For most people, Linda Lavin will always be Alice from the TV show of the same name: a widowed, would-be singer who found a home and family at Mel’s Diner. But she’s more than a one-hit wonder — even if that hit ran for nine seasons. Lavin is also an accomplished jazz singer who performs…
Screenwriter and director Lawrence Kasdan has been nominated for four Academy Awards and has written some of the highest-grossing films in Hollywood history, including “The Bodyguard,” “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” “The Empire Strikes Back” and “Return of the Jedi.” But Kasdan is best known to some for “The Big Chill” and “Grand Canyon,” the…
Mousa Abu Marzook’s first-ever interview with a Jewish publication was arranged, at the Forward’s request, by his attorney, Stanley L. Cohen, who was present for the entire exchange. Abu Marzook spoke to Larry Cohler-Esses, the assistant managing editor for news, on April 3 and April 4 for a total of five and one half hours….
Screenwriter Bruce Joel Rubin is standing in the back of the Lunt-Fontanne Theater just off Broadway watching his latest baby, “Ghost: The Musical,” unfold. Rubin won an Academy Award for his screenplay about, well, a ghost. He never imagined it as a musical. Yet here it is. Already a smash hit in London (tickets have…
Actor Alan Mandell has portrayed Shakespeare’s Shylock, Prospero and Lear, and performed everywhere from Dublin’s Abbey Theatre to Broadway to the silver screen. One of his most notable recent roles was Rabbi Marshak in the Coen brothers’ “A Serious Man.” Mandell is currently playing Estragon in “Waiting for Godot” at LA’s Mark Taper Forum. He…
It was a simple yet generous gesture. About 5,000 employees of Macy’s department store contributed what little they could afford to create a memorial plaque for their boss, Isidor Straus, and his wife, Ida, who died in the Titanic disaster. “Their lives were beautiful and their deaths glorious,” read the inscription on the bronze bas-relief…
The Los Angeles Jewish Symphony is celebrating its 18th anniversary this year with a series of live performances, beginning with a March 31 concert at Valley Beth Shalom, in the San Fernando Valley. The “Istoria Judia — La Convivencia Musical” concert concentrated on Morocco’s Sephardic tradition and commemorated the 1492 expulsion of Jews from Spain….
By day, as photo and film archivist at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, Jesse Aaron Cohen tends to thousands of images of bygone Jewish culture. By night, he’s half of the Brooklyn-based “existential pop” duo Tanlines, whose new album, “Mixed Emotions,” will sound “absolutely stupendous when you’re driving during the daytime with your windows…
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