Barry Manilow has a particular talent for upbeat — and unserious — musical storytelling. His easy-listening songs are populated by showgirls named Lola and men named Rico who wear diamonds, as featured in his iconic “Copacabana,” or balladeers lamenting the loss of a legendarily selfless lover, as in “Mandy.” His famed “Stuck on a Band-Aid”…
The National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene has a tough act to follow for its 105th season. Last year, the Folksbiene launched a remarkably successful Yiddish production of “Fiddler on the Roof” that, following a sold-out run at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, transferred Off-Broadway, where it is currently playing at Stage 42. In its 2019-2020 season,…
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…
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. As soon as the film version of “Fiddler on the Roof,” based on the stories of the classic Yiddish writer, Sholem Aleichem, came out in movie theaters in 1971, my family and I went to see it. I thought it was wonderful, especially the songs. I learned…
My best memories of summer are of the arts: Catching a B.B. King concert in a Denver August downpour; waiting in the humid heat for a free ticket to “My Fair Lady” at the Muny in St. Louis; spreading a jacket on the beach at Coney Island and watching the riveting and under-recognized “Crown Heights”…
During the cherry-blossomed blush of the first proper week of spring, on the same day Prince Harry and Meghan Markle announced which musicians would accompany 2018’s most hotly-anticipated nuptials, a group of men across the pond from Kensington Palace rehearsed for another famous wedding. “Hot toe! Hot toe! And heel,” choreographer Staš Kmieć yelled at…
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. The first Holocaust memorial services took place while the genocide of Europe’s Jews was still occurring. Whenever a city or town was liberated, a few Jews would return, clean up the mass graves where their relatives had been shot, erect a simple marker and chant “El Malei…
Broadway favorite “Fiddler on the Roof” began life as a Sholem Aleichem story, penned in its author’s native Yiddish. The show will return to that language in summer 2018, in a production by the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene. As The New York Times’s Sopan Deb reported, Sheldon Harnick, the much-acclaimed lyricist of “Fiddler on the…
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