5 ways of looking at Sarah Silverman
A series of conversations among a quintet of critics after a field trip to ‘The Bedwetter’
A series of conversations among a quintet of critics after a field trip to ‘The Bedwetter’
Meredith Willson’s 1957 hit isn’t even a little bit Jewish. It marks the last time this was true of a popular musical on the American stage.
If “Memory” wasn’t already a marquee name in showtunes, Barry Manilow probably would have used the title for a song in his new musical. Now playing at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, “Harmony,” about the Comedian Harmonists, a sextet of German singer-comedians, is also all about memory – both history’s short recall for a popular…
The night that Stephen Sondheim died, I went out for drinks with a new friend. We played “Never Have I Ever,” a game I hadn’t even thought of since college, and I very slowly nursed a cocktail called, romantically, the Hundred-Year-Old Dream. We stayed out for hours. Sondheim was a master of human connection. He…
One afternoon, when I was eight years old, my father and I traveled by train to a recording studio in Manhattan. My father was the khazn, or cantor, at the Manhattan Beach Jewish Center. We were making a record together with Sholom Secunda, the composer of the song “Bay Mir Bistu Sheyn”. The plan was…
The Kennedys, thanks to Lerner and Loewe, will forever be associated with the English setting of Camelot. Their royal British counterparts chose “Oklahoma!” for their lifelong love theme. Queen Elizabeth and her husband, Prince Philip, who died April 9 at the age of 99, had a special affinity for the musical by Rodgers and Hammerstein,…
As the novel coronavirus outbreak continues, social distancing remains the cool thing to do — just listen to Mel Brooks. Luckily, our favorite cultural figures and institutions continue to find creative ways to keep us entertained. In case you missed our first installment, as the country enters an unprecedented period of isolation to stem the…
Jeremy Schonfeld didn’t exactly intend to create a multimedia rock opera about the Shoah and the emotional trauma it inflicted across generations. All he wanted to do was write an album in honor of his father, Gustav Schonfeld, a survivor of Auschwitz who passed away in 2011. Yet, according to Schonfeld, the result of this…
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