“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,…
“It is a puzzlement,” as Yul Brynner used to crow onstage, how Rodgers and Hammerstein, two American Jewish musical theater titans who promoted ethnic and racial tolerance, created such an insensitive spectacle as 1951’s “The King and I.” Now in its umpteenth Broadway revival, the musical comedy purports to show the historical figure of King…
(JTA) — When Rabbi Bruce Dollin first talked to the board at his Conservative synagogue about launching an alternative, singing-centered Shabbat morning service that would use musical instruments, he didn’t encounter much resistance. Over the two decades he had led the Hebrew Educational Alliance in Denver, attendance at the synagogue’s regular Shabbat davening – a traditional…
Brooklynite Book by Michael Mayer and Peter Lerman Music and Lyrics by Peter Lerman Vineyard Theatre This theatrical season has seen not one but two musicals about superheroes in Brooklyn. The first, Itamar Moses, Michael Friedman and Daniel Aukin’s “The Fortress of Solitude,” which was mounted by the Public Theater in the fall, was a…
On the last day of the second coldest February in Chicago’s history, I made my way downtown to the Actors’ Equity Building on Randolph Street to gate-crash the auditions for “Beautiful: The Carole King Musical.” If you’ve never been to an audition of this kind, you’d probably expect something out of the movies: a bare…
The 1989 movie “New York Stories” is composed of three short films about New York City. In Woody Allen’s segment, “Oedipus Wrecks,” his character’s overbearing Jewish mother disappears as part of a magic show — but rather than reappearing after the trick is finished instead is transformed into a celestial presence hovering over Manhattan, continually…
Photo by Carol Rosegg “Cafe Society Swing,” a new musical that opened in New York on December 21, has so many good parts it’s a shame they don’t fit together. The play tells the story of Barney Josephson, the son of Latvian Jewish immigrants who scrapped together a few thousand bucks and, in 1938, opened…
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