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…
“Fiddler on the Roof,” composer Jerry Bock and lyricist Sheldon Harnick’s great, melancholy look at Ashkenazic history, with a book by Joseph Stein, opened on Broadway in 1964 and ran for nearly eight years. It ends, heartbreakingly, with the villagers of Anatevka, ejected from their home, marching west, ready to start new lives — marching,…
Have you heard the one about the Jewish mother so bulldozing that her husband and daughters try hard to stay out of her path? About the Jewish father proud at his daughter’s wedding, but mostly because of the great deal he got on the banquet hall? About the Waspy machetayneste-to-be who sips gin at breakfast,…
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