“This temple is going to the dogs,” said the congregant making her way to a seat, to no one in particular but loudly enough for half the sanctuary to hear. “The nerve of them! Bringing in a Carol Channing impersonator — and for the High Holidays!” What had irked her was the announcement just made…
Colorblind casting, the practice of casting actors of one race in roles traditionally played by another, seems to be a subject of perennial controversy in the world’s highest profile theaters. Last year the grand spectacle musical “Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812” based on Tolstoy’s “War And Peace” drew sharp criticism when it…
Tonight marks the opening of LaGuardia High School’s production of “The Sound of Music.” Audiences can expect the rousing score of Richard Rodgers, the inspiring words of Oscar Hammerstein – but if they come looking for historical accuracy, they may leave disappointed. The New York Daily News heard from students at LaGuardia, a New York…
It took a pessimistic girl from New York to make two of the most penetrating satires of sunny California ever committed to film. I speak of course of filmmaker Amy Heckerling, director of 1982’s “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” and 1995’s “Clueless.” In a December 5 profile by The New York Times’ Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Heckerling…
Erich Rosenthal, a Jewish scholar, watched the rise of the Nazis from the United States. He’d managed to escape his native Germany, but his family wasn’t so lucky. Now his son, the composer Ted Rosenthal, is poised to give new voice to the tormented years his father spent praying for his family from afar. In…
The American Jewish magician Ricky Jay, who died on November 24 at age 72, achieved an unusual conjuring trick while still in his teens; he managed to make his parents disappear from his life. Born Richard Jay Potash in Brooklyn and raised in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Jay had parents ill-suited to the sort of obsessive,…
Lyn Levine, 26, heard a commotion from the balcony. But it was only when she heard a man shout “Go home, Nazi” that she got a clue what was happening. Someone had said something anti-Semitic, she realized. People were moving quickly out of the way. Faces showed surprise, confusion. “The first thing that went through…
It’s next year in Midtown for the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbeine’s production of “Fiddler on the Roof.” Playbill reports that the all-Yiddish production of the musical, directed by the legendary performer Joel Grey and translated into Yiddish by Shraga Friedman, will transfer from lower Manhattan’s Museum of Jewish Heritage to Off-Broadway’s Stage 42 where it…
Dori Berinstein’s latest Broadway venture, “The Prom,” was sparked by a Mississippi media circus and a two-sentence pitch. In the spring of 2010, the circus paraded through Itawamba County Agricultural High School. The school, near Tupelo, canceled its senior prom rather than allow Constance McMillen to bring her girlfriend to the dance and, possibly worse,…
Barry Levey wants a Jewish identity free of victimhood. Confronting his brother’s interfaith marriage, his mother’s objection to the union and his LatinX boyfriend’s insistence that the Jewish story is no longer one of persecution, he begins to wonder: What would it be like if the Holocaust never happened? “Imagine how much easier life would…
The iconic look of “Fiddler on the Roof,” from its Broadway debut to the 1976 film, is due in no small part to the show’s original costume designer, Patricia Zipprodt. 30 photos of Zipprodt’s design sketches for the musical’s 1964 premiere, part of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts’ collection and recently…
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