‘Fiddler on the Roof’ lyricist Sheldon Harnick dies at 99
Harnick put words to Jewish life — past and present
Sheldon Harnick
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Culture Folksbiene To Present ‘Fiddler On The Roof’ — In Yiddish
Broadway favorite “Fiddler on the Roof” began life as a Sholem Aleichem story, penned in its author’s native Yiddish. The show will return to that language in summer 2018, in a production by the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene. As The New York Times’s Sopan Deb reported, Sheldon Harnick, the much-acclaimed lyricist of “Fiddler on the…
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Culture At Book Launch, A Broadway Playwright Discusses His ‘Lurid Past’ — And, Perhaps, Present
The night was cold and sure to get colder, and at the playwright Sherman Yellen’s Upper East Side apartment, talk of snow, predicted the next morning in abundance, was so earnest as to make one nearly see it already. In fact, ensconced in the warm dim light of the 11th-story living room with a glass…
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Culture ‘She Loves Me’ Hits The Screen, And 8 Other Things To Read, Watch, And Do This Week
We hope you’ve digested all of that Turkey Day tryptophan, because with a flood of events in New York, Chicago, Washington D.C., and Los Angeles, the Jewish cultural world is moving right along. As December creeps around the corner, bundle against the cold – or, if you’re in L.A., laugh at the rest of us…
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Culture Can This Be Too Much Bock and Harnick for Our Own Good?
This has been our year of living Bock-Harnickly. In October, the York Theatre Company presented “Rothschild & Sons,” a revised take on composer Jerry Bock and lyricist Sheldon Harnick’s 1970 “The Rothschilds,” a dull tale about the founding of the banking dynasty. In December came Bartlett Sher’s triumphant revival of their masterwork, “Fiddler on the…
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Music What 91-Year-Old ‘Fiddler on the Roof’ Lyricist Taught Me About Love
As I walked into Mendy’s on 34th Street on a recent Friday night to attend a Shabbat dinner for the Broadway cast of “Fiddler on the Roof,” I felt relieved that I’d successfully avoided a run-in with my ex-boyfriend, who lives in the neighborhood. He ended our three-and-a-half-year relationship this past summer and began seeing…
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The Schmooze ‘The Rothschilds and Sons’ On Stage — And Those I’ve Met
As comic Buddy Hackett — who frequented NBC’s Tonight Show hosted by Jonny Carson — often cited his grandmother’s Yiddish expression for “disappointed” as entoysht — is regrettably how I felt when I saw the latest incarnation of the Sheldon Harnick (lyrics), Jerry Bock (music) and Sherman Yellen(book) musical “The Rothschilds & Sons.” Presented by the York…
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Culture Revising and Reviving ‘The Rothschilds’
“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,…
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