Their story ‘has not been told’: New KC musical about WWII Jewish resistance fighters

If you haven’t heard about the Jewish resistance fighters of Vilna during World War II, you’re not alone.

Until three years ago, neither had the creators of “Vilna: A Resistance Story,” a new musical that will run April 22-30 at the Jewish Community Center’s White Theatre. Neither had its director.

“When I started researching Vilna, I was so shocked by all these incredible stories by the people who lived there,” co-creator and composer Kevin Cloud said. “And I kind of started looking around, looking for a movie that had been made, or a musical that someone had already done, because it’s just such a remarkable story. But nobody had really done it.

“On the large scale, the story of Vilna has not been told.”

Cloud and his wife, Allison, are telling it now as part of a creative team that also includes director David Winitsky from New York and playwright Lisa Kenner Grissom from Los Angeles. Co-produced by the White Theatre and The Culture House, “Vilna” remains in its developmental stages. This will be the play’s debut before live audiences.

Kevin Cloud composed the music and lyrics, and Allison Cloud wrote the early drafts of the book. But as non-Jews, they knew input from Jewish people was vital. That led them to director Winitsky, who connected the dots to book writer Kenner Grissom to complete this coast-to-coast-to-Kansas effort.

The Clouds, who co-wrote a family show called “Roar” that ran at the Fringe Festival in 2021 and at The Culture House in 2022, had to do some selling to bring Winitsky on board. He is the founder and executive artistic director of the Jewish Plays Project, which focuses on developing contemporary stories.

Winitsky said he “had not heard a whiff” of the Vilna resistance story.

“Kevin reached out to me for the first time three years ago, and I was like, ‘OK, nice person in Kansas. You have fun with that project,’” Winitsky said. “But he really kept after me.

“This story technically would not be eligible for our development process because it’s specifically World War II history. But what’s so exciting about this and what makes the partisan stories so intriguing right now (is) the idea of resistance. The idea of principled resistance to an overwhelming enemy feels very resonant to a lot of people right now.”

To be sure, though “Vilna” is set during World War II and the Holocaust, the story is one of resistance rather than persecution.

The story is similar to the true tale told in the 2008 Daniel Craig/Liev Schreiber movie “Defiance,” based on the book about Jewish resistance fighters in the Belorussian forest.

Few know the Vilna story better than Kenner Grissom. Unlike the Clouds and Winitsky, she not only had heard of the Vilna story but was immersed in it. Kenner Grissom made a trip to the Lithuanian capital (now called Vilnius) in 2019 as part of a fellowship, interviewing a woman who had fought alongside the partisans depicted in the Clouds’ play. In fact, Kenner Grissom had begun working on a documentary on the woman, Fania Brantsovsky, who will turn 101 next month.

“I jumped in having all this background and information and knowledge, and I was already creating from that place,” Kenner Grissom said. “It was … I use this word because it’s a Hebrew word, ‘bashert,’ which means meant to be.”

The musical happened only because Kevin Cloud was looking for a new idea after he had completed a previous project at The Culture House. He came across an article headlined “A Song So Powerful It Beat the Nazis” about what became an anthem in the Jewish ghettos during the Holocaust. It was written in 1943 by Hirsch Glick, a young Jew in the Vilna ghetto.

Researching Vilna proceeded to consume the Clouds.

“We learned very quickly that it was this incredibly rich cultured city with artists, poets, writers, and much of the resistance that happened there was creative resistance,” Kevin Cloud said. “So I just found a great story to be told on stage.”

The characters are based on real partisans, led by Vitka Kempner. She was 19 when she started resisting the Nazis, becoming a founding member of the United Partisan Organization. One of her first acts was blowing up a Nazi train, an act that was unheard of among Jews at the time.

Vilna’s artists, poets and writers became the core of Kempner’s fighters.

“They all had the same idea in common, which is ‘This thing that is going on right now can’t continue,’” Winitsky said. “‘It just doesn’t work. We can’t live the way our parents and our grandparents lived, where people just randomly came through and killed us. We can’t do that anymore.’

“The other thing that I think is interesting about this story is they don’t, like, win. It’s not like this small band of artists beat the Nazis. That’s not the story. What they are committed to is the work ethic, every day getting up and trying to resist and trying to make things better for themselves and other people.”

The fighters avoided the concentration camps, but they couldn’t prevent the Nazis from massacring 40,000 to 70,000 Jews in the Ponary forest outside Vilna.

It was part of a larger resistance story that hasn’t been taught to young Jews, Kenner Grissom said.

“We just did not hear stories of resistance and Jews fighting back,” she said. “And I was so captivated by it, and I felt like we as a culture, the big, broader culture, need to hear these stories, and we as Jews also need to hear these stories. Because we don’t know.”

Allison Cloud said the story continues to evolve.

“We’ve learned a lot just from contacting the children and grandchildren of the characters in our show,” she said. “So, they’ve been huge in informing our story, too.”

Like the tale itself, Kevin Cloud’s music is uplifting rather than depressing.

“I knew right away there was something special because the songs are so rich, and both emotional and true to the experience,” Kenner Grissom said.

“What we’re doing with this musical is a really different Holocaust story, because we’re focusing on the resistance and this group of writers and artists taking action. There is obviously the tragedy — you can’t ignore that — but there’s a lot of hope and empowerment and inspiration that comes out of these songs.”

Now the hope is to share the story of inspiration well beyond the Kansas City area. The team has planned a trip to New York in the fall to present the musical to producers, investors and other theater people, with the goal of reaching a Broadway stage.

“That’s the dream, right?” Kevin Cloud said. “That’s one of our lifelong dreams, to write something that would make it to New York and make it on Broadway.”

‘Vilna: A Resistance Story’

7:30 p.m. April 22, 2 p.m. April 23, 7:30 p.m. April 27-29, 2 and 7:30 p.m. April 30, White Theatre at the Jewish Community Center, 5801 W. 115th St., Overland Park. ($18). Tickets at thewhitetheatre.com.