A lawyer from Montreal who left her profession to pursue her childhood passion says that after three years, her leap of faith seems to be paying off.
Jill Ohayon, a former human rights lawyer based in Ottawa, will make her Off-Broadway debut when her show, The Garden Bridge, is performed as part of the SheNYC summer festival in New York this summer.
“We’re really lucky and grateful that we were selected for this festival and now we get to share it with more people,” she told Global News from New York, where she lives.
She said hers is one of four musicals selected from over 400 submissions, adding that her two-hour show has been performed in a number of venues already and has been well received.
Ohayon, originally from Dollard-des-Ormeaux, left her law practice in 2022 and moved to the Big Apple to pursue a two-year master’s degree in musical theatre at New York University.
During her second year, Ohayon, a writer, was paired with another student who writes music. In the process of working together, the two learned something about their ancestral histories and decided to produce a show based on it.
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“We created a piece about a Jewish family and a Chinese family who end up as next-door neighbours in this area of Shanghai that they were kinda forced into,” she explained.
Ohayon is Jewish. Her collaborator, Andy Li, is Chinese American. The play is fiction but based on the story of Jews who fled the Holocaust to Shanghai.
“It was a part of history that neither of us knew anything about,” she told Global News. “About 20,000 European Jews did that, many of whom survived the Holocaust that way.”
Shanghai was eventually occupied by the Japanese who made life difficult for both the Jewish and Chinese people.
The Garden Bridge, based on this story of forced migration and persecution, is timely, Ohayon believes, given the recent rise in anti-immigrant sentiments and racism.
“Just every form of racism, of hatred, of lack of safety, lack of security in the most basic sense, has come about,” she pointed out.
Even a synagogue attached to her childhood school in Dollard-des-Ormeaux was attacked twice, most recently in December. A 19-year-old man faces multiple arson charges.
At her childhood home, Ohayon’s mother, Lisa Struzer-Ohayon, said there were early signs of her daughter’s passion.
“That’s music notes,” she laughs, pointing to a framed illustration on a wall in her daughter’s childhood bedroom that hasn’t changed since Ohayon moved out. “That’s a music note treble clef,” she said, referring to a sculpture behind the door.
Ohayon’s Off-Broadway is quite an achievement for someone who, just three years ago, was a human rights lawyer in Ottawa, her dad, Robert Ohayon, said. But, it also doesn’t surprise him.
“She’s always loved theatre,” he said. “As a child, we had her in children[s] theatre. She always loved it.”
He smiled when he was told that his daughter credits him for her love of music and performing. He studied acting but never pursued that passion.
“I was too chicken,” he laughed.
He’s glad that Ohayon is still a member of the Ontario Bar so that she has something to fall back on in case a career in theatre fails.
Given her achievements so far, though, her parents are optimistic she’ll succeed.
