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…
Arthur Miller’s work is returning to the Broadway boards. The New York Times reports a new production of “All My Sons” will open at Roundabout Theater Company’s American Airlines Theater bringing some marquee names with it. The World War II family drama, which premiered on Broadway in 1947, follows the Keller family, whose son Larry…
Who would’ve thought that the hottest tickets in town this summer of 2018 would be for two shows adapting the stories of the great Yiddish author Sholem Aleichem? While both are well-executed and deserving of the mostly rave reviews they’ve received, neither is particularly innovative or cutting-edge from a theatrical standpoint. It would be a…
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. Sholem Aleichem has been an unusually frequent topic of conversation in New York this summer, thanks to the critical and commercial success of the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene’s Yiddish-language production of “Fiddler on the Roof.” As anyone who has read Sholem Aleichem’s Tevye stories is well aware,…
The word “complicit” has become so popular in the first years of the Trump administration that it can register as an empty gesture at a damning concept. Your tax dollars go to separating children from their parents at the border; you are complicit, and what does that mean? How could you change it? You, personally,…
I was sick for my latest birthday, sniffly and feverish, yet I somehow found the wherewithal to force my gathered friends to watch the scene from “Fiddler on the Roof” in which the furious ghost of Frume Sarah rises from the grave. You know the one. Tevye, trying to convince his wife Golde to approve…
For Sasson Gabay, 71, acting is second nature, not unlike eating, drinking or even breathing. He instinctively observes the people around him, the way they interact and behave. It’s all source material, culled and stored for future roles that he might play. “I look at you, how you speak, the kind of questions you ask,…
Going to see an intense, absurdist Hebrew play performed in Yiddish for 20 people in Manhattan’s West Village may not be the most esoteric entertainment I’ve enjoyed in my decade at the Forward (though it surely comes close), but explaining its significance presents a challenge. And yet, just like Hanoch Levin’s “The Labor of Life”…
On May 2, 1949, Arthur Miller, then 33, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Drama for “Death of a Salesman.” It was one of several remarkable moments in what was, for Miller, a remarkable year. “Death of a Salesman” swept up most of the season’s available theatrical awards, including the Tony Award for Best Author,…
In 1985, “Palestinian Girl,” a drama by Joshua Sobol, Israel’s most famous and prolific living playwright, premiered in the Haifa Theater. A story about a love affair between an Israeli man and a Palestinian woman whose relationship is being destroyed by right-wing thugs, the play was controversial, but a huge success. This was a few…
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