Folk-rock music in a new theatrical experience.
This isn’t like the musicals Bubbe used to take you to. Light Years combines the power of storytelling with all new music you would hear at an indie rock venue.
Signature Theatre is a black-box space which means that we rebuild the room to tell every story the best way possible. So, while Signature is best known for our world class musicals, the 275 seat room’s intimacy feels perfect for a folk-rock show.
Here’s a video of Robbie and the cast of the show singing the opening song of the show.
The theater is located in Shirlington, a two-block shopping neighborhood of Arlington with 16 different restaurants. Some of the options include Busboys and Poets, Cheesetique, and New District Brewing, a brand new brewery 2 blocks behind the theater. It’s easy to make a night-out of seeing a show here.
Robbie Schaefer, photo by Pippa Samaya
Robbie Schaefer is the definitive NJB (Nice Jewish Boy)
Aside from having a shayna punim (Yiddish for “beautiful face”), Robbie is kind, approachable, and the kind of person everyone wants to bring home to mom and dad.
He has charm and an earnest smile to please Mom and jokes for your dad. He founded an organization called OneVoice which works to unite children worldwide through music and creative expression. Most recently, he and his team went to a small island in Greece to bring art and music to the children in a Syrian refugee camp.
And, let’s be honest, who doesn’t melt over a man with a guitar?*
I’m lookin’ at you guy-who-sang-Green-Day’s-”Time-of-Your-Life”-after-every-youth-group-convention.
This is the first story that I’ve heard of a Holocaust survivor’s unique relationship with their family after the war. Like in Robbie’s story, my grandfather was a Holocaust survivor. His wife and son were lost to the Nazis, so he immigrated to the US, married an American woman and had a son, my father. In the short 18 years my dad had before his father passed, they shared a deep love for one another and a shared unspoken understanding that the past was not something to discuss. Like Robbie’s father, my grandfather kept his past a mystery to protect his son. And rather than dwelling on the holes between them, Robbie tells us about the deep love they shared and the life and the future he made. His father was his father, not his father, “the Holocaust survivor.”
Robbie tells my father’s story as he shares his own on stage. It’s a story that hasn’t been told, and Robbie tells it well.
My father and grandfather
Light Years is playing at Signature Theatre from February 6 – March 4, 2018.
*You can see this show with other 20s and 30s at a reduced ticket rate on February 20 with NOVA Tribe and Oy the World’s a Stage.
