In the two years since Yentl has been collecting five-star reviews and Green Room awards, the play's political context has become increasingly fraught.
The difficulty, according to star Amy Hack, lies in the conflation of Judaism with Israel and its conflict with Palestine.
"The horrible things going on in the Middle East right now shouldn't really have any bearing on the telling of this story - but it has," she told AAP.
Based on a short story by Nobel Prize winner Isaac Bashevis Singer, Yentl is set in a small 1870s shtetl in Poland, the tale of a young woman forbidden from studying religious scriptures who defies the rules by deciding to live as a man.
The opening of Yentl at the Malthouse earlier in 2024 was programmed for the same night as an event by pro-Palestinian writer and activist Clementine Ford, which was shifted to another venue.
After its Malthouse run, Yentl is premiering at the Sydney Opera House, and it's believed to be the first-ever bilingual Yiddish show at the iconic venue.
Co-creator and director Gary Abrahams admits the marketing and PR side of things has been challenging, but hopes audiences can separate the current conflict from what is ultimately a deeply humanist story.
"One of the big challenges we have is that audience members feel they're making a political statement by coming to the show, or that they're picking sides in some way," he said.
"And obviously that's just not the truth."
In fact, says Abrahams, Yentl was created with a queer audience in mind - the play brings together traditional Yiddish culture and religion, gender, and sexuality.
It's a potent mix, and Abrahams relishes observing audiences that include drag queens, queer and trans people sitting next to orthodox and liberal Jews.
Yentl has previously been adapted for the stage, and is perhaps best known for its 1983 musical film adaptation starring Barbra Streisand.
While the film took an explicitly feminist approach, when Abrahams and his co-writers re-translated the original Yiddish short story they found many differences with the existing English translation.
This slippage gave rise to a highly contemporary narrative about gender dysphoria.
"We have honed in on this notion of Yentl being in arguably the wrong body, or a body that does not allow them to fulfil their potential or fully express their identity," Abrahams said.
It's also funny, with Yentl's attempts to live as a man, despite having been segregated from them for a lifetime, resulting in no end of awkward humour.
About a third of the script is in Yiddish, and Amy Hack has spent months learning the language of European Jews and their descendants.
"It's such an evocative language, and I feel like it carries with it a lot of the pain and trauma that these people would have been through for many generations," she said.
Her grandparents, from Latvia and Lithuania, spoke the 1000-year-old tongue, her mother spoke a little too, and then there was always TV shows The Nanny and Seinfeld.
Hack believes Yentl is ultimately an apolitical, universal tale, and she puts her faith in the unifying power of stories in a divided world.
Abrahams hopes success in Sydney might mean the small Melbourne company that developed the show, Kadimah Yiddish Theatre, can tour Yentl internationally.
"If we can crack it here in Sydney, it means the show will have a long life and potentially go overseas, and be an ambassador for great Australian art," he said.
Yentl is on at the Sydney Opera House's Playhouse until November 10.
