‘It almost reads like a gag,” Sam Blair said. “Have you heard about the fascist politician who found out he was a Jew?” Blair was talking about Csanád Szegedi, a former leader of Hungary’s extremist right-wing Jobbik party. Jobbik is widely, but not officially, associated with anti-Semitism; as an example, in the run-up to the…
When Madeleine Lebeau, the last surviving actress from the film “Casablanca” (1942) died earlier this month at age 92, she took with her more than film history. Her screen role as Yvonne, Humphrey Bogart’s discarded mistress, was twinned with her real-life role as the wife of French Jewish actor Marcel Dalio (1899–1983). Dalio was born…
Joel Grey understands why it comes up in every interview. “People want to grab attention and that’s what this year’s news was,” he says. The “it” has to do with his coming out to People Magazine last year. And the reason it remains this year’s news is because of Grey’s just-published, no-holds-barred memoir, “Master of…
“Game of Thrones,” the popular medieval fantasy series that one of its creators describes as “‘The Sopranos’ in Middle-earth” — a reference to that other medieval fantasy saga written by a guy with too many R’s in his name, JRR Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings” — is full of intrigue and drama, as well as…
The Israeli actress and director Ronit Elkabetz, who died on April 19 at age 51, was noted for her masterful portrayal of tragic figures with few or no exit options. Yet in life she retained powerful optimism about the restorative value of drama for bringing people closer together. When she died prematurely of cancer, leaving…
Last spring when Michael Levine, the filmmaker of “Streit’s: Matzo and the American Dream” was in the final days of editing and had already shipped a copy off to film festivals, he received word from the Streit family that the factory he had been documenting over the past two years was closing and moving to…
When a group of young Jewish men and women stockpiled arms and rose up against their Nazi oppressors in the Warsaw Ghetto, 73 years ago today, they surely weren’t motivated by the idea that what they were doing would make for good TV. But in the decades since that Passover eve, countless novels, plays, poems,…
In the 1993 movie “Benny and Joon,” Sam (Johnny Depp), a strange and illiterate young man, falls in love with Joon (Mary Stuart Masterson), an artistic young woman who suffers from occasional psychotic episodes. Aside from the odd breakdown, though, you wouldn’t know there was anything wrong with her. As Sam says to Joon’s brother…
The first time I remember being overwhelmed with laughter in a movie theater was when Peter Sellers, as Inspector Jacques Clouseau in “The Return of the Pink Panther,” went airborne with a slow-motion karate kick that sailed over the head of sidekick Cato (Burt Kwouk), through a door and into the mayhem of crashing shelves…
There is no curtain when you enter the theater for Danai Gurira’s “Familiar” at Playwrights Horizons. And so you get a good look, as you wait for the play to start, at its fully illuminated set, an idealized, cathedral-ceilinged suburban living space with smooth cream walls, dark-wood detailing and a towering bookcase. You know the…
There’s a lesson in Kenneth Lonergan’s new play “Hold On To Me Darling,” which opened on Monday, March 14 at the Atlantic Theater Company. But I kind of doubt it’s the lesson the author intended. Lonergan is one of my favorite playwrights, which isn’t to say that he’s the author of my favorite plays. Like…
