspicion and injustice.
Then, in a chilling turn of events, while they are performing one of these “acts,” the police burst into the scene—this time for real. They seize the suspect, beating him just like in the act, making it clear that for him, fiction and reality are tragically one and the same.
“What can I tell you? I have money. I have an apartment. I have a job, thank God. I own a car, I pay phone bills, I have a mistress… just hope I’ll hold like this. Even my children have almost anything: high education, villa for young couples, two housemaids, so the wife will not complain—everything.
Just give me strength to keep fooling these people again, so that they remain idiots and keep our party in government, and not force us to find another way to keep us in power. And most important, that I’ll be comfortable. I don’t care about the state, as long as I’m comfortable. You know how good, like years before.
God of elections, you chose us. You love democracy, this disease.”
This is part of the opening act of Sambusac, When is the Elections?, a play by Bezalel Aloni.
Sambusac is a kind of oriental pastry, fried and baked with peanuts and raisins, or filled with chopped meat. But the same word is also used to describe a fool who does everything others want him to do and can’t use his own brain. Bezalel used this word to describe the people as foolish, that everyone fools them, lies to them, makes promises to them before the elections, and when they are reelected—they forget they ever spoke to the people who supported them and got them elected.
The play describes a female professor who makes a poll before the elections. While doing that, she meets different kinds of workers with large families. Each of them presents himself as Sambusac because he is also part of the anonymous herd of voters.
As opposition to them, director Bezalel Aloni, who also takes part in the act as a wheeler-dealer of the party, has everything. Now, he comes to the people again, trying to fool them once more. He makes demands for the party, for the country—for everyone. Innocent people even give their shirts and pants, but with the same taxes that were brought by the hardworking people, he builds houses for the wealthy, takes care of the sons of the other dealers, while the ordinary people who work hard get only little crumbs.
After three plays, all written and directed by Bezalel Aloni, this time the author decided to go in a different direction—a musical dedicated to the first love of the Yemenite Jews. The story follows their immigration to the land of Israel and the settlement of 200 of them in Kefar Hashilo’ach, near Jerusalem, in 1882.
Of course, this is only the beginning of the story. As expected from the Hatikva Workshop Theater, this is not a sweet tale about the settlers. The Yemenites, like their Ashkenazi brothers, turn to Baron De Rothschild, seeking assistance as he had provided for the settlers from Europe. However, in the play, they receive nothing.
First Love also explores the struggles of Hebrew workers in Israel and highlights how the Yemenites were brought to work for farmers who treated them like slaves. They were forced to work extremely hard and were paid very little.
In the second part of the play, after the intermission, the story shifts to people living near Jerusalem. They share their experiences from the days when the British army ruled the country, recounting the relationships between Arabs and Jews from 1936 to 1939. These conflicts forced the Jewish people to learn how to protect themselves with weapons. This part of the play is presented in a humorous and entertaining manner.
The play concludes in the modern day, showing a mother who is proud of her daughter for graduating with a first-class degree. However, the conservative father is upset that his daughter’s fiancé is Ashkenazi. After the fiancé proves himself by learning to read the Bible with cantillation notes, the father reluctantly gives his approval. Yet, he still questions: “Why didn’t they invite even one Yemenite or Sephardic Jew to the First Zionist Congress, ha?”
In the ‘And Beside That, Everything is OK’ play of the Hatikva theatre workshop, they don’t use ordinary humour but more satire about things that happen in real life, from the news, from politics, etc. They laugh about the financial problems, immigration absorption and ethnic gaps – this comes to fruition in an interview made by a journalist (Ofra Haza) with the people of the neighbourhood.
The “journalist” says: “hello. I’m from the radio. Are you from the neighborhood? You don’t bite, do you? You don’t stab, right? Oh, you are poor. I learned in the university that you are poor. How many children do you have? Do you speak Hebrew? Do you but in the store with Israeli money? Do you listen to music, or just Levantine sounds? Do you make children just so they can live from my father’s taxes, or do you make children only because you have nothing better to do? Do you know the holidays of Israel? Are prisons enough for you?”
Why did King Solomon, the most clever person of all, write things that come from a bitter soul, such as “and I find more bitter than death the woman,” and later on, “vanity of vanities, all is vanity”?
All blame is on one girl, who lives in poverty in Jerusalem. Solomon had a thousand wives, but it wasn’t enough for him. He saw this girl, Shulamit, and was amazed by her beauty. But Shulamit didn’t want him. Her heart was with another man, who was called “feedeth among the lilies.”
This is, in short, the story behind Song of Songs With Amusement, the musical of the Hatikva Theater Workshop.
But Song of Songs With Amusement is not just a nice legend. Shulamit (who is played by Ofra Haza, who was recently released from the army) didn’t return love to Solomon, and not only because she already found her love. She was also disturbed by the socio-economic gap.
The poor girl who was kidnapped to the palace was furious about all the wealth she saw there, while she and her family and all the people from her neighborhood were forgotten by all these wealthy people. Since her kidnapping, she furiously raised the issue of the economic and social problems of Israel.
At the end of the 1970’s, Ofra became a solo singer, and then had 3 tours in Israel: Temptations (1982), Magic Queen (1984) and Ofra Haza on Stage (1986). During her international career she had another tour: Finger of God (1992).
After the release of the album ‘Temptations’, in the middle of May 1982, Ofra began working with producer Eldad Sherim on a new tour under the same name. All of Ofra’s more hidden sides were brought up front in this tour; she sang about faith, love and daily hopes. At the same time, Ofra exposed her qualifications as an actor, a comedian and a mimic. Ofra learned how to stand on the stage in front of hundreds and thousands of people, and speak directly to their hearts. It was electrifying and the audience loved her. One of the critics wrote: “charisma of purity and beauty”.
Until that tour, Ofra only appeared in short performances, most times with playbacks. “Now”, she says, “people who buy tickets will come to see me – an hour and a half of Ofra Haza on stage! Up until now I didn’t think I can make a tour based on two albums. Now, when my third album is released, I have enough material to choose from. I know I won’t disappoint the hundreds of fans that turn to me and want to see me on a solo performance”.
‘Temptations’ tour ran for 6 months, and had “terrific success”‘, as she says. Despite the success of the tour, Ofra stopped it because of her work on new albums and the preparation for the pre-Eurovision song contest. “The tour gave me a feeling that the people in Israel really love me”, says Ofra. “The fact that people come and buy tickets and fill the halls to see Ofra Haza. Winning the pre-Eurovision completed for me the best year I had”.
In Hanukkah of 1984, at the end of December, Ofra began a new tour titled Magic Queen. Initially, she wanted to participate in Shirovision, the children’s song festival that took place every year during Hanukkah and was produced by Avraham Deshe Pashanell. Despite the cancellation of their contract, Ofra remained deeply grateful to him and had taken part in the festival every year. Even though she owed him nothing, she was still eager to participate. However, when Pashanell informed her that he had no plans to hold Shirovision that year, she decided to launch her own tour.
“This is not a shoddy work, despite what some people tried to spread,” Ofra stated. “This is a well-planned tour, and the audience gets the Ofra they love. I admit that if Pashanell had organized Shirovision this year, I would have been part of it because I agree to work only with him. He is a man I admire and love. The moment I heard he wasn’t planning a show, I knew I had to create one myself.”
In the Magic Queen tour, Ofra performed 22 songs and was accompanied by 10 dancers and two renowned magicians. The opening shows at The Cinema in Tel Aviv and the Cinerama in Jerusalem were completely sold out.
In October 1986 Ofra had a new tour – Ofra Haza on Stage. The tour was meant to follow her new album – ‘Broken Days’, that was released two months earlier. The new tour was indeed different from her previous tours.
‘Ofra Haza on Stage’ was considered a huge production in Israeli and European scale. Ofra went on with a new sound in pop music, also her songs from previous albums were also given new more modern sound.
Zedi Zarfati, the producer of the tour, wanted a grandiose pop performance on stage – many exits and returning of Ofra to stage, lot of dresses and tributes to the audience. Izhar Ashdot, who produces all the songs, wanted a modern disco sound in dizzying pace, and got it using 6 players, a lot of synthesized sounds and 3 background singers. For the first time Ofra began acting and dancing during her shows: “this time, not only do I sing the songs, but I also play them. I mean every word I sing”.
The critics praised: “Ofra brings the local entertainment to a new era”, says one of the newspapers.
The tour was a massive production, using tons of equipment, but because of lack of large halls for such appearances in Israel Ofra performed mostly in Tel-Aviv.
The tour was stopped after 4 months, when Ofra started working on performances outside of Israel.
“I love making concerts, I never use playbacks”, says Ofra. “It was important for me to know who my audience really is. And this is what I did during my tour in America in March and April, with no public relations, even before Kirya was released in the US. I called the tour Finger of God. It was with my band, 5 players. A few clubs for warm up, four times sold out in the Bottom Line in New York, and halls of 1000-1500 people, mostly fill. In Minneapolis I performed on the night of the Oscar, while U2 performed in the local stadium, and I we were performing in a 1800 seats hall. 1200 tickets were sold. No one believed we did it”.
