The National Yiddish Theater Folksbiene gives the people what they want. “Folk” is in the name, after all. And obviously, the people want Fiddler on the Roof performed in the mamaloshen. Naturally. If you don’t, there is something wrong with you.

The time will be July. The place will be the Museum of Jewish Heritage in Manhattan. Most other details are still forthcoming, but the musical’s lyricist, Sheldon Harnick, and the great director Jerry Zaks are both signed on as production advisors. Beyond that, we only have this vague, and honestly sort of confusing statement by the Folksbiene’s executive Christopher Massimine to go by. He says the production “will be presented in the context of a historical retrospective hypothetically introducing the idea that Sholem Aleichem has been present at the conception of the adaptation of his work for the musical stage.”

What? So, does that mean a framing device where Sholem Aleichem appears as a character? Is this going to be for Fiddler what Indecent was for God of Vengeance? Do we breathe new life into Tevye and his family by making the actors break the fourth wall or something?

“The idea we are putting forth would be an accurate re-creation of how this musical might look in its native Yiddish tongue,” Massimine continued.

What does re-creation mean? Is the translation new? Is the choreography different, like in the most recent Broadway revival?

WHAT IS GOING ON?

In any case, this production is far from the first performance of Fiddler in Yiddish (to say nothing of other Yiddish adaptations of Aleichem’s work). Back in the 1960s, only a couple of years after the Broadway production premiered, original director/choreographer Jerome Robbins helmed a Yiddish-language version of the show— in Israel (there’s even a cast album, and it’s great).

So we have a ways to wait before seeing Yiddish Fiddler onstage, but ideally more information will come soon. In the meantime, stay strong, and listen to every single cast recording of the show there is (and there are at least a dozen,) over and over to pick your favorite.

UPDATE, AS OF MARCH 16: JOEL GREY IS DIRECTING THIS PRODUCTION. GET. HYPE.

Photo of  the 2015 revival of Fiddler on the Roof by Joan Marcus

The post YIDDISH. ‘FIDDLER.’ IS COMING. appeared first on Jewcy.

A new year— a chance at new beginnings, and most importantly, a new round of Broadway and off-Broadway shows. The fall season brought us singing sponges, live goats, and Amy Schumer. What will the next months bring, and, of course— is it good for the Jews?

It depends on what you’re looking for. While musicals continue to boast Jewish stars (Elsa in the upcoming Broadway production of Frozen went to Camp Ramah!) and creators (shows by writing teams Rodgers and Hammerstein and Lerner and Loewe are being  revived), if you want to look for overtly Jewish content onstage, you’re probably going to need to see a play. But on Broadway and off, you’ll have plenty of options, first off-Broadway, and later on in the season, on the Great White Way itself:

Off Broadway:

In the Body of the World (begins performances January 16):

While the play may not have much Jewish content, it is a new autobiographical piece (based on a recent memoir) by an artist of Jewish descent— Eve Ensler, the creator of The Vagina Monologues, has a one-woman show about becoming deathly ill while doing advocacy work abroad.

Jerry Springer the Opera (January 23):

This one is a revival, and, yes, an opera. It actually has fairly Christian themes, but it is what it says on the label: an opera about Jewish television personality Jerry Springer.

Amy and the Orphans (February 1):

This new family drama features a bickering bunch on a road trip on the Long Island Expressway following the death of their father; while the degree of Jewishness is not yet clear, one character is a Jewish convert to Christianity, so it follows that the rest of his family is probably of Jewish origin as well.

Admissions (February 15):

This play is the latest from Jewish writer Joshua Harmon, the mind behind Bad Jews and Significant Other. It features a woman trying to diversify a prep school and explores larger questions of ideology and privilege. The main character’s name is Sherri Rosen-Mason, and like many Harmon protagonists, she is a secular Jew.

Broadway:

Angels in America (February 23):

Tony Kushner’s famous two-part play on New York and the AIDS crisis is revived in New York, by way of London. It features the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg serenading a dying Roy Cohn in Yiddish. Enough said.

Travesties (March 29):

This production is another revival— of a 1974 play by Jewish playwright Tom Stoppard. One of its three protagonists (the other two being Lenin and James Joyce) is Tristan Tzara, the Jewish co-founder of Dadaism.

Photo of Jerry Springer the Opera via Wikimedia

The post Jewish Theatre on the Horizon appeared first on Jewcy.

Last night was the 62nd annual Obie Awards, the prizes awarded to off-Broadway New York theatre (founded by The Village Voice and co-presented with the American Theater Wing, which is a co-producer of the Tonys). Sure, individual Jews win this sort of thing every year. But this year also included Jewish narratives in winning productions.

For example, while Oslo is not written from a Jewish perspective, the play is about the 1993 peace accords and includes Israeli characters, including former Israeli president Shimon Peres. The play, which has since transferred to Broadway and is nominated for a slew of Tonys, won big last night. The play was one of the winners for Best New American Theatre Work, as well as an Ensemble Award.

One of Oslo‘s current Broadway rivals, Indecent, is also a recent off-Broadway transfer, and Rebecca Taichman took home one of the Best Director awards last night. In addition, the show’s playwright, Paula Vogel, received a Lifetime Achievement Award.

But remember, if Jews kill it in anything, it’s musicals, and this year’s winner not only has a Jewish creative team, but is set in a small Israeli town, about the local population breifly bonding with a group of Egyptians. The Band’s Visit, based off of the famous Israeli film, won the Obie Musical Theatre Award (the prize goes to its writers, Itamar Moses and David Yazbek), and David Cromer was another winner for Best Director. (It must have been a nice night for Katrina Lenk, who was in The Band’s Visit between stints in Indecent, in which she currently performs. She also performed a number from the former show.)

While the Obies don’t necessarily overlap with Tony-eligible shows, could last night be a predictor for the upcoming Broadway Awards show (June 11th, y’all!), when Oslo and Indecent once again face off? In fact, the Obies was just another feather in Oslo‘s cap; it’s taken comparable best play awards from other important competitions like the Lucille Lortel Awards and the Outer Critics Circle.

For now, mazel tov to both shows for their wins.

Photo of Katrina Lenk and Tony Shalhoub in Atlantic Theater Company’s ‘The Band’s Visit,’ by Ahron R. Foster. Via Tablet.

The post Jews at the Obie Awards appeared first on Jewcy.

Good news! After a relatively gentile 2016 scene, This Broadway season is looking to be mighty Jewish. Here are the Semitic-seeming shows scheduled for spring:

First of all, Sondheim. Second of all, Sondheim where Jake Gyllenhaal is taking on a role made famous by Mandy Patinkin. That’s right, the Jewish actor stars in a revival of Sunday in the Park with George, opening next month.

Onto March! What a gift— it moves The Price from previews to opening; it’s a revival of the Arthur Miller play that actually has some overt Jewishness, unlike many of his more coded shows. March gives us the Broadway transfer of Oslo— as in, the Accords; the play tells the story of the little-known key players behind the scenes of the 1990s Israeli-Palestinian peace process. And, perhaps best of all, March brings us War Paint, the musical that stars Patti LuPone as Helena Rubinstein (focusing on her lifelong rivalry with Elizabeth Arden).

April showers bring Bette Midler back to Broadway! That’s when the revival of Hello, Dolly! opens, and everyone is rightfully freaking out. April also brings Indecent to the Great White Way, the new play with music about the controversy of Sholem Asch’s God of Vengeance playing Broadway in the 1920s (women kissing each other!? How scandalous!).

Also, hey, did you know off-Broadway (or even, God forbid, off-off-Broadway) is a thing? One such promising play is If I Forget, opening February. It’s a family drama about a liberal Jewish studies professor, set a few months before 9/11. Also, a new David Mamet play about a psychiatrist, The Penitent, opens around the same time (it may not be particularly Jewish; it remains to be seen. But Mamet sure is).

So the pickings are ripe! Whether you want a new family drama, or an old musical favorite, there’s something for you.

The post Upcoming Jewish Broadway Shows appeared first on Jewcy.

On Tuesday night, at the Laura Pels Theater in Manhattan’s Theater District, the room was completely packed with an audience buzzing about Bad Jews, the critically acclaimed new play written by Joshua Harmon and directed by Daniel Aukin. My affinity for an element of surprise kept me from researching the play too thoroughly before I saw it, rather I played a “What do you think it’ll be about based on the straightforward title” type of game. Expectedly, Bad Jews was about Bad Jews. But, uniquely, it questioned what makes a Jew a Bad Jew. Traditionally, we’ve taken the term to mean the kind of Jew that eats bread on Passover, the kind of Jew that dates outside the tribe. But in Bad Jews, the Bad Jews try to fit their kin into boxes, judging them based on their partners, guilt-tripping them based on their choices. The Bad Jews in Bad Jews look outward rather than inward, absent of self-reflection and brimming with blame.

On the eve of their grandfather’s funeral— a strong man who survived the Holocaust with a gold Chai necklace hidden under his tongue— a family spends the night in a fancy apartment on the Upper West Side. There’s Diana, or Daphna, with an Israeli inflection, as she prefers it. Daphna (Tracee Chimo) is very religious, spiritual, but mostly she’s just holier than though. She speaks in a cartoonish Jewish New York accent and talks incessantly of family and tradition and aliyah. She is the woman you hide from at the Hillel house. Her cousin Liam (Michael Zegen), an almost-atheist, too-cool-for-religion, thick-framed hipster kind of Jew, shows up to the apartment after the funeral, having missed it because he dropped his iPhone off a ski lift in Aspen and didn’t get the news of the death. Liam arrives with his soon-to-be fiancé, Melody (Molly Ranson), a frustratingly stereotyped version of a non-Jew. She dons long blonde hair, outfits from Talbots, and a huge treble clef tattoo on her leg despite her ironically awful singing voice. She wants everyone to get along, offering hot tea and hugs. Devoid of a personality, Melody’s sweet, but she’s a trope. Finally, there’s Liam’s younger brother, Jonah (Philip Ettinger), who lies somewhere in the middle on the Jewish scale—he’s not into religion, but he’s not blatantly embarrassed by it like Liam. What Jonah does believe in is staying out of Liam and Daphna’s pugnacious ways.

From the moment they occupy the same space, Liam and Daphna fight. They have so clearly made their minds up about each other that their hatred is organic and real. When Daphna’s in the bathroom, just a thin door and earshot away, Liam rips her apart.

Ater her trip to Israel last summer, all we heard about at Thanksgiving was this fucking Army boyfriend she had now from some town where you have to say “cccccchh” to pronounce it, so she pronounced it like sixteen hundred times, this guy who is so Jewish and so great and he wants to marry her and she’s going to make aliyah and live in Jerusalem shoving shofars in her hideous unused vagina until the whatever arrives.

Later, after what seems like hundreds of insults, it’s Daphna’s turn to criticize Liam:

Studying torah for all of ten minutes is only worthy of total utter snide sniveling disdain; if you found yourself in the middle of a rain dance you would be soooo respectful trying to do every movement perfectly to like honor every Native American who ever lived, but if you found yourself in the middle of a hora– I’ve seen you in the middle of a hora– you look like you want to fucking die.

They continue their vitriol, but at a certain point the tenacity of their arguments lose effect because when the insults are this strong, it’s unlikely that anyone—siblings, cousins, fiancés—would ever stick around to hear what comes next. In those moments, Bad Jews loses its emotional métier. The fighting becomes parody like the play’s portrayal of Melody—a simple shiksa who couldn’t possibly be intelligent given her religion. When Liam proposes to Melody with the Chai necklace his grandfather left to him, a necklace whose inheritance has been the major source of antagonism between the cousins, Daphna rips it off her neck like a maniac. Melody bleeds, screaming and crying. She says, vulgarly, “It was in someone’s mouth! I could have an infection. I want to go to the hospital.” The family, and likely the audience, agreed that Liam should not have given his fiancé the necklace. But why was Melody made to be so shallow? Does Bad Jews imply that in order to be sympathetic and understanding of the Holocaust’s tragedy, one must be a Jew? Liam, a Jew, certainly doesn’t understand.

At its strongest, Bad Jews shows us that Jonah, who loves unconditionally his family, is the Good Jew. Liam and Daphna throw stones, unable to see that they’re missing the point. In a short beautiful scene, the cousins laugh about the night of Liam’s 10th birthday. The family, and their Jewish stomachs, dined at Benihana—an ode to Liam’s love of Japanese, not Jewish, culture. The whole family—the grandparents, parents, and children—all got sick, wobbling to the bathroom one at a time. Recounting the story, the cousins forget their differences, laughing through tears on the floor. Melody watches on, unable to understand, as it should be for an outsider to any cousins, whether they’re Jewish or not. They’re just family and they have a shared history. But the moment is fleeting and before long it’s back to judgment.

In a recent survey by the Pew Research Center, we learned that one in five Jews describes themselves as having no religion. In Bad Jews, the responsibility, the one to blame, for that statistic, is everyone else. Rather than using love and hope, like their grandfather did during the holocaust, Daphna and Liam work through the hardest moment of their young lives—their grandfather’s passing—with hate and judgment, and for that, they’re the Bad Jews and they’re to blame.

(Photo by Joan Marcus)

The post The Good And The Bad of ‘Bad Jews’ appeared first on Jewcy.