My Brooklyn Hamlet – Brenda Adelman’s story has shocking parallels with Shakespeare’s play
By Judi Herman
A man shoots his wife dead and marries her sister. In a way he does ‘get away with murder’ for he pleads manslaughter and goes to jail for just two and a half years. His daughter and son sue him in the civil courts for their mother’s death and though they are awarded millions they never see the money because he’s squirreled it away. Extraordinarily his daughter finds it in her heart to forgive him. And she is the winner in this unfolding tragedy for it takes his death to set her on the path to t |
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Love Story at the Chichester Festival Theatre: Take a box of tissues to a musical stage version of Erich Segal’s 1960s set weepie novella
By Judi Herman
What can you say about musical based on a forty-year-old novel that got turned into a blockbusting film? |
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Arthur Miller’s The Crucible gathering power in the Open Air at Regent’s Park
By Judi Herman
In The Crucible, Arthur Miller famously draws a parallel between the true story of how hundreds of women were accused of witchcraft in Salem and the surrounding Puritan communities of Massachusetts in 1692, and the witch hunt for communists led by Senator Joe McCarthy after World War II. McCarthy’s Committee of un-American Activities may not have finished with the accused being executed, but it certainly destroyed careers, especially of those in the entertainment industry, so many of whom were J |
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Applause for Irrepressible Sweet Charity in London's West End
By Judi Herman
David Babani, theatre producer and artistic director of the Menier Chocolate Factory may at last be getting a bit too old to be called a Wunderkind (at just 33, he can look back over a fifteen year career!). But with two shows, La Cage aux Folles and A Little Night Music, already transferred to Broadway and currently sharing fifteen Tony award nominations, and a third, Sweet Charity, just opened in London’s West End and also Broadway bound, he has obviously earned the title of one of the UK’s to |
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Anyone Can Whistle: A rare revival of one of Sondheim’s lesser-known shows
By Judi Herman
This is Sondheim’s Eightieth Birthday year (the big day was 22 March) and it’s proving an interesting time for his fans here in the UK, with several one-off concerts, including a birthday Prom at the Albert Hall on 31 July and an eagerly awaited production of Into the Woods, his not so happy ever after fairy tale musical at the Open Air Theatre, Regent’s Park, running from 5 August to 11 September. |
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Ghost Stories not in the cinema, but in the theatre
By Judi Herman
What does it take to scare an audience out of its wits, not in the cinema, but in the theatre before their very eyes?
Two multi-talented men, who first met at a Jewish summer camp as teenagers twenty-eight years ago and discovered a shared love of magic and the supernatural, have been working together to create Ghost Stories, a show aimed at doing just that. |
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The Balfour Declaration, promising a Homeland to the Jews on London Stage
By Judi Herman
The promise of the title is made in the Balfour Declaration, promising a Homeland to the Jews, drafted in the British Cabinet in 1917 and published in the form of a letter from Arthur Balfour to Lord Rothschild later the same year. |
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An intimate portrait of Jewish family life in pre-war New York
By Judi Herman
Neil Simon’s vivid portrait of Jewish family life in 1930s Brooklyn, based on his own teenage years, is brought to glorious life in Jennie Darnell’s vibrant production. The family jostling for space – and position - in the rather run down clapper board house is an extended one, for Jack and Kate Jerome have taken in Kate’s prematurely widowed sister Blanche and her two teenage daughters to live alongside their own teenage boys. |
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Jews and Palestinians at New End Theatre in North London
By Judi Herman
Meanwhile the New End Theatre in North London is the scene for more intimate relations between Jews and Palestinians. As the play opens Max, a newly bereaved middle aged widower, is burying his wife, whom he has nursed through the long debilitating illness that has finally killed her. |
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Amir Nizar Zuabi returns to London with his own theatre company Shiber Hur
By Judi Herman
Eight years after the UK success of his play Live from Palestine, Amir Nizar Zuabi returns to London with his own theatre company Shiber Hur (‘an inch of freedom’) to perform this powerful new play. They arrive fresh from touring Palestinian towns, villages and refugee camps in Galilee and the West Bank and a visit to Germany. |
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Circus Klezmer invites its whole audience, including Judi Herman, to a shtetl wedding
By Judi Herman
The fun begins in the foyer. An extraordinarily lovable clown – a sort of cross between Marx brothers Harpo and Chico – accosts members of the audience queuing to get into the auditorium. He may even be queue jumping in the Ladies! The perils of sitting in the front row or on an aisle are instantly clear as one hapless man finds himself onstage sitting back to front on a rocking horse. But no-one is safe when Adrian Schvarstein, creator of Circus Klezmer and playing the Village Idiot, is on the |
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Etgar Theatre from Israel at the London International Mime Festival
By Judi Herman
Mention the name of Onan and many will come up with the hazy memory that he’s the guy in the Bible who ‘spills his seed’. Wicked satirist Dorothy Parker even named her pet parrot Onan, because he did exactly that …
Etgar Theatre’s haunting and atmospheric Eshet tells the story of Onan, but he is not centre stage. For Eshet means wife of and is the story of Tamar, wife of Onan’s older brother, Er, son of Yehuda.. |
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Hetty Feinstein’s Wedding Anniversary
By Judi Herman
Chamber music is a familiar term and perhaps even chamber opera, conjuring up intimate performances with small casts accompanied by just a few instrumentalists. So am I coining a phrase if I welcome Hetty Feinstein’s Wedding Anniversary as a “chamber musical”? |
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Our Class by Tadeusz Slobodzianek:Unsparing account of a wartime massacre and its repercussions
By Judi Herman
1,600 Jews are burnt to death in a barn in a small Polish town in1941. The repercussions, guilt and retribution, accusations and counter-accusations of blame continue long after the War ends, coming to a new head with an investigative TV documentary in the 21st century. |
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Hello, Dolly! at the Open Air Theatre
By Judi Herman
Jerry Herman and Michael Stewart are the writing and composing team behind this daft and delicious cocktail of a musical, distilled from Thornton Wilder’s play The Matchmaker, which in turn owes a plot line to nineteenth century Viennese playwright Johann Nestroy’s Ein Jux will er sich machen (He Wants to Go Off on a Spree, also the source of Tom Stoppard’s comedy On the Razzle – and there was even an earlier English play upon which Nestroy based his, John Oxenfors’s A Day Well Spent). And thank |
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A moving Holocaust story simply told:Dr Korczak’s Example by David Greig
By Judi Herman
Janusz Korczak was a Polish Jewish educator, doctor and writer, who devoted his life to establishing the rights of the child, regardless of nationality or religion. As early as 1911, he founded an orphanage where, living and working with the street children and orphans in his care, he formulated and put into practice his child-centred ideas, giving young people rights and treating them as equals. |
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“The best of times is now!” :A musical summer in London Theatre
By Judi Herman
Whether it’s chanting in synagogue, composing and playing classical music, penning blockbusting musicals or chartbusting pop songs – the Jewish love of music is self evident.
So it’s not surprising that so many London theatres play home to musicals written by Jewish composers and lyricists; and it’s usually a safe bet that, as the song from Jerry Herman and Harvey Fierstein’s La Cage aux Folles puts it, “the best of times is now!” |
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Remembering a Forgotten Hero: Aristides de Sousa Mendes
By Judi Herman
Alice de Sousa has a mission. The writer/producer, who runs the Greenwich Playhouse, a beacon of Portuguese culture in the land of its oldest ally, is determined to get audiences “to come and see the story of a man whose name is hard to pronounce” in her new play, Aristides - the Outcast Hero. |
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Saturday Night: a rare one from the Stephen Sondheim collection
By Judi Herman
Currently there’s a rare chance here in London to see the very first musical with both words and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, written back in 1954. This was three years before he wrote the lyrics for West Side Stor, but thanks to a set of unlucky circumstances, it did not officially premiere until December 1997, and Primavera’s production at the intimate Jermyn Street Theatre is only the second in the UK and features two numbers never before heard in a production in this country. |
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On the Waterfront- Berkoff is a contender!
By Judi Herman
Back in 1983, I had a theatrical epiphany that nearly lifted me out of my seat – even though I was heavily pregnant with our daughter, Jess!
In his play West, Steven Berkoff and his actors conjured up London – his London, that he roamed in his youth, a pupil, like so many other North London Jewish boys, of Hackney Downs School (also attended by Harold Pinter – and before them by my own father and uncle!) – and my London too. From Hackney Marshes in the East End, where the leaders of rival gangs |
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Outrage on stage?
By Judi Herman
Judi Herman asks why religious and ethnic groups up in arms in our theatre |
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A Prison Visit to The Merchant of Venice
By Judi Herman
Baz Luhrmann locates his fine film of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet on Verona Beach, a breathtaking setting for blossoming young love blighted by youth violence. The setting for Ed Hall’s all-male production of The Merchant of Venice is Venice prison. |
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Has Lionel Bart’s Oliver! stood the test of time?
By Judi Herman
Has Lionel Bart’s Oliver! stood the test of time? asks Judi Herman
One of the first shows I saw as a very small stage-struck child (even younger than the talented youngsters packing the stage in the current revival!) was the original production of Oliver! And I must have worn out my LP album of the cast recording – to which naturally I sang and danced along. |
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A hugely enjoyable journey ‘Into the Woods’ by Stephen Sondheim
By Judi Herman
When storytellers end fairy tales with the words ‘they all lived happy ever after’ they are apparently tying up the threads and leaving their audience basking in the warmth of a happy ending. But audiences at Sondheim’s ‘Into the Woods’ find they have apparently reached that satisfactory conclusion by the interval. And then, in the second half of the show, the stories of the fairy tale characters they meet in the first half begin to unravel. |
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Unravelling the Tangle: the Cameri Theatre’s ‘Plonter’ comes to London’s Barbican Theatre
By Judi Herman
It’s telling that Plonter is Yiddish for ‘tangle’, for the tangle in which Israelis and Palestinians find themselves, brought home here by Israeli and Palestinian families intertwined by the tragic coincidences of violent death, surely owes something to the tragedies of Yiddish-speaking Jewry that were a catalyst for the creation of the State in which these two peoples find themselves. |
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Mandy Patinkin in Concert in London
By Judi Herman
In my last year of studying for a BA in performance arts at Middlesex University, half a dozen American exchange students joined us for a term. When nobody cast them in the very British student projects already underway, I devised ‘To Stephen – Love Dorothy’, a compilation show of the work of my two great loves, Stephen Sondheim and Dorothy Parker – and duly cast it entirely from these gifted Yanks. The most gifted of all was Rick, blessed with a glorious high tenor voice that swooped onto the S |
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Sondheim's Wonderfully Mature Production at the Menier Chocolate Factory
By Judi Herman
This elegant, elegiac musical based on Ingmar Bergman’s film ‘Smiles on a Summer Night’ is especially well suited to an intimate production and this is just one of the pleasures of Trevor Nunn’s new production at the Menier Chocolate Factory. |
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Jonathan Lichtenstein shares some of the memories that inform his play ‘Memory’
By Judi Herman
As we walk companionably to the quiet room I’ve booked for our meeting, Lichtenstein reveals that his father was a ‘Kindertransport’ child, sent by his parents from Nazi Germany to London in the nick of time just before the outbreak of World War Two, his life almost certainly saved by the emotional bravery of his heartbroken parents. His father’s journey ended in rural Wales which is where Lichtenstein himself grew up. When his father eventually spoke about his past, he was positive – his glass |
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Halpern and Johnson and Lionel Goldstein
By Judi Herman
‘I went out with a Jewish lady myself once. She comes up to town occasionally and we lunch’. These words, confided to him by his non-Jewish accountant, made a lasting impression on twenty-five-year-old Lionel Goldstein. “Although it took twenty years for the idea to ferment, it had such an effect on me that I still remember the way his head turned”. |
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Basking in the energy generated by two great musicals
By Judi Herman
We may be a bit short of sunshine in London this summer, but at least we’re basking in the warmth and energy generated by two terrific revivals of great musicals written first seen in the 1950s. And both are from the sort of composer/lyricist dream teams that made Cole Porter feel he had to learn to ‘write more Jewish’. |
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Amy Rosenthal plays On the Rocks
By Judi Herman
Back in 1916, at the height of the First World War the world-famous writer D.H. Lawrence and his German wife Frieda are living in the idyllic surroundings of the seaside village of Zennor in England’s southernmost county, Cornwall. They’re so enchanted and invigorated by this romantic spot that they want to share it with like-minded people. And who better than their close friends and soul mates - the novelist Katherine Mansfield and her husband, writer John Middleton Murry? They persuade them to |
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Ron Hutchinson’s razor-sharp comedy tells the hilarious story of 'Gone With the Wind'
By Judi Herman
Anyone who has ever thrilled to the romance and excitement of the Oscar-winning blockbuster Gone With the Wind, may be surprised to hear that MGM studios almost failed to complete the film at all! Ron Hutchinson’s razor-sharp comedy tells the hilarious story of the film’s birth pangs. |
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Michael Frayn is drawn to Max Reinhardt
By Judi Herman
It’s easy to see why Michael Frayn is drawn to Max Reinhardt. The Austrian Jewish theatre practitioner had extraordinary, visionary ideas – and the material means, charisma and powers of persuasion to realise them. |
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Off Broadway hit comedy finds an ideal London home at the Hackney Empire Theatre
By Judi Herman
James Sherman’s 1990s Off Broadway hit comedy finds an ideal London home at the Hackney Empire Theatre in London’s East End. Because this area of London with a long history of being home to a large and vibrant Jewish population (playwrights Harold Pinter and Steven Berkoff both went to Hackney Downs School – and so did my own father!), is now home to equally large and vibrant Afro-Caribbean and Asian communities. And what is so exciting about seeing the play at the Empire is sharing the fun and |
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The Last Days of Judas Iscariot
By Judi Herman
Poor Judas Iscariot. He’s had a bad press for the last two thousand years. Jesus himself may have been Jewish, but the portrayal of the ultimate baddie and betrayer makes Jews uncomfortable nonetheless. |
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God of Carnage, by Yasmina Reza
By Judi Herman
The playwright Yasmina Reza is best known for her sophisticated comedies which translate successfully from her native France to achieve extraordinary success around the world. She happens to be Jewish, and although to date this has not proved a source of inspiration for her famous successes, she did translate Kafka’s Metamorphosis for Roman Polanski. |
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The Glass Room by Ryan Craig at the Hampstead Theatre London
By Judi Herman
Ryan Craig’s last play was the electrifying What we did to Weinstein, an uncompromising examination of the moral stance of the protagonists in the current Israel/Palestine conflict, seen from the perspective of the Diaspora - and indeed of history - and lit up by quick fire, scabrously funny dialogue and breathlessly fast-moving action. |
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Fresh, Exciting Production of The Dybbuk
By Judi Herman
S. Ansky wrote The Dybbuk in 1917, but it has the feel of a much older story for it is steeped in elements of Jewish folk belief and superstition and its cast of characters is drawn both from this world and the next. Indeed Ansky travelled for years around the Jewish shtetls of Russia and Ukraine to research the story of love between the poor but brilliant scholar and the wealthy beauty, thwarted by her father in favour of a rich bridegroom, so they can be united only after death, when he posses |
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Marlowe transforms into four women from the Bible
By Judi Herman
This may be a one-woman show, but Linda Marlowe peoples the stage with such vivid characters with such gripping, often harrowing stories, that it seems to teem with women, Marlowe is a compelling stage presence, striking to look at and moving with extraordinary grace and precision. She’s an outstanding physical theatre performer – and a natural comedienne, so she exploits wonderfully the humour with which Hurt leavens his script. And she engages so intensely with her audience that it’s as if she |
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An English Tragedy tell the true story of John Amery
By Judi Herman
Ronald Harwood, the Oscar-winning writer of the screenplay for the moving holocaust film The Pianist and the new film The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, for which he has just won the BAFTA award for best adapted screenplay, returns to the theatre this month. His latest play An English Tragedy has just opened at the Watford Palace Theatre, near London. . |
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Three Sisters on Hope Street after Anton Chekov
By Judi Herman
Anglican and Catholic Cathedrals stand at either end of Liverpool’s Hope Street, and until the 1930s there was a synagogue on Hope Place. And now it’s the setting for Three Sisters on Hope Street the new play based on Chekov’s famous work by writer Diane Samuels and actress Tracy-Ann Oberman. |
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Candida's journey into her own family past
By Judi Herman
When Charlotte Salomon died in 1943 in Auschwitz, aged only 26, she had already completed a unique series of over 1000 autobiographical paintings she called ‘Life? Or Theatre?’ These brightly-coloured intimate paintings, complete with words and musical references, are almost like a series of cartoons, or the storyboard for a film or play - and indeed, she calls it a play with music. |
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Awake and Sing : An eyewitness account of catastrophic events
By Judi Herman
There’s a moment in this vivid evocation of Jewish family life in New York during the depression, when the matriarch of the family glows briefly with pleasure on her return from a cinema trip. Of course it’s provided a couple of hours of escapism from the mundane struggle to survive, but there’s more – Bessie and her husband Myron marvel at the natural acting in the film that made it seem so real. |
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The Gershwins and Rodgers and Hart bring summer sunshine to London
By Judi Herman
We Londoners may have been feeling all washed up as our summer was yet again dubbed ‘the wettest since records began’, but nothing can really dampen our spirits while we have the glorious music and lyrics of the Gershwins and Rodgers and Hart to bring the sunshine back into our city lives. |
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Angels in America : An epic story told on a spiritual and human level
By Judi Herman
Back in the 1980s, American playwright Tony Kushner was trying to make sense of a world in crisis – the AIDS epidemic was at its height in America and in its great cities, like New York and San Francisco, it seemed that attending the funerals of those who had died prematurely was becoming all too common. |
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‘The Merchant of Venice’ at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre
By Judi Herman
This website is ‘All about Jewish Theatre’ - which begs the question what is Jewish Theatre?
if it is any theatre that is of interest to Jewish theatregoers because of the subject matter, the writer, the actor(s), the character(s), then plays like Shakespeare’s ‘The Merchant of Venice’ and Christopher Marlowe’s ‘The Jew of Malta’ earn their place here. |
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Summer with Sondheim in London
By Judi Herman
In the Midlands, at Derby Playhouse, Artistic Director Karen Louise Hebden has continued her rewarding exploration of the Sondheim canon with ‘Merrily We Roll Along’, a great follow up to last year’s ‘Into the Woods’ and previously ‘Company’. |
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The tale of Tevye hits London Stage
By Judi Herman
The tale of Tevye, the Jewish milkman eking out an existence in a shtetl (village) in Tsarist Russia and trying to do his best for his wife and family of marriageable daughters receives a bold new treatment in John Doyle’s production. |
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How do you mint ‘Tradition’ into a twenty-first century musical ?
By Judi Herman
The tale of Tevye, the Jewish milkman eking out an existence in a shtetl (village) in Tsarist Russia and trying to do his best for his wife and family of marriageable daughters receives a bold new treatment in [John Doyle]’s production. |
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Ten thousand Jewish children who escaped Nazi Germany on London Stage Kindertransport
The ten thousand or so Jewish children who escaped Nazi Germany when their parents made the impossible decision to put them on the ‘Kindertransport’ trains bound for Britain shared a common destination. But every individual soul has a different story. Each child reacted differently to the sudden – and usually all too permanent – separation, not just from parents but from everything they knew. The children even had to learn a new language. |
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David Babani : The boy who always wanted to be a producer
By Judi Herman
David Babani - the boy who always wanted to be a producer when he grew up achieved his ambition before he left his teens... and now runs the hugely successful Menier Chocolate Factory Theatre. He talks to Judi Herman . |
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The Four Seasons to celebrate Arnold Wesker's Knighthood and seventy-fifth birthday
By Judi Herman
A recent Knighthood and a seventy-fifth birthday are good enough reasons to celebrate Arnold Wesker. Famous for his ground-breaking early works such as "Chicken soup with barley", "Roots" and "I'm talking about Jerusalem", Wesker has often called on his experiences as a Jew growing up in London's East End and finding love and life in the English countryside. |
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Underneath the Lintel’ by Glen Berger, a one-man play featuring American actor Richard Schiff
By Judi Herman
The lintel of the title is at the entrance to a home in Jerusalem. It’s the erstwhile home of a figure who found fame - or notoriety - in folklore for being homeless. The Wandering Jew.
One may be forgiven for thinking that this must be an important figure in Jewish mythology, but the truth is perhaps surprising. For this Jew was condemned to wander eternally because, as legend has it, his home was on the road that led to the place of crucifixion; and so it was that Jesus staggered and fell to |
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Everything is Illuminated
By Judi Herman
To date, US writer Jonathan Safran Foer’s hugely successful book has been made into a rather less successful film (by Liev Schreiber). And now, the British playwright Simon Block has taken on the formidable task of bringing this picaresque story of a journey in space and time - and self-knowledge – to the stage |
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Bashevis Singer's ' Dead Fiddler ' in London
By Judi Herman
Singer’s evocations of the lost world of the shtetl haunt the memory long after you’ve finished reading his stories. He captures the enveloping warmth that is at the same time claustrophobic and suffocating, the depth of devout faith and learning - and the beguiling lure of magic and superstition. ‘The Dead Fiddler’ gets to the heart of shtetl life and the lives and beliefs of our forebears. Singer takes the premise of Sholom Anski’s famous play ‘The Dybbuk’ one step further. The bereaved young |
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Moments that Burn:Ester meets her Past
By Judi Herman
Together these two incarnations of one extraordinary woman have told the story of the almost unbearable journey from the happy child in Kracow to the emaciated girl who seems to have lost everyone she loves and almost everything she has apart from that indomitable will to survive. Against a graphic backdrop of often shocking archive footage from the ghettos and camps in which she was imprisoned and with accompanying soundtrack, the twin incarnations of Ester tell the story that must be told if h |
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UK premiere of Resurrection Blues by Arthur Miller
By Judi Herman
It’s not surprising that the UK premiere of what amounts to the great man’s swansong with a starry cast directed by the great Robert Altman, has been eagerly awaited. And it would be great to report that it lived up to expectations. Although there is perhaps more to enjoy than you would guess from the majority of the reviews, this dark satire does not really do the business. The setting is a fictional South American Republic high in the Andes and the premise is that the cynical dictator currentl |
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Vivid nineteenth century cameos in ' Sunday in the park with George ' by Stephen Sondheim
By Judi Herman
The George of the title is George Seurat , the nineteenth century French artist (1859-1891) who famously invented the painting technique known as pointillism. His fascination with colour and light led him to experiment with the idea of breaking down colours into their components and then building up his pictures through tiny dots of these different colours that looked solid to the viewer at the right distance. |
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One Touch of Venus
By Judi Herman
This tale of the Statue of the Goddess of Love that comes to life must be one of the sassiest, most sophisticated and quirky shows to come out of forties America! Perhaps this is not surprising when you read the names of the creative team – Music by Kurt Weill and lyrics from the combined talents of S.J. Perelman (responsible for much of the Marx Brothers anarchic output) and Ogden Nash (responsible for some of the pithiest, wittiest verse in the English language – e.g. his New York take on Eliz |
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Artists who struggled in the shadow of the Third Reich : Entartete Musik
By Judi Herman
Jude Alderson’s ‘Singspiel’ is billed as ‘an evening of subversive cabaret and songs celebrating the lyrics and music of artists who struggled in the shadow of the Third Reich’. Since anything composed by a Jew, a Black, a homosexual or an Aryan said to have fallen under these influences was dubbed ‘Entartete’ or degenerate music in the Third Reich, there is a wealth to choose from! |
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What We Did To Weinstein by Ryan Craig
By Judi Herman
London’s blessed with plays of Jewish interest this autumn. Mike Leigh’s eagerly awaited ‘Two Thousand Years’ is set in 21st century Northwest London and Arnold Wesker’s ‘Chicken Soup with Barley’ in the East End between the 1930s and 1960s. Lessing’s 1779 play ‘Nathan the Wise’ takes us back to Crusader Jerusalem. Ryan Craig’s exhilarating new play transports us effortlessly through time and space, between the Middle East and London, between the present day and the twentieth century. This is ac |
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Nathan the Wise by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
By Judi Herman
The German playwright Gotthold Lessing, who wrote ‘Nathan the Wise’ in 1779, is one of the leading literary figures of the Enlightenment, a movement that rejected religious intolerance in favour of rationality and humanity. He was the son of a Lutheran pastor, who turned from theology to theatre, much to his father’s disgust. The Hampstead Theatre’s revival in a twenty-first century translation by Edward Kemp is nothing if not timely. The action is set in the Jerusalem of the Crusaders, which is |
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The curtain finally went up on Mike Leigh's eagerly awaited new play
By Chris Hastings
The curtain finally went up on Mike Leigh's eagerly awaited new play last night - two days after it was supposed to have opened - and it was worth the wait Two Thousand Years, whose entire 16,000-ticket run at the Royal National Theatre sold out even before it had a name and a script, has been the subject of intense speculation for months. Leigh is famous for his brinkmanship, taste for adrenaline and inability to keep a deadline. But, as it turned out, it was all right on the night. |
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First Two Previews For Mike Leigh's Two Thousand Years Cancelled
By James Inverne
The first two previews for Mike Leigh's much-anticipated new play Two Thousand Years for the National Theatre have been cancelled. The show was to have begun its run-up to the opening on September 8, but that performance and the one the following day have been wiped. Extra Sunday performances for the sold-out run have been scheduled for audience members who had booked for those previews. The notoriously secretive writer has still not let the show's subject matter be known. The production is due |
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Don't tell a soul, but Mike Leigh's return to the theatre is a sell-out
By Michael Horsnell
ALL 16,000 tickets for Mike Leigh’s new play at the National Theatre have been sold, yet no one but its cast and director has a clue what it’s all about. The plot remains a mystery and the working title, A New Play by Mike Leigh, gives nothing away. But that did not stop theatregoers snapping up every ticket a month before it opens, thanks solely to the reputation of the writer. The eight cast members have spent the past four months locked away in rehearsals, developing the work at a secret loca |
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Jewish Summer in London
By Judi Herman
I’m one of those cinemagoers who hangs around at the end of the film until the last credit has rolled down the screen. I’m fascinated by the number of folk it takes to make a movie and the arcane job titles on the list. And in the case of American films in particular, I’m struck by the number of Jewish sounding names there seem to be – usually near the top of the list. So why am I writing about film on a theatre web site? It’s simply because at any moment you might choose to take a snapshot of ‘ |
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Professor Bernhardi :The Dreyfus of Vienna
By Judi Herman
Schnitzler himself was both Jewish and a doctor and his play is a fascinating and disturbing one. Using the Institute as a microcosm of contemporary Viennese Society, he reveals the depth and breadth of anti-Semitism – which even extends to Jewish converts to Christianity. Their discomfort is palpable as they try to be more Austrian than the Austrians. This is a society that forbids Jews from duelling as they are considered not to be human enough to have any honour to defend.
The play makes unc |
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Losing Louis by Simon Mendes da Costa opens in London’s West End
By Judi Herman
The action of the play takes place in one bedroom – and two different times. In the 1950s, six-year old Tony inadvertently catches his dad Louis in bed with his mistress, just as his wife is about to give birth. The skeletons that subsequently get shoved into the bedroom cupboard only come to light almost fifty years later in the present day, as Tony and his estranged younger brother Reggie come back to their childhood home, accompanied by their wives, for Louis’ funeral.
Da Costa and his direc |
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Mark Maier Objects : a hit on London stage
By Judi Herman
Maier is far from fat now and his lean figure, topped with a variety of headwear as he takes on the persona he has invented for each object – the smallest is a grain of sand – makes the comedy as visual as it is verbal. By the time we the audience get to join in at the climax of the show, trying to hit the mark so to speak, by aiming to get a sock into a bag hanging centre stage – you had to be there, as they say – none of my fellow punters could possibly object to my verdict - ‘Mark Maier Objec |
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Busy performance programme across the spectrum of Jewish music in London's Jewish Music Institute
By Geraldine Auerbach
2005 brings a busy performance programme across the spectrum of Jewish music. We mark the official Holocaust Memorial Day in January with concerts including music by composers whose work was suppressed by the Nazis and by survivors of Auschwitz, whose liberation is remembered on 27 January. In April, we commemorate the liberation of Bergen-Belsen, where Anne Frank was killed, with a performance of a new work based on her famous diary (Clare College Choir and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra cond |
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Welcome to Klub Simple :Tonight Lola Blau at New End Theatre, London
By Judi Herman
At last it’s time for the main event – Lola pours herself on stage in a figure-hugging frock Dame Shirley Bassey would covet. And launches into the first of a series of numbers with tightly rhymed, sometimes very witty lyrics (music and lyrics courtesy of Georg Kreisler, English version by Don White)– and music that seems oddly familiar (it probably is in a way, as much of Kreisler’s music is wickedly accurate pastiche and parody).
The band prove immediately that they’re far more than just acco |
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Think Before You Laugh : Judi Herman speaks to British Jewish comedian Ivor Dembina
By Judi Herman
‘I’ve been doing this for twenty years now and I’ve never directly encountered anti-Semitism or racism of any kind’ he declares. ‘There are conscious efforts going on between Muslims and Jews to get together and perform. I performed recently with the US Muslim comic Ahmed Ahmed- we put on a show in London and it went really well. I’ve been invited by another American comedian, Ray Hanania who is a Palestinian, to go out with him and a group of other Jewish and Muslim comedians to perform in the |
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Gershwin's 'Crazy for You' touring the UK
By Judi Herman
George Gershwin died in 1937, aged only 38. Ever since, and for many years often thanks to his surviving brother Ira, the best of his astonishing legacy of thousands of classic songs has been combined in different compilations to create new Gershwin ‘musicals’ for film and theatre. Ken Ludwig and Mike Ockrent’ sCrazy for You must surely be one of the most joyous and sassy of these posthumous creations. They tell the preposterous backstage musical story with a flair and bazazz, that seems wonderf |
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Mr & Mrs Schultz
By Judi Herman
After World War Two, an unknown number of senior Nazis escaped Europe and the Nuremberg Trials to assume new identities in South America, mainly in Argentina. A vast secret network gave them shelter in a succession of safe houses until the coast was clear to start a new life.That’s the set up for an evening of tension, mounting to an almost unbearable and protracted denouement. It’s hard to discuss the play without giving away the plot, and I wouldn’t want any prospective audience member to expe |
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Oxford Stage Company revival of Peter Flannery's "Singer "
By Charles Spencer
We first encounter Peter Singer as a Polish Jew in Auschwitz, who manages to save his life through guile and skilful trading on the black market, though survival comes at a terrible price for both himself and his fellow inmates...We next discover him as an immigrant in post-war Britain, wheeling and dealing as ever, and establishing himself as a slum landlord racketeer closely modelled on Peter Rachman... In the final analysis, Flannery's Thatcher-bashing lack of proportion both dates and dimini |
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Hershey Felder chats to Judi Herman about Gershwin - and about Felder!
By Judi Herman
However Gershwin’s short life has provided Felder with a wealth of material. ‘He was the first to bring jazz into the concert hall’ he explains. ‘That was a very big deal that a white Jewish boy would bring what you’d think to be American black music into a concert hall and then of course write the quintessential American opera in Porgy and Bess’. Felder’s warming to his theme now ‘And what hits he wrote! They can’t take that away from me, for example, just the most gorgeous music. And every tim |
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Cabaret coming to London
By Noel Gallagher
Based on Christopher Isherwood's book, Goodbye to Berlin, the play is set in Germany in the early 1930s, more specifically the notorious Kit Kat Club. The tacky cabaret is the meeting place for British singer Sally Bowes (Lara Katz) and American writer Cliff Bradshaw (Derritt Mason), two lovers whose hopes for happiness are threatened by the rise of Hitler's evil Third Reich. |
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George Gershwin Alone in London
By Judi Herman
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. 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. |
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