Mein damen und herren. Citizens of River City. Momsies and popsicles. And all people who want to succeed in business without really trying. Attend this tale — Sunday night was the 72nd annual Tony Awards ceremony. The Schmooze has carefully tabulated every single Jewish moment that occurred during the three hour awards ceremony at Radio…
Jeremy Schonfeld didn’t exactly intend to create a multimedia rock opera about the Shoah and the emotional trauma it inflicted across generations. All he wanted to do was write an album in honor of his father, Gustav Schonfeld, a survivor of Auschwitz who passed away in 2011. Yet, according to Schonfeld, the result of this…
Something Wonderful: Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Broadway Revolution By Todd S. Purdum Henry Holt & Co., 400 pages, $32 Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II met cute at Columbia University’s Varsity Show. Hammerstein had helped write the musical variety show. Rodgers’s elder brother, Morty Rodgers, a fraternity pal of Hammerstein’s, introduced the two afterward. Rodgers, not…
The Schmooze will be the first to tell you that almost anything can be a great musical. Every time we hear some holier-than-thou would-be art critic, usually a dad or some other form of man, asking “Does “Mean Girls”/”Shrek”/that obscure tv show/the life of that interesting woman” really need to be made into a musical?”…
Update note: This story was published on December 24, 2017. It was updated to reflect new developments for the musical on August 14, 2019. Britain’s royals now wear shorts, cry in public, and care about marginalized people. Now, a musical about Princess Diana’s wedding, written by the Jewish keyboardist for “Bon Jovi” is officially headed…
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. Thirty-five years ago, Zalmen Mlotek and Moishe Rosenfeld co-wrote the script for a musical called “The Golden Land” in honor of the 85th anniversary of the Forverts, the world’s oldest Yiddish newspaper. The goal then was to depict, through Yiddish song, the first decades of Eastern European Jewish immigration…
In “Changing Places,” a terrific academic novel by David Lodge, a professor and his colleagues play a literary parlor game called “Humiliation.” In the game, the players attempt to one-up each other in admissions of ignorance by confessing the most inexcusable examples of books they haven’t read. When Professor Howard Ringbaum admits he never read…
(JTA) — A musical play based on the lives and careers of the influential hip-hop group The Beastie Boys is to open in London. “Licensed to Ill,” named after the group’s first album, is scheduled to run from Nov. 23 to Dec. 12 at the Camden People’s Theater. The three core members of The Beastie…
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