Original-Cin Q&A: Toronto Musical Less than Kosher Drawn from Real Life
By Liam Lacey
The centrepiece film of this year’s Toronto Jewish Film Festival is Less Than Kosher, an irreverent hometown musical comedy which has its world premiere June 4 at the Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema.
The film, which originated as a seven-part digital series, was produced by Michael Goldlist and Shaina Silver-Baird, a Toronto actress and singer-songwriter in the lead role performing traditional, popular, and original songs.
Silver-Baird stars as Viv, an 30-year-old self-styled “bad Jew” who doesn’t attend synagogue and feels little connection to the religion. After hitting bottom in her pop music career, and compelled to move into her mother’s basement, the cynical Viv is persuaded by her mother’s rabbi to accept a job as a substitute cantor. That leads her through a roundelay of weddings, brisses and shivas — complete with fantasy production numbers — as she recovers her joy in singing while negotiating an inappropriate romantic entanglement.
Although Silver-Baird says she is definitely not Viv, several elements of the script are drawn from her life. Shortly after Silver-Baird finished theatre school at York University, her family rabbi, Eli Rubenstein of Congregation Habonim in mid-Toronto, persuaded her to work as a substitute cantor.
“I said, ‘Eli, I don’t speak Hebrew. I’ve never read the Torah. I never go to synagogue. I don’t know what I’m doing.’ He said, ‘Shaina, you're a good singer. You're a good performer. That's all that matters. You can do this.’ So, I was a wedding cantor for several years.”
She hasn’t often lacked for work since, including performing in many of Canada’s best-known stages with roles in Hannah Moskowitz’s Old Stock: A Refugee Love Story, and the Dora Mavor Moore award-winning ensemble for La Chasse Galerie, as well as several small film projects.
She also writes and sings for two musical outfits: the folk group Crooked Road House, and the electronic pop of Ghost Caravan. For several years, she felt she could develop an original script from her own experience, a story that was, in some ways, of reverse of Al Jolson’s 1927 film The Jazz Singer, in which an aspiring cantor leaves the church to sing popular music.
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About four-and-a-half years ago, she posted on Facebook, looking for writers in the Toronto Jewish community who might be interested in an original project. She got a response from Michael Goldlist, a writer on the CBC Gem baseball comedy series The Ninth who she knew peripherally. He told her he loved her pitch. Funding came in dribbles from 2020 on, and the series was shot in the fall of 2021, delayed by but not shut down by the COVID pandemic.
“My partner is actually a paramedic,” she says, “and he was one of the go to COVID compliance managers in the industry at the time. So, he helped us out. And we were testing and we were using masks we were being as careful as we could because we shot the whole thing in 11 days and we could not afford to be shut down.”
Besides the cantor gig, Silver-Baird borrowed other more personal details from her life. In the series, Viv is still dealing with the death of her father when she was young. Silver-Baird’s father also died suddenly when she was an adolescent. Like Viv’s stepfather in the film, her father was not Jewish but was “completely enfolded in the culture.”
“I had just turned 14,” she recalls. “It was unexpected and it gave me a sense that life is short and I attribute that experience to my decision to become an artist. I felt I had no time to waste or lose. That's both a good thing and a bad thing.
“Sometimes I filled my time too much and I’ve tried to achieve too fast because I have a sense that you’ve got to do what you want to do right now. I think that might also be partly why I do things like jump into writing a series when I've never written for TV before.”
She stresses that she “wasn’t stupid about it. I surrounded myself by exceptionally talented people who were exponentially more experienced than me.”
The team included co-writer Goldlist, “our mentor,” the story editor Kat Sandler (Kim’s Convenience), director Daniel am Rosenberg, and producers Emily Andrews and Laura Nordin from the production company FILMCOOP INC.
A critical story point in Less Than Kosher involves Viv’s unhappy memory of her bat mitzvah, the ritual that initiates 12-year-old Jewish girls into adulthood. In Silver-Baird’s case, it marked the moment she discovered her vocal gift. The rabbi who presided over the service, Eli Rubenstein, remembered her performance that day well enough to approach her a decade later for the cantor job.
“I was exceptionally tone deaf as a young child, but I'm very thankful that my parents never told me, so I thought I was great,” she recalls. “That allowed me to start to learn without self-consciousness. My bat mitzvah culture was a professional singer, and I would imitate her and I was getting these unofficial singing lessons.
“I learned all the music so fast that I ended up doing the entire service which, if you've ever been to a bat mitzvah or a bar mitzvah, is very unusual. Usually, the kid kind of stumbles through a couple minutes and that's it. But I did, like, an hour of prayers and music and song. After that my bat mitzvah coach turned to my parents was like, ‘You should really get her into something. She's really good.’ So that was a weird kind of full-circle moment.”
After Less Than Kosher screens at the Toronto Jewish Film Festival, it will be available in Canada on the Highball streaming service (specializing in film festival content). As well, the producers have just signed a deal for distribution internationally on Chai Flicks, a streaming service for Israeli and Jewish content. Silver-Baird has also put together a set of original music “Judeo-pop” music for the premiere, inspired by the film’s theme.
While the story has a distinct arc and a conclusion, other subplots and narrative turns were cut to pare the story down to the digital short episode format. The ending is open-ended enough to allow for a sequel (More Less than Kosher?) or possibly an episodic television series.
“Michael and I are still writing and exploring this world,” says Silver-Baird. “I think Less Than Kosher will continue to have a life some time after this.”
Less Than Kosher has its world premiere at the Ted Rogers Hot Docs Cinema on Sunday, June 4, at 4 pm. For more information, see the website of the Toronto Jewish Film Festival.