The curtain goes up on musical ‘Vilna’

Eight decades have passed since the young poet Hirsh Glick wrote his legendary Yiddish hymn, which became the anthem of World War II Jewish partisans – brave young men and women who fought back against the Nazis in the ghettos and forests of Eastern Europe.

Glick’s “Zog Nit Keynmol Az Du Geyst Dem Letstin Veg” (“Never Say You’re Going on the Final Path”) is a haunting memory of their struggle, now recast as a modern musical, Vilna: A Resistance Story.

The lyrics of this new work, set in Vilna, capture the feeling of that historic moment: 

This is more than a place

It’s an idea, a way of life, like a living breathing book

Or more like a prayer

It’s a bright shining star 

Turning darkness into light

My Vilna My Vilna!

The musical is the brainchild of Kevin and Allison Cloud, a married writing team in Kansas City, and Lisa Kenner Grissom, a playwright and screenwriter in Los Angeles.

Kevin, a composer/lyricist, explains the creative process that led to the finished work: “We tried to write a musical that would connect with modern audiences. I wrote a pop score with klezmer influence. So we tried to merge the two worlds of pop Broadway-style songs that still have the feel of the klezmer instrumentation.”

The inspiration for the musical draws on the real-life partisans who resisted the Nazis.

As the story unfolds, we meet Vitka Kempner, cast as a rebellious teenage girl, and young poet Abba Kovner, who famously declared in the face of the Nazi onslaught against the Jewish people, “We will not go like sheep to the slaughter.”

After the war, Kempner and Kovner worked to get Jews to Mandate Palestine. They eventually married and settled on Kibbutz Ein HaHoresh of the Hashomer Ha’tzair movement, which Kovner had joined while in Europe. Recognized for his poetry, he was later awarded the coveted Israel Prize for literature.

In an ironic twist, the Clouds discovered the partisan story quite by accident. While searching for a new project, Kevin remembers, he “just kind of stumbled across this article…about Hirsh Glick, this young poet and songwriter…who wrote a song that then spread throughout the ghetto and eventually to other ghettos and to the partisan fighters in the forests of eastern Europe and became their anthem…”

“This was a Holocaust story that I had never heard before,” Kevin says. “It was such a heroic and inspiring story… so we decided to make it our next project.”

The Clouds pitched the story to the Lewis & Shirley White Theatre, part of the Jewish Community Center of Greater Kansas City, which featured it in April 2023.

Joining the Clouds with responsibility for the book is Lisa Kenner Grissom, who specializes in what she terms “female-centered stories” about “empowered women.”

As things turned out, Kenner Grissom just happened to be on a cultural fellowship in Vilnius, Lithuania. “On the last day (of the fellowship),” she recalls, “I found myself in a Soviet-style apartment, sitting across from a 97-year-old Holocaust survivor, who was also a partisan resistance fighter. She had escaped the ghetto for the forest and fought back against the Nazis.

“She looked like my grandmother, and I was just completely and utterly captivated by this woman and by her experience.”

It was not long after the fellowship that Kenner Grissom was introduced to the Clouds, and given the confluence of their interests, she believes that their meeting was “bashert,” the Yiddish term for “meant to be.”

A two-time O’Neill Kennedy Center Fellow, Kenner Grissom has embarked on several projects since visiting Vilnius, including Following Fania, a documentary about Fania Brantsovsky and the role of Jewish female resistance fighters, which closely mirrors the subject matter of the Vilna musical.

Among her full-length plays, Here Comes the Night earned her a semi-finalist award from the O’Neill National Playwrights Conference, while Motherland was a finalist in the Jewish Plays Project.

Kevin Cloud is a lifetime songwriter and multi-instrumentalist, and Allison Cloud freelances as a playwright, singer, actress, model, and voiceover artist.

The couple’s first musical, Roar, won the Kansas City Fringe Festival Best of Fringe award. They are also developing The Nashville Chronicles, a one-woman show, and Something More, a song cycle, for the 2024 Fringe Festival in July.

'More important than ever'

Kenner Grissom believes that the Vilna story “is more important than ever.”

“Something that is coming out at this moment,” she notes, “is just a real resurgence in Jewish pride. Not a lot of people know about Jewish resistance during the Holocaust.

“And people know even less about the role of women. I think what’s happening today…is a real energy around Jewish pride, and I think that this story is just so inspiring.”

The writer also stresses that one of the important themes in the story “is that every action matters.”

“The resistance fighters from the Vilna Ghetto…engaged in different forms of resistance,” she says. “There was cultural resistance, which took the forms of theater and art…and spiritual resistance – maintaining our traditions and holidays. And then there was armed resistance.” 

FOCUSING ON the current upsurge in global antisemitism, Kenner Grissom believes that people can face this challenge in a variety of ways.

“Everything matters,” she emphasizes. “You can share an article; some people are going to Israel…but if you can’t do that, there are other things that you can do.”

Noting that people were afraid to put menorahs in the windows of their homes during Hanukkah, Kenner Grissom responds forcefully, “No, light your candles. Put your menorah in your window. Don’t back down.” 

Last February, the musical was presented at the Ebell Theatre in Los Angeles with the support of the Holocaust Museum LA, Writer’s Bloc, Meredyth Deighton, and the Consulate General of the Republic of Lithuania.

This fall, a reading will be held in New York City to find a commercial producer or a theater.