Ella Marx
Putting on The Moss Maidens—the production that won the Best Play and Best Ensemble awards at SheNYC, a recent theater festival—felt particularly cathartic for the play’s Jewish cast and crew members.
Sarah Breger
After The West Wing, Scandal, and Sports Night, Joshua Malina takes on Leopoldstadt, which is on Broadway through July. Perhaps Hollywood’s most Jew-y Jew, Malina now acts as Hermann Merz, the patriarch of the sprawling Viennese Jewish family.
Yochai Greenfeld was subjected to conversion therapy in his Israel. That process, and his recovery, is the subject of ‘It Gets Bitter.”
Toward the end of World War II, an increasingly paranoid Adolf Hitler worried about poison. To protect himself, he required young women—girls of “good German stock”—to taste his food before each meal.
Joshua Harmon’s new play Prayer for the French Republic draws us into the life of a French Jewish family struggling to decide whether it is safe to remain in the country they have called home for generations.
Moment
Love, Laughter and Tears: Theodore Bikel’s The City of Light with Aimee Ginsburg Bikel. This zoominar is part of the Martha’s Vineyard Jewish Book Festival, in partnership with Moment Magazine, the Chilmark Library and the Martha’s Vineyard Hebrew Center.
Simi Horwitz
“In the theater you are either Jewish, Italian or gay and I chose Jewish,” says Protestant-born lyricist Richard Maltby Jr. during a conference call that includes his long time Jewish collaborator, composer David Shire. “Musical theater is so profoundly Jewish—it’s like living in a Kibbutz—you can’t help becoming Jewish. Also, my wife is Jewish, my children are Jewish and we belong to a temple.”
Liam Hoare
A master of the English language who was not born into it, Stoppard exhibits an arresting verbal dexterity, a mix of joy, wit and wordplay.
Going back to his early line drawings, you can see that Sendak liked to populate the world with Sendaks.
Anis Modi
The Cameri Theater in Tel Aviv recently announced a new play, titled It’s Me, featuring songs by popular Mizrachi artist Eyal Golan, bringing familiar social tensions back to the forefront in Israel.
A definitive guide.
Emily Zisko
The Kinsey Sicks, a dynamite Dragapella Beautyshop Quartet, explode on Theater J’s stage for a limited run of their new politically charged show Things You Shouldn’t Say, saying and singing anything they damn well please.
