All About Jewish Theatre - George Gershwin Alone in London

Judi Herman is a freelance writer, broadcaster and producer, working mainly for BBC Radio World Service and the BBC’s main UK speech network, [Radio 4]. She specialises in making radio features on arts and entertainment, religion, education, travel and human-interest stories. Among programmes to which she contributes regularly are the World Service Arts and Entertainment Magazine The Ticket, the World Service Heart and Soul Series and Radio Four’s flagship magazine programme Woman’s Hour. She also writes regular theatre reviews for the influential UK theatre website Whatsonstage.com and is a guest performing arts lecturer at Middlesex University
Judi has written several stage shows, including How the West End Was Won, a show celebrating Jewish life in the West End of London, commissioned to accompany the London Jewish Museum's exhibition Living Up West; and Stones of Kolin, a play with music, charting six hundred years of Jewish life in a small Czech town, performed in both London and Kolin in the Czech Republic. She’s also worked in Public Relations, including theatre PR, so she reckons she knows the theatre business from more sides than most!
Judi lives near London with Steve, her husband of twenty-eight years. They have a son and a daughter in their early twenties – and a Bedlington Terrier just coming up to Bar Mitzvah age! E-mail : judi_herman@hotmail.com Web: www.bbc.co.uk

A play with music written and performed by Hershey Felder

Hershey Felder alone onstage, looks entirely at home, seated at an imposing Steinway grand piano. Behind him, giant back projected posters and song sheets of Gershwin’s hits blossom from sepia into full technicolour as the story of the man and his music unfolds.

It’s the story of a tragically short but extraordinarily productive life. It comes as a shock to discover that one of the most prolific musical talents of the twentieth century, responsible for so many enduring hits, died in 1937 aged only thirty-eight. It’s poignant to discover from Felder, that the last songs he wrote seem like an autobiographical postscript: Nice work if you can get it,Let’s call the whole thing off, and They can’t take that away from me.

The multi-talented Felder is a composer himself as well as a writer/performer. His empathy with Gershwin goes further, for they are both of Jewish immigrant stock, although their families arrived in the New World in different centuries and settled in different countries (Felder is Canadian, and was brought up in Montreal).

Felder tells Gershwin’s story with an engaging mix of anecdotes, musicology and of course live music at that gorgeous grand. We find out about his Jewish upbringing in a family typically at once close and stifling. His father always wanted to know why he couldn’t write tunes ‘like Irving Berlin’! When George made good, he bought a fine house for the whole family to move into – but he found they were perhaps too close for comfort.

It’s almost like sharing the creative process as Felder shows us how the power of the writing can be in something as simple as moving up in thirds in I loves you, Porgy from Porgy and Bess.

But just as we share the excitement of composing, so we share also the crushing disappointment of critical and commercial failure. Porgy and Bess, the quintessentially American opera, with its powerful story set in the Black South actually led to a number of anti-Semitic attacks when it opened in 1935. It was equally unpopular with much of the black community. Duke Ellington for example, declared the only thing that was black was the cast.

Felder introduces us to the love of George’s life, Kay Swift – left behind when he moved to Hollywood to write for the likes of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.

And although when he moved to Tinseltown, George also heeded advice to leave behind the highbrow stuff and stick to writing hits, Felder reminds us just how captivating that ‘highbrow stuff’ can be with a complete rendition of The Rhapsody in Blue.

Finally he turns his audience into one great chorus, as we’re invited to choose two or three favourites for Sing-along-a-Gershwin! I guess on most nights the collective choice includes a couple of unforgettable standards and almost certainly Summertime, proving that despite his short life, Gershwin lives on through all his work.

Contact for London Booking:

Mr. Jason Caplin

Really Useful Theatre Group

39 Shaftesbury Avenue
London, United Kingdom

07870 60 94 80

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