It was not an ideal spot for a phone call but there I was, balancing between cars on a train traveling back home to Berlin, talking with Joshua Salzberg, who was calling from Budapest, where he was working on a film.
Salzberg knows I am a religion nerd. The film he adapted with co-writer/director Shira Piven — “The Performance”— featured a cast of characters with varying religious identifications. The team wanted to get the details right. Down to the minutest items.
So, there I was, rocking back and forth as the German state of Brandenburg flitted by, talking to Salzberg about the ring a club owner in 1930s Berlin might foreseeably be wearing.
That attention to detail impressed me. The care and concern that Piven, Salzberg and the entire team brought to the film is a testament to its overarching message of resisting hate and finding people’s humanity in the unlikeliest of places.
“The Performance,” starring the director’s brother, Jeremy Piven of Emmy-nominated “Entourage” acclaim, is adapted from an Arthur Miller short story of the same name. The story has been described as, “a strange midnight train ride” by Seattle Times critic Richard Wallace, and tells the tale of Harold May, a down-on-his-luck New York tap dancer who heads to Europe in the 1930s in search of new opportunities.
While dancing on the tabletops of a Hungarian night club, May and his troupe attract the attention of Damian Fugler (Robert Carlyle), who invites them to give a special performance at a Berlin nightclub, hefty paycheck included. May, who is Jewish but can “pass” as a blond-haired Aryan, and his fellow performers — including Adam Garcia as the politically attuned Benny Worth, Isaac Gryn as a closeted Paul Garner, Lara Wolf as the namesake of a Persian princess “Sira” and Maimie McCoy as a recently divorced, single dancer Carol Conway — are fast-tracked through a series of ethical, moral and professional through stations as they tap their way into a performance none of them really want: a private show for Adolph Hitler.
The story chugs along like “a modern, gothic folktale,” with the personal stakes becoming ever greater until it all falls off the rails, when their experience of opulent luxury at the behest of their German hosts contrasts too starkly with the increasingly evident persecution of Jews, homosexuals and other so-called “undesirables” around them.