Mervyn Rothstein
By Mervyn Rothstein
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Culture At 78, a long-anticipated theatrical debut (with thanks to Edward Albee)
I’m 78 years old, and I’m a budding, soon-to-be-produced playwright. To explain how this happened, we need to go back 16 years. “I’d like to think,” Edward Albee said to me, “that maybe I’ve made people think about things a little bit.” It was the fall of 2005 and we were sitting in his TriBeCa…
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Culture Ceramics, Broadway, gay rights activism, Tevye, memoirs — for Harvey Fierstein, they’re all parts of the same quilt
“Hello, Merv,” the unmistakably familiar voice says, gravelly yet warm. “What can I tell you, cookie?” The first thing I want to ask Harvey Fierstein, the 67-year-old multiple Tony Award-winning actor, playwright and librettist, is why he decided to write a memoir. “COVID hit,” he says. “Which I’m sure is the reason for most people…
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Culture Coming to Broadway this spring, a bevy of Jewish themes and writers
From Richard Rodgers’s melodic music to Arthur Miller’s tragic dramas to Stephen Sondheim’s brilliant scores, Jewish artists have been essential contributors to Broadway theater. This year’s spring season is a testament to that legacy, with a list that includes Tony Award and Pulitzer Prize-winning Jewish playwrights and librettists. I talked to three: Harvey Fierstein, a…
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Culture A ‘vaguely Jewish’ director confronts a vexing Jewish dilemma in a specifically Jewish play
The stage director David Cromer once described himself as “vaguely Jewish.” His current job has erased the “vaguely.” “It forces me to spend more time thinking about what my Judaism means to me,” Cromer said. “What I owe to it, what it has provided for me. I think about it quite a bit.” That job…
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Culture 140 Tony nominations later, this Jewish impresario is still energizing Broadway
Theatrical producer Emanuel Azenberg likes to tell this story about the time, more than 30 years ago, when “Jerome Robbins’s Broadway” was in rehearsal. The show, which Azenberg was co-producing, was a compendium of brilliant musical numbers from the master choreographer’s Broadway career, but Robbins — born Jerome Rabinowitz — didn’t like the title. So…
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Culture How a poor Jewish immigrant made a fortune as a madam — and why we’re still uncomfortable talking about it
On Dec. 10, 1913, a 13-year-old Yidishe meydl arrived alone and almost penniless at Ellis Island. She was to have traveled to America from Eastern Europe with a cousin, who decided to abandon the journey. The new immigrant’s name was Pearl Adler. The oldest of at the time eight siblings, she hailed from Yanow, a…
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Culture How Tony Kushner changed ‘West Side Story’ and ‘Change’ itself
The Broadway musical “Caroline, or Change” is set in Lake Charles, Louisiana, in 1963, in the early years of the civil rights movement, in the home of a Jewish family with an 8-year-old son, Noah and a Black maid, Caroline Thibodeaux. The Tony Award- and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Tony Kushner, who wrote the musical’s book…
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