Jesse Oxfeld
By Jesse Oxfeld
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Culture Don’t Mess (Too Much) With Tradition: Updated ‘Fiddler’ a Triumph
The thing about traditions is that in order to thrive they sometimes need to change — just enough, and in the right ways. Even Tevye the milkman, musical theater’s great advocate for tradition, knows this. Oh, sure, he’ll raise a fuss when his traditional ways are questioned, but, on the other hand, he’ll come around…
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Culture David Mamet’s American Snoozefest
“QUESTION: WHAT IS DRAMA?” When he was running the CBS series “The Unit,” the expert and expertly hectoring dramatist David Mamet a memo to his writers, complete with excessive capitalization and the occasional bolded phrase. “DRAMA, AGAIN, IS THE QUEST OF THE HERO TO OVERCOME THOSE THINGS WHICH PREVENT HIM FROM ACHIEVING A SPECIFIC, ACUTE…
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Culture Welcome to Arthur Miller’s Nightmare
“And if I seem to tell this like a dream,” says the lawyer who serves as narrator, as the play reaches its brutal resolution, “it was that way.” The lawyer is Alfieri, our guide through postwar Red Hook in Arthur Miller’s 1955 classic, “A View From the Bridge.” And in the production that opened last…
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Culture Revising and Reviving ‘The Rothschilds’
“Fiddler on the Roof,” composer Jerry Bock and lyricist Sheldon Harnick’s great, melancholy look at Ashkenazic history, with a book by Joseph Stein, opened on Broadway in 1964 and ran for nearly eight years. It ends, heartbreakingly, with the villagers of Anatevka, ejected from their home, marching west, ready to start new lives — marching,…
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Culture Bob Morris and Jesse Oxfeld Talk Love and Guilt
Bob Morris grew up on Long Island with two larger-than-life parents, Joe and Ethel Morris. In 2002, after years of illness, his mother died. Four years later, after a few good years, a few bad ones and then, essentially, surrender — there was a halfhearted suicide attempt — his father died, too. In a very…
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Culture Broadway’s 11th Commandment: Thou Shalt Be a Wise-Ass
Two years ago, I took a morning off work to attend my childhood rabbi’s funeral. Ours wasn’t an observant family, and I really didn’t have any relationship with the rabbi beyond my decades-ago bar mitzvah, but Jehiel Orenstein, of Congregration Beth El in South Orange, N.J., was a nice man and a good man, a…
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Culture Heard the One About the Jewish Musical That’s Better Than You’d Think?
Have you heard the one about the Jewish mother so bulldozing that her husband and daughters try hard to stay out of her path? About the Jewish father proud at his daughter’s wedding, but mostly because of the great deal he got on the banquet hall? About the Waspy machetayneste-to-be who sips gin at breakfast,…
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Culture How Wendy Wasserstein and Heidi Holland Remade the World
tk “It’s just that I feel stranded,” says Heidi Holland, standing alone on stage, delivering a frustrated, funny speech about her life and its discontents. It’s 1986, she’s nearing 40, and she’s addressing an alumnae gathering of her all-girls high school. For the last hour or so, we’ve watched her grow up, along with the…
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