Ami and Tami An Immersive Musical Fable
March 29, 2024
“Truly conceived for the entire family. A rare breed.” (Carole Hyatt, CBS TV)
Fantastical Forests! Wicked Witches! An… an Imf?
Israeli composer Mátti Kovler (Here Comes Messiah, Carnegie Hall) and his music
theatre company Floating Tower team up with director and visual polymath Doug
Fitch (New York Philharmonic’s The Cunning Little Vixen) to present ‘Ami and Tami’ a
sophisticated, immersive musical fairytale for children and families.
Ami and Tami, trapped inside by their overbearing parents, long for adventure in the
outdoors. Fed up with their house and bored of homework, the siblings escape into
the unknown, enchanted forest. Their journey sends them into the clutches of the Evil
Humm, the lair of Yaga the Witch and the depths of their own imagination.
“The singing was splendid and the piece is musically brilliant.”
(Yehudi Wyner, Pulitzer Prize Winner)
The Israeli twist on the familiar tale of Hansel and Gretel, ’Ami and Tami’ in a new
English translation by Spencer Garfield, promises to enthrall audiences of all ages.
Featuring seven versatile actors, who all sing, dance and play musical instruments,
the performance is headlined by the Emmy award winning Television host Sonya
Hamlin as Storyteller and Ami and Tami’s composer Mátti Kovler performing the
actual role of Composer in the production.
With mesmerizing visual design from Doug Fitch and costumes by Tommy Nguyen, the piece unfolds across five spaces across the Blue Building, allowing the audience to
step into a magical new world. Instrument wielding characters lead the audience
through the forest, where they become part of Ami and Tami’s adventure.
“…Striking music. Kovler appears to be contemplating the fork in the road that
divides opera from musical theater. Someone to watch.”
(Steve Landrigan, Boston Musical Intelligencer)
Join us for a unique opportunity to catch ‘Ami and Tami’ in NYC before it heads to
the Underbelly theater at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival this summer. For further
information and press review tickets please contact Erin Simmons.
Email: erin@floatingtower.com Phone: (469) 826 1224
Floating Tower
With a modular make-up of 27 multi-national actors/musicians, Floating Tower
operates as a producer, creator and educator developing innovative content along
new avenues of cross-cultural engagement. Drawing upon the power of music to evoke
emotion, Floating Tower creates music and theatre experiences that transcend
boundaries of language, geography or history. While many Floating Tower events
spring from a Jewish impulse they aim to speak to a universal audience.
Since its founding in 2011, Floating Tower has created over thirty productions in the
United States, Israel, China and Russia. Spanning from traditional to experimental,
Floating Tower events have been staged at venues ranging from Boston’s Museum of
Fine Arts to the Underground Collector, a 1000 sq. ft. art-loft in Moscow.
Mátti Kovler
Described by The New York Times as “a potentially estimable operatic composer in the
making,” Matti is the grandson of the Russian operatic tenor and Yiddish singer Leonid
Kovler. Mátti Kovler’s music has been commissioned by Tanglewood, Carnegie Hall and
the Israel Philharmonic. Born in Moscow, Russia, he was raised in Jerusalem, Israel,
and is currently based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a member of the BMI Lehman
Engel Musical Theatre Workshop, the foremost training ground for new musical
theatre, where the writers of A Chorus Line, and The Book of Mormon, among others,
learned their craft.
A pioneer in redefining “Jewish musical theater” in the 21st century, over the past
decade Kovler created a substantial body of work intended to propel this genre
beyond wallowing in a nostalgic past. In 2014 Kovler was the Elie Wiesel composer-inresidence at the Boston University.
Kovler was a recipient of the Chai in the Hub Combined Jewish Philanthropies Young
Leadership Award for his voluntary work with the young Jewish and Israeli
communities in Boston. Over the course of several residencies with various Jewish
organizations in Boston (The New Center for Arts and Culture, Northeastern Hillel,
BU’s Elie Wiesel Center) Matti has developed unique programming focused on
engaging young Jewish people in contemporary Jewish culture outside the political
discourse.
Among the most engaging projects were the Suf-Ga-Ni-Ya (Hebrew for ‘donut’), a viral
music video in response to antisemitic vandalism at Northeastern university, and the
musical installation Seekers of Light (with Iranian and Israeli musicians in the cast)
presented as part of the MFA Hanukkah public-art event, drawing an unprecedented
number of 2300 people to the MFA.