Michael Handelzalts
By Michael Handelzalts
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The Schmooze Warsaw Theater Tackles Hanoch Levin
Crossposted From Haaretz Gay soccer fans about to come out of the closet. A mother and her daughter, and their fatal relationship against the backdrop of occupied Poland. Twenty-first-century Poles who must deal with the guilt of World War II, a time when men handed their countrymen over to the Nazis in exchange for nothing…
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The Schmooze Israeli Arab Actor Targeted by Right-Wing Campaign
Crossposted from Haaretz In a normal — not to say ideal — country, discussion of a production of Federico Garcia Lorca’s “The House of Bernarda Alba” would deal with the production’s artistic merits. But we are not living in a normal country, and so before I discuss the artistic values of this production at Tel…
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The Schmooze Mikhail Baryshnikov in Tel Aviv
Crossposted from Haaretz There are two excuses to see the play “In Paris,” which is playing this week at Tel Aviv’s Suzanne Dellal Center as part of a world tour. The first is a lovely story by Ivan Bunin about a missed opportunity. A “white” general who is living out his disappointment with life in…
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The Schmooze If Not a Singer, Then an Actor
Crossposted from Haaretz I admit that after 40-odd years of theater-going and formulating evaluations of what I have seen and publishing them (which obligates me to form an opinion and makes it hard to evade expressing it), I am not entirely certain what the role of the director is in a theatrical production. This question,…
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The Schmooze Czeslaw Milosz Honored at Festival in Lodz
Crossposted from Haaretz Since 2002 Lodz, an industrial city in western Poland, has been holding a festival called Four Cultures, which packs into a few days in September events from all areas of the arts, including interdisciplinary arts, representing the four major cultures of the inhabitants that make up the city: Polish, German, Russian and…
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The Schmooze Hanoch Levin’s Jokes About Death
Crossposted from Haaretz In the final scene of Hanoch Levin’s “The Suitcase Packers,” a comedy with eight funerals now revived at the Cameri, the surviving characters stand around “this cart” pulled by the gravedigger, holding the white-sheeted body of Henya Gerlenter. Her son Elhanan (Dror Keren, who has a Levinesque childish innocence) is possibly the…
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The Schmooze Superficial Characters and Their Sex Lives
Crossposted from Haaretz This shouldn’t have happened. A spectator coming to the theater is supposed to take an interest in many things: the plot, the characters, the style, the acting, the directing. When the play is really good, he is supposed to take all of these in, perhaps reflect on them later in greater detail,…
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The Schmooze Big City Dreams, Small Town Scandals
Crossposted from Haaretz The recent Europe Theater Prize ceremony in St. Petersburg gave me a chance to meet with Lev Dodin, the director of St. Petersburg’s Maly Theater, who won the prize back in 2000. Israel’s Gesher Theater hosted the Maly recently for their adaptation of Vasily Grossman’s “Life and Fate.” Dodin’s perception of time…
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