Play Explores Different Holocaust Aspect — Effect on Son of Nazi War Criminal

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Thursday, January 22, 2009

Enough Is Enough: Play About Mideast Conflict Is Timely

By Dikla Kadosh

Iris Bahr’s “Dai” (Hebrew for “Enough”), a one-woman play about 10 people at a Tel Aviv cafe moments before a suicide bombing.

Thursday, January 22, 2009

Questions, Dilemmas Drive Geffen-Commissioned Play

By Rachel Heller

When the Geffen Playhouse commissioned a new piece from Donald Margulies five years ago, the award-winning playwright bided his time.

Wednesday, November 19, 2008

Tovah Feldshuh immortalizes life of young Shoah heroine in ‘Irena’s Vow’

By David A. Lash

"Irena's Vow" is the story of Irena Gut Opdyke, a young Polish Catholic woman who took unimaginable risks and paid an unspeakable personal price to save the lives of 12 Jews by hiding them in the basement of the villa where she was virtually enslaved by a German major during World War II.

Thursday, October 9, 2008

‘Accidental Mexican’  Ilan Stavans probes cultural identity in first play

By Rachel Heller

As an "accidental Mexican" born to an Eastern European family, author and essayist Ilan Stavans has hurdled critics to become one of the nation's foremost commentators on Latino culture. As a Mexican American, he has written widely on immigration, the clash and fusion of languages and the quest for acceptance.

Sunday, September 28, 2008

Emily Stern—Howard Stern’s daughter—on stage and off

By Naomi Pfefferman

As a child, Emily first performed in the choir at her Reform temple in Roslyn, N.Y., where she sang at children's services and Jewish camp. She continued to perform in high school; but studying acting at New York University did not mesh well with her intuitive approach to theater, she said.

Wednesday, September 24, 2008

Robert Schimmel: Cancer, through a lens comedic

By Naomi Pfefferman

He realized that even though he had just been told he had cancer, he hadn't been told he was going to die. To prove it, he was going to do the one thing that showed he was very much alive, which was to make people laugh.

Wednesday, September 10, 2008

Women plot revenge against a sexist ‘70s boss in ‘9 to 5: The Musical’ (what a way to make a livin’)

By Shoshana Lewin Fischer

"It seems that in a musical you would get to know people less -- I actually think you get to know them more" -- Patricia Resnick, writer of "9 to 5"

Wednesday, August 20, 2008

Even up close, Minkin’s illusions are magical

By Dikla Kadosh

"I want to make people think and feel a range of emotions —wonder, surprise, nostalgia, delight."

Wednesday, August 6, 2008

Deferred dream comes true for actress Nan Tepper

By Tom Tugend

"I had been a student, wife, mother, news executive and caregiver, but I had always promised myself that one day I would be an actor."

Wednesday, July 30, 2008

‘Forgotten Hero’ of the Shoah Peter Bergson gets his due times two

By Tom Tugend

Wednesday, July 16, 2008

Prolific Israeli producer-director tries Hollywood

By Tom Tugend

Israeli producer-director Uri Paster has four movie and theater projects planned this year

Wednesday, July 9, 2008

Israeli and Palestinian shed their armor in ‘Desert Sunrise’

By Orit Arfa _

The play opens in the south Hebron hills in the West Bank with Tsahi, an off-duty Israel Defense Forces soldier, pointing his gun at Ismail, a Palestinian shepherd. Having just broken up with his settler girlfriend, Tsahi is lost and seeking a way back to the main road. Ismail, waiting for his girlfriend, is the only one who can help Tsahi find his way.

Wednesday, July 9, 2008

Leigh Silverman:  Nurturing novel ideas, one play at a time

By Naomi Pfefferman

One day, when Leigh Silverman was 15 and the youngest student in a college summer drama program, her teacher pointedly asked her to stay after class.
"She said, 'Leigh, you shouldn't be an actress; you're terrible,'" Silverman, now 33, recalled with a laugh. "I was horrified. But then she said I had good insights about the plays, and that instead of acting I should be her assistant.

Thursday, June 19, 2008

Theater: Making a Jew not a Jew

By Tom Tugend

Always in the background lurks the threat of "Gentleman's Agreement," produced by Darryl Zanuck, the only non-Jewish studio chief, and starring Gregory Peck as a WASP who pretends to be a Jew.

Thursday, June 12, 2008

‘Chorus Line’ composer’s music still has a kick

By Shoshana Lewin Fischer

The characters reveal their stories through a mixture of singing and dancing -- with some pantomime thrown in. Hamlisch said that from the beginning the creators felt that certain stories were best told through song, others through dance.

Thursday, June 12, 2008

Pilar Millhollen puts it all on the ‘Line’

By Shoshana Lewin Fischer

"When I was 14, I saw the first national tour of 'Crazy For You,' she said. "I saw that show and that's what made me want to be a dancer. It was the most wonderful thing I've every seen."

Thursday, May 29, 2008

Tale of the ‘Stranger’ leaps from book to musical

By Anita K. Kantrowitz

It was 1985, and many of the Ethiopian Jews who'd been airlifted from Sudan were being housed in a hotel in Netanya, Israel. When writer Sonia Levitin entered the temporary nursery, she was particularly struck by all the babies and toddlers who'd been born since their families had arrived.

Friday, May 23, 2008

MUSIC VIDEO: Janet Klein and Her Parlor Boys— ‘Yiddish Hula Boy’

By The Web Guy

Hollywood ragtime sweetie Janet Klein sings a 1920s Tin Pan Alley tragedy -- tailor Izzy Cohen visits Honolulu, falls in love with the hula hotties, and writes wife Becky that he won't be back no more.

Thursday, May 22, 2008

Secrets of their success

By Jay Firestone

New book looks at what makes people successful

Thursday, May 8, 2008

Balancing the seen and unseen is a juggling act

By Naomi Pfefferman

In the defining moment of Sara Felder's performance piece, "Out of Sight" -- about a mother and daughter who clash over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict -- she juggles machetes while precariously balancing on a rola bola.

Thursday, April 17, 2008

Theater: ‘Immigrant’ sings the story of the ‘Only Jew in Town’

By Naomi Pfefferman

In 1909, an impoverished Jewish immigrant arrived in Hamilton, Texas, hawking 1-cent bananas from his pushcart.

Haskell Harelik had fled Russia to escape pogroms, docking not in Ellis Island but in Galveston, Texas, via a plan to route Eastern European Jews to the West. He spoke no English and was the first Jew the Hamilton residents had ever seen. But he found some friendly faces, and he stayed in that Baptist town, founding a dry goods store and raising three sons there.

Thursday, April 10, 2008

Einstein’s allure is more than theory on stage

By Tom Tugend

We think of Albert Einstein, and we conjure up the image of a frail, unkempt and absent-minded old man, but a visit to the Einstein archives at Caltech provides quite another picture.

The man who radically transformed our understanding of the universe was adored by women, at 23 fathered an illegitimate child and after marriage had a few side flings with other women.

Thursday, April 3, 2008

Theater: Tolins draws on his own mentorship ‘Secrets’

By Nick Street

"Everything I write is a question of identity," Jonathan Tolins says over tea after a yoga class in Sherman Oaks. "What choices do you have? What roles do you take on?"

Thursday, April 3, 2008

Theater: A generation’s history, one life at time

By Laurel Ollstein

"Showing Our Age" is a play about stories, and the fact that everyone has one. It's a project that I started more than 10 years ago, though not specifically as an idea for a play. I was a participant in a community outreach program in which we interviewed senior citizens, used their remarkable life stories to write monologues and then performed them for the seniors and their families. The simplicity of just the details of a life -- without sets or costumes -- created some of the most powerful theater I had ever been involved with. And I have been involved in theater for a very long time, as an actress, writer, director and teacher. I wanted more! I wanted to take this idea and expand it.