A new CD offers a little Yiddishkeit to hum along to while frying latkes and polishing menorahs at Hanukkah.
The creators of “The Meshuganutcracker,” an original Hanukkah musical that first graced Bay Area stages in 2003, have released a cast recording of the musical’s soundtrack, which is set to a klezmer-style orchestration of Tchaikovsky’s “Nutcracker Suite.” The musical tells the story of the people of the fictional shtetl of Chelm, who act out Hanukkah stories in song and dance.
The musical was written by local husband-and-wife team Shannon and Scott Guggenheim, with vocal arrangement by Scott’s brother Stephen Guggenheim.
The show was performed for years at San Jose’s Retro Dome, but after that space closed, it ran last year at theaters in San Francisco and Campbell. This year there will be no live performance, but the CD and 24-page booklet with lyrics are available at www.themeshuganutcracker.com.