Almost 20 years after his death, Shlomo Carlebach is still a problem. To some fans, Carlebach was the “Singing Rabbi,” a folk music star who performed alongside Bob Dylan and the Grateful Dead. To others he was a scholar and a sage, a talmudic genius and a spiritual leader in the tradition of the early…
“Kinky Boots” won six Tony awards on Sunday including the top award of best musical and a prize for its composer, pop queen Cyndi Lauper, as Broadway presented its top honors. Lauper won best score for her first Broadway musical, “Kinky Boots,” an adaptation of a British film about a struggling shoe factory reinventing itself…
The original “Hairspray” (1988) was a weird little movie made by cult director John Waters about rock and roll and race relations in 1960s Baltimore. Then it became a smash musical on Broadway, then a 2007 film adaptation of that Broadway hit. Now, the show is coming to Jerusalem, with a community theater production featuring…
When my parents landed in New York in 1947 they were assigned a case worker. I’m not sure who did the assigning, but I remember my father saying how puzzled he was. “Case” was German for cheese, and he didn’t understand why he needed a cheese worker. My parents didn’t tell many stories about their…
“Scandalous,” the new Broadway musical about evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson, was written by Kathie Lee Gifford. No surprise there. Gifford is a well-known born-again Christian with, presumably, an interest in the work of a crusading missionary. But in a fit of ecumenical irony (or common sense), the two guys she picked to supply the bouncy,…
The sky is turning orange behind the black trees of Central Park, just like the set I remember from 25 years ago. I’m inside one of the city’s greatest works of art, the park, waiting to see another: the revival of Stephen Sondheim’s “Into the Woods.” I do remember that night in 1987 at the…
“Up From The Stacks” is musical theater, but like no other performance that you may have seen. The show, which originally appeared in 2011 in New York and had its West Coast premiere February 23 at the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco, tells the story of college student Lincoln Cabinée, who has a part-time…
MacDougal Street today can hardly be described as paradise. Crammed with NYU students jostling for falafel, or the bridge-and-tunnel crowd fighting for a seat at Panchito’s, it’s difficult to picture the street as a hub of subversion and artistry. But once upon a time, it was. In the 1920s, a Polish Jewish lesbian immigrant named…
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