The Divine Miss M seems to be recovering nicely from losing Jewish Celeb Madness.

Was there ever any question that Bette Midler in Hello, Dolly! would be anything other than an Experience? And since I saw it one day before opening night, wouldn’t it be silly for me, a humble Standing Room Only patron, to join the parade of rave reviews and bandy about words like “legend” and “star charisma?” For months, the words “Bette Midler. Hello, Dolly! What more do you need to know? Oh yeah: Telecharge” haunted my waking hours. That damn black screen advertisement showed up every time I watched something on YouTube. But eventually, I managed to see it (chairs are overrated).

Bette Midler was really good, guys.

Bette aside for a moment, Hello, Dolly! is a 1960’s Broadway musical so of course its creative team (Michael Stewart and Jerry Herman) is Jewish. One would assume that Dolly, the meddler of Yonkers, widow of one Ephraim Levi, brought to screen by Barbra Streisand, is patently Jewish, too.

But she’s not (necessarily)! As Jesse Green points out, there’s a long list of Dolly actresses who were not Jewish themselves and did not portray her as Jewish. In that same article, Tovah Feldshuh and Carol Channing discuss their differing portrayals of Dolly Levi. Whereas the non-Jewish Carol Channing plays Dolly as Jewish, Tovah Feldshuh plays Dolly as a 12-sibling, Irish potato famine emigré who “learned some things about Judaism, but she’s as Christian as she was 20 years ago.” After all, Feldshuh points out, Dolly’s maiden name is Gallagher.

Channing disagrees: “See, from my own personal experience, I’ve found that you turn Jewish when you’re married to a Jew.”

Feldshuh also makes repeated references to how she could “not afford” to play Dolly as Jewish. Channing doesn’t understand what she means; after all, Of course, saying that Gallagher is an Irish surname would have been a sufficient explanation.

But I could wager a guess: Feldshuh might be suggesting that playing Dolly as Jewish and being Jewish herself would be too much of a risk, something about which Channing does not have to worry. She may be worried she would be “too Jewish?”— That she would alienate an audience by injecting too much Judaism in a not-explicitly-Jewish play.

However, whatever it may mean, Midler can sure afford to both play Dolly as Jewish and be Jewish herself. With the sheer force of her charisma, Midler could take a hatchet to the set and a blowtorch to the Shubert and still get thunderous applause.

As for the rest of the show: it was delightful, old-timey musical fun, with much the same spirit as last season’s She Loves Me, but even grander. Speaking of She Loves Me, Gavin Creel passed on his weird mustache from that production to David Hyde Pierce, who is hilarious in Dolly as the stern Mr. Vandergelder. Creel plays the 33-year old virgin Cornelius, and he and Taylor Trensch as Barnaby make a delightful pair. (Side note: wouldn’t Nicholas Barasch be a great Barnaby? Wouldn’t he?)

Kate Baldwin is a feisty Irene Molloy, and Beanie Feldstein is adorable as  Minnie Faye. I just found out that she’s Jonah Hill’s sister but I won’t let that affect my judgment. The sets are beautiful, and the stunning reveal of Harmonia Gardens elicited gasps. There is also a moving train car and a dancing horse. What more do you need to know?

The bare black-screen commercials are right, but at this point, good luck getting tickets through Telecharge. For what it’s worth, standing behind the back row of the orchestra is not a bad view.

Photo by Julieta Cervantes, via Playbill.

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One of Broadway’s newest hits is Come From Away, a musical about the 6,500 plus airplane passengers who were welcomed into Gander, Newfoundland on 9/11 when U.S. airspace was shut down. With a versatile cast of 12 who portray passengers and the people of Gander alike, a bluesy rock score played by a band on stage, and a heartfelt message about kindness and community during a trying time, Away has all the ingredients to be both entertaining and timely.

The show, written by the married creative duo Irene Sankoff and David Hein, has been getting a ton of press, ranging from rave reviews to accounts of the performance that Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau attended with Ivanka Trump and U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley last Wednesday. (Trudeau wasn’t just in New York for a night on the town. Some of the same community members who invited the “come from aways” into their homes 16 years ago have recently helped four families of Syrian refugees adjust to life in Gander, and the prime minister spoke before the show about their generosity. “The world gets to see what it is to lean on each other and be there for each other through the darkest times,” he said.)

Although it’s tough to top anything involving our northern neighbor’s charming leader, what’s more noteworthy to us here at Jewcy is that Sankoff and Hein’s previous musical was an autobiographical project called My Mother’s Lesbian Jewish Wiccan Wedding, based on Hein’s experience of his mother coming out to him and then attending her real-life nuptials. In addition to the rousing title song, which Hein says is about “Hot lesbian action…and my mother,” other numbers include “Don’t Take Your Lesbian Moms to Hooters” and “A Short History of Gay Marriage in Canada.” If only there were video evidence of this project!

Oh, wait.

As for the newer, decidedly more serious, play, Come From Away also has a Jewish touch: a rabbi character based on Rabbi Leivi Sudak, who is in charge of Chabad of Edgware, near London. Rabbi Sudak, who flew to New York to visit the grave Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson in advance of Rosh Hashanah in 2001, was among those stranded in Gander.

Singing rabbis? Jewish wiccan lesbians? Sankoff and Hein are a duo to watch.

Image via Facebook

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We’re gearing up towards the annual New York Musical Festival, an annual outing of developing works hoping to someday gain larger-scale productions (nearly thirty have subsequently opened off-Broadway, or Broadway itself). So if you want to see undiscovered gems and talent, you have to see something there.

If you want something with Jewish content, you’re in luck: This year you can catch The Gold, a musical about a fictional Jewish-German boxer, Joseph Cohen, who’s an Olympic hopeful for the 1936 Munich games. You can guess why this doesn’t work out.

The musical is “set against the backdrop of the Holocaust and the creation of Israel,” “A testament to the resilience of the human spirit and the journey of self-discovery that each of us takes as we search for purpose in our lives.”

It would seem to be quite a journey of self-discovery for the creative team, too; writer and composer Philip Yosowitz is a plastic surgeon by profession living in Houston (where The Gold, his first full musical, has previously been in development). His co-writer is Andrea Lepcio, and this production’s director is Spiro Veloudos.

This festival could be a huge break for this show. We’ll see if Joseph Cohen’s resilience applies to the text.

The Gold plays at the Pearl Theatre in Manhattan from August 1st through 6th.

Image Credit: Josh Davis (Joseph) and Johnathan McVay (Karl). By Paul Schmit

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Jews might not have invented neurosis, but we certainly perfected it. Dear Evan Hansen, the off-Broadway hit scheduled for a Broadway transfer, is the latest addition to what I like to call the Great Jewish-American Songbook of Sadness. In musical theater tradition, Dear Evan Hansen is about loneliness, isolation, desire, and the crushing weight of being alive. Also in musical theater tradition, it is steeped in subtle but unmistakable Jewish influences.

It would be easier to count how many important Broadway writers and composers aren’t Jewish. The balance is upheld by Dear Evan Hansen’s creative team, consisting of one Christian—Justin Paul (music and lyrics)—and two Jews: Benj Pasek (music and lyrics) and Steven Levenson (book). None of their previous works scream “Jewish,” although Pasek joined the ranks of Jews who wrote Christmas songs when he adapted A Christmas Story into a musical. Aside from a couple of quick references to bar mitzvah parties and getting to second base with an Israeli soldier, the characters in Dear Evan Hansen don’t have to be Jewish.  It’s not Fiddler.

But Ben Platt, the driving force on stage, is Jewish. Ben Platt has a history of playing lovable, lonely nerds who have a hard time fitting in. Most know him as Benji from both Pitch Perfect movies. At age 11, he starred in the national tour of Caroline, or Change as Noah Gellman, a Jewish boy in the 1960’s who has a close and complicated relationship with his black housekeeper. More recently, he played the (decidedly not Jewish) Elder Cunningham in Book of Mormon.

Platt is captivating when he becomes Evan Hansen. His tics, twitches, and nervous rambling that are all too familiar for the socially anxious. It is impossible to praise Platt enough, although critics have tried, for a performance that is so painfully and heart-wrenchingly raw that you can’t help but wonder how he can do that (once the show is over and you remember that he was acting).

In an interview with Metro Weekly, Platt credits his Jewish background as inspiration, explaining, “I had to base his social awkwardness more on people I’ve encountered in my life…I come from a big Jewish family and we all have our neuroses and our anxieties.”  And where does that voice come from? He adds, “We’re a very Jewish family, so we would sing a lot in synagogue, and at any bar mitzvah or wedding we always do a song together. “

Though anxiety is not unique to any culture or religion, Evan’s behavior is distinctly Jewish, particularly his use of humor as a coping mechanism. He goes off on rambling, rapid monologues that he injects with sly self-deprecation. Evan suffers, but he uses humor to cope and, like many Jews, he knows the best target is himself. Early on, he explains that he broke his arm trying “to climb this 40-foot tall oak tree but—it’s a funny story—there was a solid ten minutes after I fell where I was laying around, waiting for someone to come get me. I kept saying, any second now.”

“And nobody came?”

“No,” he finishes, “that’s what’s funny.”

There, he turns sadness into a laugh line: credit to Levenson for the joke and Platt for the delivery.

The moments where tragedy embraces humor, where Evan’s suffering gets a laugh—and he welcomes it, laughs along—are familiar in a culture known jointly for humor, suffering, and quirk. Jared, Evan’s family friend, also provides comic relief. His comedy takes a harder, meaner edge that is more like Lenny Bruce than Woody Allen, but his flippant wisecracks and occasional lewdness are greatly appreciated—and at times merciful—in a show that can be emotionally overwhelming. I don’t know if actor Will Roland is Jewish, but it wouldn’t surprise me if he were.

For all its tragedy, Dear Evan Hansen is not just filled with humor, it is also filled with hope.  Like the characters, the story is as universal as it is Jewish: struggling through rough times, coming out of them, growing. Take the Jewish “Easter eggs” away and you’re still left with Ben Platt’s tour de force, wonderful songs and characters, a resonant story, and a lot of used tissues.

Arielle Davinger likes TV, theater, and dogs. She is currently trying.

Image credit: Wikimedia

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