Welcome to the Forward’s coverage of Jewish theater, the performing art done everywhere from small indie venues to Broadway, in Yiddish, English, and other languages.
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Community A Director’s Undying Tribute to the Iconic Elie Wiesel
For the 85th birthday of Professor Wiesel, I was asked to write a small essay to present my first encounter with Elie Wiesel. This article was published in the book “Take a Teacher, Make a Friend,” special edition for the 85th anniversary of Elie Wiesel, published by Boston University in 2014. Today, after his death,…
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Culture How ‘Aladdin’ Became A Hanukkah Musical
Over Christmas last year, the New Wimbledon Theatre in South London staged — as many English theaters do this time of year — the story of “Aladdin.” The comedienne Jo Brand played the Genie; former “Britain’s Got Talent” contestants Flawless were the Peking Police Force; and faded television presenter Matthew Kelly donned a dress to…
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Culture The Dybbuks Made Me Do It
If there had been stand-up comedy in the shtetl, “The dybbuk made me do it!” could very well have been a popular catchphrase. The myth of an innocent person turning to evil because a demon has taken possession of his or her body is common to all cultures, but it has deep roots in Jewish…
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Culture Bryna Wasserman Picked To Lead National Jewish Theater
F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, “There are no second acts in American lives.” But there are second acts, apparently, in Yiddish theater lives. In late June, the National Yiddish Theatre — Folksbiene announced that Bryna Wasserman, formerly the head of Montreal’s Segal Centre for Performing Arts, will take over as executive director, joining the Folksbiene’s artistic…
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Culture Beneath Black Hats and Shtreimels
It used to be that if you saw a Hasid in a movie or a TV show, he (and it was nearly always a “he”) was there as a visual signifier of urban diversity and little more. Hasidim appeared only in crowd scenes, or in montages intent on showing the multicultural essence of the American…
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News Sidney Lumet, 86, Prolific Director of Gritty, Realist Films That Captured the City
APPRECIATION Just after Sidney Lumet passed away, I received numerous e-mails from film students who fondly recalled his visits with them at Columbia University. A few remembered the emotional wallop of seeing “The Pawnbroker” for the first time, in my American film history course. Others praised Lumet’s humility and candor after a preview of “Night…
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Culture Conducting Crowds to the Beat of His Grandparents
Michael Tilson Thomas’s grandmom had trunks in her basement. A lot of our grandmothers had stuff stacked away. But our grandmoms were not Bessie Thomashefsky. “When I used to go visit my grandmother at her apartment in Hollywood, she had trunks in her basement and that was a special treat,” said Tilson Thomas, music director…
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Culture Metamorphoses: The Sources and Journeys of a Tune
Listen to a clip from “Di Tsvey Brider” (“The Two Brothers”) from “New Worlds: A Celebration of I.L. Peretz” produced by Folksbiene. From an original score by Dmitri Slepovitch, recorded with the musicians Dmitri Slepovitch, Matt Temkin, and the voices of Shane Baker and Mikhl Baran. ‘A melody lives and dies and it is forgotten,”…
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