There’s nothing more intimidating to a writer than a blank page, playwright Mark Altman ruefully explained to The Jewish Standard recently, so when he is ready to start a new theater project, looking at a printed story at least gives him a starting point.
“For many years, I’ve been adapting plays,” Altman said, starting when he was associate artistic director at the Folksbiene National Yiddish Theater. He began to read stories written by the classic Yiddish writers and turn them into dramatic pieces. Some of these went into a reading series.
“I pulled out a lot of these old chestnuts and tried to adapt them. I felt we had a chance to bring some pieces that couldn’t run for six or eight weeks, but were unusual or different,” Altman said.
If you live long enough, you see everything. In 1968, when “The Producers” came out, the idea of a musical about the Holocaust was so absurd as to form the comic heart of Mel Brooks’ satire about two bumbling Broadway producers who put on a show so outrageous as to guarantee failure. Now, we have “Signs of Life,” a musical about Theresienstadt, and more Holocaust musicals to come. We’re getting very close to “Springtime for Hitler” here, folks.
“Signs of Life,” which is now at the Deane Little Theatre on West 63rd Street, opens in a culturally vibrant Czechoslovakia just before the Nazis take over. In short order, we meet the central characters: Lorelei, a pretty young artist; her gay artist pal, Jonas; the sexually ambiguous cabaret singer Kurt Gerard; Lorelei’s uncle Jacob; her younger brother Wolfie (played by Haworth resident Gabe Green); the Communist agitator and Lorelei’s soon-to-be beau, Simon; Berta, who was abandoned by her Christian husband; and the two Nazis, Heindel and Raum.
Naomi Levine snapped the black-suited attendees to attention at the inaugural conference on charity governance hosted by NYU’s George H. Heyman Jr. Center for Philanthropy and Fundraising when she announced, “The boards of foundations [that were defrauded] were accessories to the [Bernard] Madoff disaster.” Levine, the founding executive director of the Heyman Center, was one of the organizers of the conference, as well as a speaker. The conference was presented against a background of swelling criticism of nonprofit governance from Congress, from judges, and from the nonprofit sector itself.
A certain quality ties the characters of Jamie Fox’s one-woman play “Mazel Tov Cocktail” together — their enormous sense of entitlement. With some of them — Cheryl, the actress for whom the central character, Alyssa, is a personal assistant, Alyssa’s drug-dealing brother — that quality is obvious, but it’s as true for the other characters as well, including Alyssa. Their heart’s cry is “What about me?” and it echoes through this short piece, which moves from what is supposed to be comedy to a much darker place.
Both writer and performer, Fox has structured the beginning of what she acknowledges is an autobiographical play as a conversation between Alyssa and the invisible temp who will take over her duties while she goes to her brother’s arraignment. As Alyssa officiously pulls boxes from the wall of shelves behind her (the terrific set by Sandra Goldmark looks like an ad for the Container Store), she carefully instructs the temp on Cheryl’s idiosyncrasies. Cheryl’s demands are so over the top that this section is surely meant to be humorous, but some failure in timing prevents it from succeeding.
It is impossible to describe what it is to lose a child. Your whole life is totally changed forever. It’s not that I’m not the same person I was. I’m the same person with a lot of pain.” These words were written by Robi Damelin, an Israeli woman whose son was killed by a sniper while he was fulfilling his reserve duty. Sadly, many Israelis can identify with Damelin’s experience. But not so many have done what she has, which is join the Parents Circle—Families Forum, a group of bereaved Israelis and Palestinians who aim to promote “long-term reconciliation through dialogue and mutual understanding.”
Now Parents Circle—Families Forum has gotten together with No Longer Empty, another nonprofit group that encourages the use of empty New York City storefronts for arts programming, to mount an exhibition of editorial cartoons. The exhibition is called “Cartoons in Conflict: Editorial Cartoonists Explore the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict.” Forty cartoonists from countries all over the world, including Pulitzer-Prize winners Pat Oliphant and Jim Morin, have donated drawings, and more than half of them are on display at 6 West 26th St. All 40 can be seen in a catalogue and some are in a calendar, which is available for $20. The traveling exhibit has already visited Israel, Spain, and Italy.
Maybe there’s something to all this talk about a resurgence of Yiddish. It seems that there are now two Yiddish theater companies in New York. A scrappy new outfit, the New Yiddish Rep, joins the National Yiddish Theatre—Folksbiene in bringing Yiddish entertainment to the masses. And while there were hardly masses at 45 E. 33rd St. for “The Big Bupkis,” the New Yiddish Rep’s newest production, there was a surprising amount of entertainment.
The star of “The Big Bupkis,” Shane Bertram Baker, may be the new incarnation of Yiddish theater — he’s relatively young, not Jewish, and learned his Yiddish as an adult. A child magician and a participant in the current burlesque revival (what, you didn’t know burlesque was reviving?) Baker is perfectly comfortable on stage and has great comic timing.
To celebrate its 95th consecutive season, the National Yiddish Theatre-Folksbiene is presenting “Sholom Aleichem: Laughter Through Tears,” a one-man commemoration of the 150th birthday of the beloved Yiddish humorist and writer. That one man — Theodore Bikel, a renowned actor and folksinger long associated with Sholom Aleichem through his portrayal of Tevye in “Fiddler on the Roof” — is 85 years old. Watching Bikel stride across the stage for almost two hours, speaking continuously, breaking his monologue only to launch into numerous songs, all these birthdays and milestones are much on the viewer’s mind. How could they not be? It’s an amazing accomplishment for anyone (How do actors remember all those lines?), but it would be dishonest (if a bit ageist) to deny that it’s even more amazing for someone his age. Bikel’s bulk and full white beard make for a commanding stage presence; the words flow easily and he never seems fatigued.
Yisrael Campbell has a somewhat different perspective from most Jews on making aliyah. Rather than that revelatory perception that everybody — the cops, the bus drivers, the pizza guy — are all Jewish, Campbell realized that he had moved to the Middle East. “I thought it would be like New York, but with more Jews, and actually it was like Saudi Arabia, with fewer Arabs,” the comedian confesses ruefully. Of course, Campbell didn’t spend his whole life being the only Jew in his class, so it makes perfect sense that he wouldn’t be sensitive to the change from minority to majority status. Born Chris Campbell into a Roman Catholic family in Philadelphia, Campbell traces the many twists that brought him to be a payess-wearing black-hatted Jerusalemite in a documentary called “Circumcise Me,” which is on the film festival circuit, and in a soon-to-open one-man off-Broadway show with the same title.
Although Shirley Lauro’s “All Though the Night” looks at the Holocaust through the eyes of five gentile German women, the view will be familiar to a Jewish audience. It’s not the content that distinguishes Lauro’s play, currently at the Marjorie S. Deane Little Theater on West 64th Street, but the imaginative production and fine acting of the ensemble cast. The simple set designed by Adrienne Kapaiko consists of boxes and gates piled up against the back wall and a platform that allows some of the women to stand above the others. Dramatic lighting designed by Jessica Greenberg turns red to highlight certain events. Lauro manages to maintain the play’s dramatic intensity while packing in an enormous amount of information about Hitler’s reign and how the Nazis affected the lives of ordinary Germans.
The documentary “As Seen Through Their Eyes” joins the seemingly endless parade of films, both fiction and nonfiction, about the Holocaust. Unlike many others, this absorbing addition focuses on several individuals who either saved their own lives or provided some measure of comfort to others through their artistic talent. Using interviews and focusing primarily on visual artists, the film tells the story of people such as Dina Gottliebova Babbit, who was invited by the young man who supervised the children’s barracks in Auschwitz to paint a mural to cheer the children a bit in that hellish environment. A 21-year-old art student from Prague, she painted the images she remembered from the Disney feature “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.”
