Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
The Schmooze

A Comedy by, About and Starring Lawyers

“I got my show business through a needle,” Myron Cohen, a former litigator [no relation to legendary comic-raconteur and Ed Sullivan regular Myron Cohen] told me following the August 28 launch at The Lambs of his most recent production —“The Ghost Writer—A Comedy.“

Presented by the New York City Bar Association’s Entertainment Committee, it was also showcased on September 10 at the NYC Bar Association and will have its final performance on September 15 at the Cold Spring Harbor Library.

Author and director of the New York Bar’s “12th Nite Performances” since 1973, Cohen also stars in this convoluted chuckler about [his character] — Roger, an honest, married lawyer — who unwittingly becomes entangled with the sexy “ghostwriter” of his memoirs who is in bed — so-to-speak — with a cast of goodfellas right out of “Guys and Dolls.”

When I asked Cohen — a/k/a/ “Mike” — how he got bitten by the writing bug and what kind of “needle” he was referring to, he said: “After retiring…I played golf for the first month and then went out of my mind!” Apropos “needle.My grandfather from Russia was a theatrical tailor in the ‘20’s and ‘30’s in Boston… I put myself through Harvard as a stand-up comic and I have been writing shows [akin to] ‘This Is Your Life’ sketches of everybody from [Justice “Antonin] Scalia” to mayors [John] Lindsay and [Ed] Koch.”

Samuel Bartos, who plays Joe — who with fellow “goodfella” Kevin Nolan (Vinnie) strong arm Cohen’s character Roger — told me during our post-performance chat that “my father was a Yiddish maven [who] wrote all the jokes in the ‘Treasury of Jewish Folklore’. He also worked for the Forward.” With degrees from Amherst College, Yale School of Music and Cardozo Law School, Bartos — a professional singer since childhood and a Steinway Artist — continues to straddle both the legal and musical orbits.

With a multi-generational cast of thirteen (lawyers, litigators, judges, law students, district attorneys), stage-managed by Jane Shufer (an Agency Attorney in the Torts Division of the New York City Transit Authority), plus the exquisite accompaniment by Vladivostok-born, Moscow Conservatory and Juilliard-trained violinist Larisa Shahmatova, whose performances include venues in the Lower East Side, my verdict is in.

Delightful as charged.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse..

Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.