A lawyer in Montreal who left his profession to continue his childhood passion says that after three years, his jump of faith seems to bear fruit.
Jill Ohayon, a former human rights lawyer based in Ottawa, will make his debut outside Broadway during his show, Le Pont du Jardinis played as part of the Shenyc Summer Festival in New York this summer.
“We are really lucky and grateful to have been selected for this festival and now we can share it with more people,” she told Global News in New York, where she lives.
She said that hers is one of the four musicals selected from more than 400 submissions, adding that her two -hour show has already been presented in a certain number of places and has already been well received.
Ohayon, originally from Dollard-des-Orleaux, left his law in 2022 and moved to the Big Apple to pursue a two-year mastery in musical theater at New York University.
During his second year, Ohayon, a writer, was twinned with another student who wrote music. In the work process together, the two learned something about their ancestral history and decided to produce a show based on this.
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“We have created an article on a Jewish family and a Chinese family who find themselves as neighbors in this Shanghai district in which they were a little forced,” she explained.
Ohayon is Jewish. His collaborator, Andy Li, is Chinese-American. The play is fiction but based on the history of the Jews who fled the Holocaust to Shanghai.
“It was part of history that none of us knew nothing,” she told Global News. “About 20,000 European Jews have done so, many of which have survived the holocaust in this way.”
Shanghai was finally occupied by the Japanese who returned life difficult both to the Jewish and Chinese people.
Le Pont du JardinBased on this story of migration and forced persecution, is appropriate, estimates Ohayon, given the recent increase in anti-immigrant feelings and racism.
“Just all forms of racism, hatred, lack of security, lack of security in the most fundamental sense,” she said.
Even a synagogue attached to his childhood school in Dollard-des-Orleaux was attacked twice, more recently in December. A 19 -year -old man faces multiple accusations of criminal fire.
In her childhood house, Ohayon’s mother, Lisa Struzer-Ohayon, said that there were early signs of her daughter’s passion.
“These are notes of music,” she laughs, pointing to an illustration framed on a wall in the childhood room of her daughter who has not changed since Ohayon has moved. “This is a triple music note key,” she said, referring to a sculpture behind the door.
Off-Broadway d’Ohayon is an achievement for someone who, barely three years ago, was a human rights lawyer in Ottawa, said his father, Robert Ohayon. But that doesn’t surprise him either.
“She has always loved theater,” he said. “As a child, we had it in children’s theater. She has always loved it. “
He smiled when he was told that his daughter credits him for his love of music and performance. He studied theater but never continued this passion.
“I was too much chicken,” he laughed.
It is glad that Ohayon is always a member of the Ontario bar so that she has something about what to fall back in case a career in theater fails.
Given her achievements so far, however, her parents are optimistic that she will succeed.