Quirky Theater from Around the Country I

 

[I’m part-way through a blog project that I thought would be quick and easy.  It wasn’t.  It’s been several weeks already, and it looks like it’ll take a few more.

[Instead of just finding and posting an article or two on the same or related topics, I decided to assemble a collection of pieces on different subjects.  In this case, I’m using several reviews from around the U.S. that cover what I feel are quirky and intriguing theater from some of the more adventurous troupes in different cities.

[I’m an associate member of the American Theatre Critics Association and I get its monthly e-mail newsletter, The Update.  One section is called “This Just In,” a selection of reviews and articles by ATCA members from their base publications. 

[I always glance at them, and recently, I kept aside several of the notices that just looked interesting.  I’m taking this opportunity to post some of the reviews to show what’s going on in some of the theaters across this country.  See what you all think.]

“ANDY WARHOL IN IRAN BY BRENT ASKARI:
HIT PREMIERE AT BARRINGTON STAGE COMPANY”
by Charles Giuliano 

[The first selection is from Berkshire Fine Arts (website; North Adams, MA) of 9 June 2022.  BFA covers all aspects of the arts in the Berkshires (western Massachusetts), including the major theater companies.  Charles Giuliano is the site’s editor.]

Andy Warhol in Iran
By Brent Askari
Directed by Skip Greer
With Nima Rakhshanifar and Henry Stram
Scenic designer, Brian Prather; Costumes, Nicole Wee; Lighting, Joyce Liao; Sound, Dan Roach; Wig and makeup, Mary Schilling-Martin. Projections, Yana Biryukova.
Barrington Stage Company
St. Germain Stage
June 2-25, 2022

In Andy Warhol in Iran, a new play by Skip Greer commissioned by Barrington Stage [Pittsfield, Massachusetts], the vocal cadence of Henry Stram as Andy Warhol [1928-87] is off key.

With insouciant, faked self-effacement, stutter-step delivery, smirks at his own riffs and put-ons, Warhol’s pitter patter was distinctive and should rightly have been patented. It was a significant part of how the artist and master huckster marketed and promoted himself.

With the deadpan artist the persona was the sizzle that sold his steak.

Or in Andy parlance “Brought home the bacon.”

Stram joins a long list of those who have portrayed Warhol including David Bowie [Basquiat (1996); Paul Bettany recently played the artist on Broadway in Anthony McCarten’s The Collaboration, 18 December 2022-11 February 2023]. There seems to be endless fascination with an enigma. Arguably, Andy through his museum, estate, and foundation is now more rich, famous and influential than ever.

He grew up poor and sickly in Pittsburgh. The death benefits of his father paid for his art education. Through illness he was prematurely bald and had bad skin. He was in fact quite homely but accessorized with clear plastic glasses, wigs and makeup. That made him easy to impersonate. Warhol employed a double who made speeches and appearances for him when he didn’t want to leave New York.

Andy was clever with wigs and took to wearing silver on top of a black one. That layering made it appear that his roots were showing. My friend Gerard Malanga, who bunked with him on the road, swears that he never saw Andy without a wig. During lunch breaks they walked home from the studio where Andy’s mother, Julia, made lunch. Often that entailed a can of Campbell’s soup, one of his iconic images. He also used Julia’s unique and florid handwriting as part of his graphic design. As devout Catholics they attended mass each Sunday during the 18 years she lived with him in New York.

Warhol had the schtick of being anything you wanted to him to be. When asked a complex question his standard and gobsmacking answer was “Yes.” As to how do you make your work, he responded “I fake it.” He was the master of passive resistance. Facing the media, reporters or critics essentially framed interviews which Andy cleverly affirmed. The media always got what they wanted though the “answers” were typically enigmatic.

Or, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol from A to B and Back Again.

When queried about war, politics or tough questions he would demur that he didn’t know and that the subject was too “abstract.” That was his standard response to anything that stumped him or attempted to make him take a position on a difficult issue.

He attracted an entourage dubbed “The Factory.” They comprised queers, drag queens, druggies, socialites, artists, dropouts, the poet Gerard Malanga, and whoever showed up for a screen test and proved to [be] somewhat interesting. Andy was a magnet for beautiful boys but was in a long-term, committed relationship.

Each night he fed a menagerie of freaks on his running tab at nearby Max’s Kansas City. Wisely, its owner Mickey Ruskin took art from Andy and other artists to settle bills. Upstairs at Max’s, which served steak, lobster and chick peas, was a room where The Velvet Underground, the New York Dolls and other bands performed.

Nobody got paid other than Gerard and Paul Morrisey who directed some films. The entourage fed him ideas, starred in the films, and in that manner earned their fifteen minutes of fame. He loved gossip which he shared each day with Brigid on the phone.

Valerie Solanas, a deranged radical lesbian thought he owed her more. June 4, 1968 she walked into the factory and point blank shot him. The play explains that she was angry that he did not produce her play. In fact, he had not returned or acknowledged a film script that she had submitted.

As he explains to the waiter Farhad (Nima Rakhshanifar) a radical revolutionary holding him captive in a hotel room “She ran a movement Society to Cut Up Men (SCUM) but was its only member.”

With irony his beloved Daily News ran the story inside. He got bumped off the cover by the assassination of Bobby Kennedy. [Robert F. Kennedy was shot by Sirhan Sirhan in Los Angeles shortly after midnight on 5 June 1968.  He died the next day.] He fought for his life and was legally dead for a couple of minutes.

“Fame saved me” he explains. When the doctors realized who was on the table they redoubled their efforts.

After that Andy was never the same. He stopped hanging out with freaks fearing another incident. The movies, which cost a lot and took in little, were suspended. With a midlife and career crisis he reinvented himself. He made a series of silk screen paintings of Mao, Marilyn, Elvis, Liza, Elizabeth Taylor, Mick Jagger and other celebrities.

Hanging out with socialites and billionaires at Studio 54 he came up with a cash cow. Shooting Polaroids, with assistants he transformed them into silk screen portraits in the manner of the iconic Marilyns. While these portraits of the megarich brought home the bacon, lots and lots of bacon, they were generally commercial, uninspired and the aesthetic lowpoint of his storied career. Truth is most captains of industry are not very interesting or inspiring people. Warhol's commercial portraits reveal that. Seeing them gathered at the Whitney Museum was a painfully dreadful experience.

Andy earned some six figures plus for these hack works. Some of his sitters ordered multiples for homes and offices. It was easy money for which he sold his soul.

As Andy puts it in this play “I have a lot of mouths to feed.”

The back stories of the really bad guys he sucked up to for commissions proved to be too “abstract” for him to comprehend. So he was pals with Imelda Marcos [b. 1929; wife of Philippine president/dictator Ferdinand Marcos from 1965 to 1986] and attended a White House reception for the Shah of Iran.

No doubt Andy would have loved the Trumps, particularly Melania, and been a frequent flyer to Mar y Lago [sic]. Basically, Andy was a trend and taste maker devoid of a social conscience. He was the Switzerland of art which is to say frequently cheesy.

Which is how Askari focused on a hotel room in Tehran (an apt set by Brian Prather). That’s a fact although there is no record of a botched attempt to kidnap him. It’s also true that he mostly spent time ordering room service.  It was too hot for tourism. “Can you believe it you can order a half pound of caviar for just nine dollars.”

Set in 1976, the play imagines events when the artist was invited to Iran by Fereydoun Hoveyda, Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations, to create a portrait of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s wife. Warhol met the Empress Farah Pahlavi, whom he took Polaroids of during his visit. He was accompanied by his manager Fred Hughes and Bob Colacello, Warhol’s biographer and then editor of Warhol’s Interview Magazine.

Things go south for 80 minutes when the waiter arrives with the caviar. With a knock on the door Andy asks to just leave it outside. Farhad insists on coming in. “You have to sign for it. That’s hotel policy.”

Once in he pulls a gun and demands cooperation. The plan is to kidnap him as a device to get world attention for the cause of ousting the Shah. A car is coming, as Farhad constantly looks out the window. It never does.

Initially, they have nothing in common. Farhad refuses to answer questions while Andy mugs to what he hopes are listening devices.

Andy offers money or a part in a movie. “I can make you famous” he argues. Farhad, a committed revolutionary, isn’t interested in fame or fortune. Andy is flummoxed, “Everyone wants to be famous.”

There is reversal as they find commonality. They even compare their scars. Farhad had been tortured by the Shah’s savage Savak [Iranian secret police during the reign of the Shah] which killed his father as well as countless dissidents. As Andy comes to identify with his captor he muses that he might be a victim of Stockholm syndrome.

As a device the two characters from time-to -time step out of the play to narrate projections (Yana Biryukova) which provide backstories. That of Farhad was particularly riveting as it provided a capsule of how the Shah with the CIA and MI5 [actually, MI6; British intelligence service] ousted the rightful democratic president who died in prison. [Mohammad Mosaddegh (1882-1967), prime minister of Iran (1951-53) until ousted by the Shah with the help of the CIA and MI6.] For that support, he forked over 60% of Iran’s natural resources and petroleum forming what became British Petroleum. The major oil companies shared the wealth of Iran.

It was good to have that brief flashback and unvarnished exposure of America’s role in global imperialism.

Overall we loved this new play. The actors were compelling in their roles and the direction of Skip Greer navigated them nicely. There were twists and turns that kept us engaged. Stram was a very good if not great Warhol. He was actually too pretty with none of Andy’s awkward enigma. This was a play after all and not a documentary. To portray an authentic Andy would have added another half hour at least.

This production kept it tight and sweet. The play is the first hit of the summer season. Jump fast for tickets to a fun and entertaining evening in fabulous downtown Pittsfield. After being shut down for two and a half years Julianne Boyd was thrilled to welcome back audiences. We laughed all the way home.

*  *  *  *
“SAN FRANCISCO MIME TROUPE RETURNS TO DOLORES PARK 
WITH ‘BACK TO THE WAY THINGS WERE’”
by Jean Schiffman 

[Jean Schiffman’s review of SFMT’s annual event ran in the San Francisco Examiner on 23 June 2022.]

“Today I have to write a culminating scene,” says busy San Francisco actor/director/playwright Michael Gene Sullivan, who’s been San Francisco Mime Troupe head writer for the past 22 years. “A lot of things have to come together.”

He is on the phone several weeks before the much anticipated July Fourth grand opening of the Mime Troupe’s latest political musical comedy, “Back to the Way Things Were.” The troupe premieres a new, original free show every year on the Fourth at Dolores Park, but this year it’s especially eagerly anticipated by troupe artists and audiences because it follows the two-year pandemic shutdown.

Sullivan says that recently he’s been sitting in his car, feverishly writing scenes for his one-hour show, between matinee and evening shows of “Ragtime,” in which he’s performing at TheatreWorks Silicon Valley.

Co-written with Marie Cartier, “Back to the Way . . .” (tagline: “Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be”) is an extended version of the final radio play that the S.F. Mime Troupe aired during the dog days of the pandemic. As Sullivan explains, he and composer/lyricist/music director Daniel Savio knew “the good old days weren’t that great” and aimed to explore that concept. Police brutality, “the war on immigrants,” climate change, civil rights . . . Sullivan ticks off a list.

For the radio play, he created a prototype working-class family: Alice and Ralph (yes, he was thinking of “The Honeymooners” [iconic TV sitcom (1955-56) created by and starring comedian Jackie Gleason]) and their nihilistic college-age daughter, Zoe, who’s about the same age as Zachary, the son of Sullivan and his wife, Velina Brown. Brown and Sullivan played the couple in the radio version; now Mime Troupe regular Lizzie Calogero plays Alice, and Brown directs.

“Those of us significantly older than Zoe remember the days of activism, the days of hope,” says Sullivan. “But Zoe’s generation has never been able to get on an airplane without taking off their shoes because someone might murder them. The U.S. has been at war most of their lives. They’ve grown up with YouTube showing Black people being abused by cops. We say, ‘You’re the future’ (and they think), ‘You’re gonna put it all on us?’”

He relished the opportunity to explore the dystopia Zoe sees around her while at the same time showing what her parents see: the absence of “that constant dread that characterized the Trump/COVID years.”

“All I had to do was make it funny,” he sighs.

Because the San Francisco Mime Troupe is a collective, the group meets to discuss each new annual show — its theme, the issues that need to be covered — and it’s the head writer’s job to fold the ideas into the show, with live original music (this year, Savio plays keyboard with Will Durkee joining us on guitar and Jason Young on drums) and a set that can be put up and broken down as the troupe tours to parks throughout the state during the summer.

“I’m taking into consideration all the issues that (the collective members) bring up,” Sullivan explains. “The election, the Supreme Court, people’s sense of false news. I worked on the unhoused, housing costs, bureaucracy. Zoe has an internship at a homeless shelter and she has to work through all this red tape, which is farcically difficult.”

He says most of his preparation to write each year’s “dramatic comedic critique of modern American culture and economics,” as he describes it, is to read daily news articles from all over the world. “For theater to be viable, it has to be a town square where audience questions are addressed. Whatever is up for them in the zeitgeist, theater is a place to come to, lively and see those issues aired and addressed in a way that’s human. Not necessarily answered, though. A good play will have at least two sides to every argument, and those positions have to be well stated with real human beings in front of you, a sense of danger.”

In crafting a play, Sullivan follows the structure he teaches his playwriting students: a three-act play and within each scene, a setup, a conflict and a resolution. “It’s very mathematical, and also very Aristotelian,” he says. (Aristotle famously proposed three rules for drama: unity of action, time and place.)

Sullivan’s plays have been seen worldwide; most recently, his “The Great Khan” was staged at San Francisco Playhouse, and his adaptation of George Orwell’s “1984” has been running in rep at a theater in Kyiv for several years. (It just reopened; Sullivan declined any further royalties from the company.)

Brown, a busy local actor/singer and longtime member of the Mime Troupe collective, and others wanted to make sure there was some reference in the script to the attack on Roe v. Wade, but otherwise, she says, the play sets up tension between people who are looking at before the pandemic with rose-colored glasses and those who know that things were not all that rosy back then.

Although the cast only has five members — Calogero and Norman Gee (who plays the bus driver-turned-Uber-driver Ralph) plus Keiko Shimosato Carreiro, Andre Amarotico and Alicia M.P. Nelson — the characters include several unhoused people, a CEO, an 1880s robber baron, a cop, a butler and others.

This is Brown’s first time to direct a Mime Troupe live park show; she directed some of the company’s radio work recently and has directed elsewhere. Her specialties as a director, she says, are working individually with actors on their emotional arcs and relationships within the play, creating a safe space where actors can experiment and helping them with the songs. Her husband, when directing, specializes in the physical component; the Mime Troupe’s broad, crisp and farcical comedy harks back to the Italian commedia dell’arte style.

As a drama teacher at San Francisco’s Gateway High School, Brown points out that kids now have not only fire drills and earthquake drills but also active shooter drills. Kids have a different perspective than their parents, she observes, who could look back on a time when certain current concerns didn’t exist — or so they might like to think.

“Back to the Way Things Were” explores the then-versus-now paradox. “There’s so much apocalypse imagery out there,” she sighs. “For us as artists, what if we use that same creative ability to picture ... what if we get it right? What if we find a way to not just descend into shooting each other up?”

Sullivan acknowledges all Mime Troupe shows over the past 63 years have something in common: “the critique part,” as he calls it. “That can be tiring for people,” he concedes. “Sometimes they just want to be entertained. It’s not like we’re taking away hope. Some things need to be condemned, some altered. The job is never done. That’s a challenge for the Mime Troupe and a challenge for those committing to try to change the world. Some audience members want to see theater as an escape from trying to change the world.”

The Mime Troupe isn’t likely to give up the changing-the-world job — ever. But they’ll continue to make you laugh all the while.

*  *  *  *
“REVIEW: IN A STORM OF SILLINESS, THEATER WIT’S HURRICANE
DIANE  DEMANDS THAT WE CARE ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE”
by Nancy S. Bishop

[Nancy Bishop’s review of a 2017 play was published in the Third Coast Review (online magazine; Chicago) of 29 June 2022,  3CR specializes in Chicago-area arts and culture coverage.]

Dionysus/Diane has messages for us. The messages we continue to ignore about the serious dangers that climate change portends for our future—and more importantly, for the futures of our children and grandchildren. Yes, while we seethe with anger about SCOTUS decisions and the January 6 insurrection, playwright Madeline George wants us to get mad about climate change too. She’s right, of course.

Her 2019 [sic; premièred at Two River Theater in Red Bank, New Jersey, on 14 January-12 February 2017] play Hurricane Diane, directed by Jeremy Wechsler, is now on stage at Theater Wit. George’s premise is that if she presents us with a climate change message wrapped in a flamboyant comedy, we’ll listen. And so it starts. The Greek god Dionysus (or Bacchus, if you prefer the Roman version) descends to earth as a butch lesbian gardener, determined to attract acolytes and form a cult focused on saving the earth. Upon her arrival on stage, Diane (Kelli Simpkins) [is] swathed in white satin, wrapped in a leopard skin, and crowned with leaves and grapes. And she’s here to tell us of the danger we’re in: “It’s eleven fucking forty-five on the cosmic clock!”’

She chides us, directly: “You‘ve been busy, haven’t you? Mining and stripping and slashing and burning and generally despoiling the green earth that gave you life. It’s not like I haven’t been aware of your misdeeds, I’ve been watching you fuck shit up for hundreds of years.”

Diane/Dionysus has chosen a perfect locale for her first recruitment campaign: a cul de sac of four identical homes in Red Bank, New Jersey, a community like others along the east coast recently pummeled by other named hurricanes (we remember Sandy). The four women could be the cast of Bravo’s “The Real Housewives of Monmouth County.”*

*Monmouth County is an important county in New Jersey—for a certain narrow sector of the population. In addition to Red Bank, other key place names are Freehold, Asbury Park, Long Branch, West Long Branch, Belmar, Colts Neck, Manusquan, Rumson, Matawan and Ocean Township [all “Jersey Shore” towns]. West Long Branch is the home of Monmouth University (location of the respected Monmouth Polling Institute and site of several Bruce Springsteen Symposiums that I’ve participated in). If those names mean nothing to you, it’s only because you’re not a Springsteen fan.

Diane begins her campaign by marketing her landscaping services and lesbian lust to each of them, usually getting some resistance—at first. Diane’s preferred natural garden is a fragrant paradise with “a lush green understory, teeming with beneficial insects, worms, beetles . . . native groundcovers: hognut and bee balm, foxglove and awl-fruit, hawkweed and bladderwort and milk vetch.“ No lawns. Diane rips out lawns. 

Carol Fleischer (Carolyn Kruse), a tightly controlled corporate-compliance officer, wants a garden with themes drawn from HGTV magazine. Most of all, she wants a wrought-iron accent bench. “I don’t do furniture,” Diane replies.

Pam Annunziata (Lori Myers) wants her garden to reflect her Italian heritage with “my own Italian garden exactly like in the mural outside Delfini’s, you know the deli on Front Street? . . . . with the hanging vines, the roses, the fountain, the whole nine.” 

Renee Shapiro-Epps (Jazmin Corona) is the first to understand Diane’s landscaping vision; she’s an editor at HGTV Magazine. She enthusiastically buys into Diane’s concept and yearns for a forest permaculture in her back yard.

Beth Wann (Aniesa Hicks) tells Diane she wants a fairy garden “just like it says in the poem” with a leafy bower and “the kinds of flowers that attract fairies. So I can lay my head among the mosses while they sing me to sleep.” Beth’s husband has deserted her and she’s the first to succumb to Diane’s lecherous charms.

Hurricane Diane is totally silly with a broad array of sure-to-please laugh lines. Wechsler gets distinctive characterizations from the five actors, with Simpkins using her comedy chops to good advantage. (I’ve seen her in several serious roles—like Men in Boats, We’re Gonna Be Okay and [The Gulf]—and I can only say, she should play comedy more often.) The 90-minute play moves along briskly, using the single kitchen setting to represent the four identical homes with prop changes and landscapes scrolling by outside the back windows. There’s far more to the scenic design but no spoilers here. The clever set design is by Joe Schermoly with lighting by Piper Kirchhofer and sound design by Joyce Ciesil. Mara Blumenthal and Maddy Low are responsible for the creative costume design.  

Hurricane Diane has been extended through August 14 [2022] at Theater Wit, 1229 W. Belmont Ave. Performances are Thursday, Friday and Saturday at 7pm and Sunday at 2pm. Tickets are $25-$36 and are on sale now at TheaterWit.org or by calling the Theater Wit box office, 773-975-8150. Run time is 90 minutes, no intermission. Proof of vaccination is required for entry and masks must be worn over nose and mouth while you’re in the building.

*  *  *  *
“‘AND THEN I LAUGHED’”
by Kerry Reid 

[The review by Kerry Reid of this unusual performance ran in the Chicago Reader of 4 August 2022.  The Reader is an alternative weekly newspaper noted for its coverage of the arts, particularly film and theater.]

Theatre Y and Marvin Tate’s Laughing Song is a one-of-a-kind experience.

At one point in Theatre Y’s ambulatory Laughing Song: A Walking Dream, Marvin Tate as George W. Johnson ([1846-1914] the first Black American recording artist) is asked by a reporter at a press conference, “Is your laugh real, or is it fake?” It’s a reasonable question—but by the end of this four-hour show, which weaves together elements of Johnson’s life with Tate’s own experiences growing up in North Lawndale [West Side neighborhood, since 1950s largely African-American in population; poverty-ridden and economically depressed], it also feels utterly beside the point. How do we even know where our laughter comes from? If we stop to examine it, do we kill the fleeting moment of joy? And given everything that happens in the span of our earthly existence, shouldn’t we just be grateful we can laugh at all?

The devised piece, created by Tate and Evan Hill in collaboration with the 12-member cast and directed by Theatre Y artistic director Melissa Lorraine, does indeed unfold, as the subtitle promises, in a sort of dream state. If you’re unfamiliar with the landscape of North Lawndale (as I largely was before seeing the show), it’s a chance to see the neighborhood’s broad boulevards and parks lined with vintage greystone buildings (more than any other neighborhood in Chicago), interspersed with boarded-up storefronts that tell the story of decades-long disinvestment in the west-side community. (This is the third installment in Theatre Y’s ongoing Camino Project—a series of outdoor walking performances inspired by the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage in Spain.)

This is where Martin Luther King Jr. stayed to highlight the crisis in housing for Black Chicagoans. This is also where activists set up a 47-day protest in “Freedom Square” in 2016 to call attention to the Chicago Police Department’s infamous Homan Square interrogation facility. And it’s where young Marvin Tate first discovered his calling as an artist. Early on in the show, he recounts (as he did in a profile by Reader contributor Jack Helbig) that his childhood encounter with Gwendolyn Brooks’s poem “We Real Cool” helped him find his voice (one that had been hampered by the fact that he had a stutter). 

But Tate’s biography is more implied than told, except for a haunting segment that unfolds on some abandoned railroad tracks, where we meet his mother, Ophelia (Cat Evans), who always carried an ice pick for protection and waited for her wandering husband to return. Lamarion Hall embodies the absent father, dressed in black tuxedo pants and a white dress shirt and walking far down the tracks while Ophelia trails at a distance, wearing a bright blue dress and lugging a suitcase—a poetic evocation of romantic longing and loss, as well as a subtle reminder of the Northern Migration that brought Tate’s mother to Chicago.

We learn more direct details about Johnson’s story, which is probably because it’s been largely untold. Some of it is still all too familiar, though—particularly the ways in which the record companies ripped him off. Eric K. Roberts plays “Charles Emerson,” a portmanteau name for Charles Marshall and Victor Emerson, who both heard Johnson singing at a ferry terminal and began recording him on wax cylinders. (Johnson’s biggest hit, “The Laughing Song,” gives the piece its title.) Sometimes Johnson would do the same song in the studio 50 times a day, since the early days of phonography didn’t allow for mass reproduction. (No wonder people wondered if the laugh was “real,” or as one commenter puts it, “Can you still keep your laugh when it’s being sold?”)

After cutting loose Tate’s George and his vaudeville band (mass duplication now being possible, and thus negating the need to keep George on payroll), Roberts, riding a three-wheel bike, leads the audience on one side of the street while the cast berates him for his villainy from the other. It’s a cunning way to highlight the socioeconomic split not just between moguls like Emerson and struggling artists (particularly Black performers), but between largely white neighborhoods that receive tons of private and public perks while communities of color are ignored—until it’s time to exploit them through gentrification and development. (This tour of North Lawndale doesn’t include businesses like Lagunitas and Cinespace, though we do go by the old Sears Tower on Homan, once the headquarters of the retail giant.) 

Music and visuals add texture as Johnson’s increasingly sad story unfolds. Both his common-law wives died before him, and he faced murder charges in the death of the second. He was acquitted; a trial scene set in a colonnade gives this part of the story an air of Greek tragedy, with his dead wives standing motionless, shrouded in heavy veils. (The sound of Michael Jackson singing “I’ll Be There” from over the fence at a nearby barbecue added an unplanned piquant touch at the opening.) The ensemble, whom we meet initially as Johnson’s fellow vaudevillians in a “backstage” prologue at a theater (the YMEN Center), play multiple roles and exhibit skills as dancers, clowns, acrobats, and at improvising dialogue with the audience as we stroll along. 

August Garrett as young passionate George feels like the hopeful conscience and connective historical tissue between Johnson and Tate, his helmet and goggles suggesting that being ready to tackle the open road is a good way to get through life. A portable stereo wheeled by an ensemble member accompanies us throughout the journey, often playing songs that reference smiles and laughter (“When You’re Smiling,” “Laughter in the Rain,” “My Funny Valentine”).

I didn’t attend either of the previous Theatre Y Camino shows, so I can’t say how this one fits in with those excursions. But I can’t imagine a more engaging tour guide than Tate, or a more unique experience in Chicago theater right now. It ends up back at the YMEN Center, where we all share a delicious chicken dinner prepared by chef Joseph Cooper. (And it’s all free, though donations are accepted.)

But before dinner, Tate gathers us all together to practice letting out some big laughs. Are they real or fake? Does it matter? The important thing is that Laughing Song asks us to spend time in a sometimes overlooked community, learning about a lost figure in Black cultural history, in the presence of a contemporary Chicago Renaissance man and an ensemble working hard to help us to appreciate everything around us in light and shadow—from sunny open parks to grimy underpasses. It doesn’t get more real than that.

[I’ve saved a few more notices of curious shows like these from recent ATCA newsletters.  I may post another collection soon (since it doesn’t look like I’ll finish my current Rick On Theater project in the next week or so).

Burt Bacharach (1928-2023)

 

“FOR BACHARACH, ONE BROADWAY HIT WAS ENOUGH”
by Laurence Maslon 

[The great songwriter and composer Burt Bacharach died earlier this month in Los Angeles.  He was justly famous for the many pop songs he wrote, mostly with lyricist Hal David, many of which became hits for singer Dionne Warwick in the 1960s and ’70s. 

[He and David also wrote the score for a very successful Broadway musical, 1968’s Promises, Promises, an adaptation of the 1960 movie The Apartment, which starred Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine.  

[For Rick On Theater, I’ve put together two recent New York Times articles about Bacharach and his musical legacy.  The first, by Laurence Maslon,(author of Broadway: The American Musical [Bulfinch Press, 2004]) is about the creation of Bacharach’s only Broadway score.  Maslon’s article was published in the Times on 14 February 2023 in the “Arts” section (sec. C).

[The second article is the New York Times obituary of Bacharach, written by Stephen Holden.]

After helping to write the score for ‘Promises, Promises,’ the perfectionist composer was content to leave musical theater behind.

In the late 1960s, when Broadway show tunes and popular music were veering in opposite directions, the producer David Merrick [1911-2000], one of the most hidebound curmudgeons on Broadway, reached out to one of the most successful American pop composers of the time: Burt Bacharach.

Bacharach (who died on Feb. 8 at age 94 [see his obituary, posted below]) already had more than a dozen international hits with his lyricist partner, Hal David [1921-2012], including “Walk on By,” “Alfie,” “I Say a Little Prayer” and “The Look of Love.” That last song was introduced in the spy parody “Casino Royale,” and, in fact, Bacharach had met Merrick at that movie’s London premiere in 1967. They agreed to work together if the right project came along.

Bacharach wasn’t exactly bedazzled by the bright lights of Broadway. “When I was getting successful with pop songs, and having hits, there wasn’t something burning inside me that said, “Boy, I need to write a Broadway show,’” he said in an interview for the 1985 book “Notes on Broadway.” “I was quite content being in the studio and making my records.”

It just so happens that when Merrick eventually wrangled the playwright Neil Simon [1927-2018] to adapt Billy Wilder’s 1960 Academy Award-winning film “The Apartment” as a musical, it was Simon who pushed for Bacharach and David, as he wanted to update the material and incorporate a sound that might reach contemporary audiences. “Promises, Promises,” as the show would be called, centered on a well-meaning milquetoast accountant in a New York insurance firm who essentially pimps out his apartment to his superiors in exchange — so he is promised — for a series of promotions. Merrick, a master of the Show for Tired Businessmen (“Do Re Mi,” “Hello, Dolly!,” “How Now, Dow Jones”), assembled the perfect team for a show about tired businessmen.

The material was beautifully tailored for Bacharach and David’s sensibilities — urban, witty, rueful, alienated but passionate — and the songwriters were faithful to the tone of Simon’s book: a savvy mix of wisecracks, romantic heartbreak and contemporary satire.

But one early aspect of this collaboration was telling: While Simon and David crafted the text together in New York, Bacharach remained deeply involved with other studio projects in Hollywood, setting his music to David’s lyrics from afar. He would not arrive in New York until September 1968, with the first Broadway preview just two months away.

Despite the distance, Bacharach was already demonstrating how his command of the pop charts could pay dividends — even before the show went into rehearsals. “I thought it would be great if the music came out a couple of months before, so [theater audiences] would have some familiarity with the work,” he recounted in the liner notes to a 1989 three-CD set of his music. His eternal muse, Dionne Warwick [b. 1940], recorded two songs from the incipient score, while Bacharach worked his usual meticulous magic in the protected confines of the recording studio, getting his complicated rhythms just right. Warwick’s single of the “Promises, Promises” title number hit No. 19 on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart.

“As musicals go, it couldn’t have been easier,” Bacharach recalled in “Notes on Broadway.” “The financing, getting it done, getting it in the theater — it just went with lightning speed.” 

Then came the November tryout in Boston, where Merrick’s usual boorish behavior was on display. He apparently demanded a hit song for the second act, so that the nebbish hero, Chuck [played by Jerry Orbach in the Broadway première; Jack Lemon in the film], could connect romantically (however tenuously) with Fran [Jill O'Hara on Broadway; Shirley MacLaine on film], the elevator operator for whom he pines.

Bacharach would have gladly obliged, but he was sent to Massachusetts General with pneumonia. Merrick stomped around and cursed the songwriters and supposedly threatened to hire Leonard Bernstein to replace them, but David beavered away and came up with wistful lyrics to a duet called “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again.” He even incorporated Bacharach’s malady: “What do you get when you kiss a guy?/You get enough germs to catch pneumonia./After you do/he’ll never phone ya.”

When he was released from the hospital, Bacharach found the melody to match the malady: “Maybe because I was still not feeling all that well, I wrote the melody faster than I had ever written any song before in my life,” Bacharach wrote in his 2013 memoir, “Anyone Who Had a Heart.”

Ahead of the New York opening, Bacharach wanted a sound more like what he was used to in a recording studio, so he brought in his frequent recording engineer Phil Ramone [1934-2013] and had the Shubert Theater’s sound system redesigned. The orchestra was divided into small groupings (separated by fiberglass panels), each surrounding a microphone that would relay the sound to be mixed live at the back of the theater. And the orchestrator Jonathan Tunick [b. 1938; see my post “Pacific Overtures (1976)” on 15 May 2014] (in one of his first Broadway jobs) added two guitars — one acoustic, one electric — and a quartet of female singers, billed as Orchestra Voices. The technical virtuosity of these innovations unnerved Merrick so much that, according to a New York Times article about the arrangements, he admonished Ramone and Bacharach: “I don’t want the audience walking out of the theater saying, ‘It’s a recording.’”

But even Merrick fell in love again after “Promises, Promises” opened on Dec. 1, 1968, to rapturous reviews. On opening night, he told a reporter that Bacharach was “the first original American composer since [George] Gershwin.” In an article in The Times, John S. Wilson [1913-2002; music critic for the New York Times] wrote, “The tight Bacharachian rhythmic patterns keep bouncing around in your head as you walk into the night, songless but pulsing with a busy little beat.”

But the experience didn’t make Broadway burn any brighter inside Bacharach. “Somehow I lived through it, and I’m still alive,” he told Rex Reed [b. 1938; film critic] in a Times interview before the show opened. “But this has been the hardest thing I’ve ever done. I’m wiped out by this show, man. I’ll be in Palm Springs on Wednesday.” And he was as good as his word — joining his wife, the actress Angie Dickinson  [b. 1931], in a newly-rented desert home with a tennis court and a swimming pool.

A week or so later, a phone call to Palm Springs from Merrick confirmed that there were limits to what Bacharach could control in a live production, eight times a week. “He called me and said ‘Eight subs [substitute players] in the orchestra last night, including the drummer’ and guess who was in the audience? Richard Rodgers! This great, great composer. Richard Rodgers!,” he recounted in “Notes on Broadway.” “It made me feel just terrible, because my music is not that easy to play. A song like ‘Promises, Promises’ changes time signature in almost every bar. And I’ve got . . . a drummer who’s sight-reading, who’s never played it before.”

“Promises, Promises” was hardly an irreparable disappointment for Bacharach: The original Broadway production ran for 1,281 performances (and Jerry Orbach, who played the accountant, won a Tony Award for the role); there was a robust West End run; and a Broadway revival (sized and trimmed for contemporary tastes) in 2010 starred Kristin Chenoweth and Sean Hayes [see my post “Gay Actors,” 14 June 2010, which concerns Hayes and Promises, Promises]. And “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again” would become a smash single for Warwick in 1970, hitting No. 1 on Billboard’s adult contemporary chart; it would also be the last time a song originating on Broadway reached the top spot on any of the Billboard charts.

That was probably cold comfort to Bacharach. Looking back on his Broadway experience for the CD liner notes decades later, he was definitive: “If you’re doing a musical, it’s going to change every night,” he wrote. “If you’re doing something on record, it doesn’t get changed every night. So that’s what I prefer to do.”

David, also quoted in the liner notes, said about his collaborator and the reality of Broadway: “If you’re a perfectionist, it can drive you crazy.”

Sixteen months after “Promises” opened, Stephen Sondheim’s “Company” arrived on Broadway and the modernity of its sound would have been unthinkable without Bacharach’s innovations. Indeed, many of them were reintroduced by Tunick, the “Promises” orchestrator, when he took on the orchestrations for “Company.”

“If I were hearing ‘Another Hundred People’ for the first time,” the music critic Will Friedwald said in an interview for this article, “I would have guessed it was Bacharach and not Sondheim.”

Bacharach was initially philosophical about “Promises, Promises” — “If we knocked down a few doors with my rhythms or the new sound in the show, great,” he told Reed — but the theatrical magic he created for his only Broadway score is so apposite and hip and melancholy and sweet that it makes one ache for what might have been.

[Laurence Maslon is an arts professor at New York University. His latest book, I’ll Drink to That! Broadway’s Legendary Stars, Classic Shows, and the Cocktails They Inspired, will be published in May.]

*  *  *  *
“BURT BACHARACH, 1928-2023: COMPOSER OF BUOYANT POP HITS”
(“BURT BACHARACH, 94, WHOSE BUOYANT POP LIFTED THE ’60S, DIES)
by Stephen Holden

[Holden’s obituary of Burt Bacharach appeared in the New York Times on 10 February 2023 in section A (the news section). 

[The underlined title above is the one that appears on page 1 of the front section; the title below that, which appears as the headline of the continuation of the obituary, is the one by which it’s referred to on the website and under which it’s listed in databases.]

Burt Bacharach, the debonair pop composer, arranger, conductor, record producer and occasional singer whose hit songs in the 1960s distilled that decade’s mood of romantic optimism, died on Wednesday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 94.

His publicist Tina Brausam confirmed the death. No specific cause was given.

A die-hard romantic, Mr. Bacharach fused the chromatic harmonies and long, angular melodies of late-19th-century symphonic music with modern pop orchestration and embellished the mixture with a staccato rhythmic drive. His effervescent compositions epitomized sophisticated hedonism to a generation of young adults only a few years older than the Beatles.

Because of the high gloss and apolitical stance of the songs Mr. Bacharach wrote with his most frequent collaborator, the lyricist Hal David, during an era of confrontation and social upheaval, they were often dismissed as little more than background music by listeners who preferred the hard edge of rock or the intimacy of the singer-songwriter genre. But in hindsight, the Bacharach-David team ranks high in the pantheon of pop songwriting.

Bacharach-David songs like “The Look of Love,” Dusty Springfield’s sultry 1967 hit, featured in the movie “Casino Royale”; “This Guy’s in Love With You,” a No. 1 hit in 1968 for Herb Alpert; and “(They Long to Be) Close to You,” a No. 1 hit in 1970 for the Carpenters, evoked a world of jet travel, sports cars and sleek bachelor pads. Acknowledging this mystique with a wink, Mr. Bacharach appeared as himself and performed his 1965 song “What the World Needs Now Is Love” in the 1997 movie “Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery,” which spoofed the swinging ’60s ambience of the early James Bond films. He also made cameo appearances in its two sequels.

Mr. Bacharach collaborated with many lyricists over the years, and even wrote some of his own words. But his primary collaborator was Mr. David, seven years his senior, whom he met in a music publisher’s office in 1957. The team’s artistic chemistry solidified in 1962, beginning with the hits they wrote and produced for Dionne Warwick, a gifted young gospel-trained singer from East Orange, N.J.

Mr. Bacharach met Ms. Warwick at a recording session for the Drifters that included “Mexican Divorce” and “Please Stay,” two songs he wrote with the lyricist Bob Hilliard [1918-71]. Hearing Ms. Warwick, a backup singer, Mr. Bacharach realized he had found the rare vocalist with the technical prowess to negotiate his rangy, fiercely difficult melodies, with their tricky time signatures and extended asymmetrical phrases.

The artistic synergy of Mr. Bacharach, Mr. David and Ms. Warwick defined the voice of a young, passionate, on-the-go Everywoman bursting with romantic eagerness and vulnerability. Their urbane style was the immediate forerunner of the earthier Motown sound of the middle and late 1960s.

Mr. Bacharach and Mr. David worked in the Brill Building, the Midtown Manhattan music publishing hub, and they are frequently lumped together with the younger writers in the so-called Brill Building school of teenage pop, like the teams of Carole King and Gerry Goffin or Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil. But they rarely wrote explicitly for the teenage market. Their more sophisticated songs were closer in style to Cole Porter, and Mr. Bacharach’s fondness for Brazilian rhythms recalled lilting Porter standards like “Begin the Beguine.”

Hits and a Miss

Beginning with “Don’t Make Me Over” in 1962, the team turned out a steady stream of hits for Ms. Warwick, among them “Anyone Who Had a Heart,” “Walk On By,” “Alfie,” “I Say a Little Prayer” and “Do You Know the Way to San Jose.”

Mr. Bacharach’s success transcended the Top 40. He won two Academy Awards for best song: for “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head,” written with Mr. David, in 1970, and “Arthur’s Theme (Best That You Can Do),” written with Peter Allen, Carole Bayer Sager and Christopher Cross, in 1982. His original score for the 1969 film “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” which included “Raindrops,” a No. 1 hit for B.J. Thomas, won an Oscar for best original score for a nonmusical motion picture. And the Bacharach-David team conquered Broadway in December 1968 with “Promises, Promises.”

Adapted by Neil Simon from “The Apartment,” Billy Wilder’s 1960 film about erotic hanky-panky at a Manhattan corporation, “Promises, Promises” [see article above by Laurence Maslon] was one of the first Broadway shows to use backup singers in the orchestra pit and pop-style amplification. Along with “Hair,” which opened on Broadway that same year, it presaged the era of the pop musical.

“Promises, Promises” ran for 1,281 performances, yielded hits for Ms. Warwick in the catchy but fiendishly difficult title song and the folk-pop ballad “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again,” and was nominated for seven Tony Awards. Two of its cast members won, but the show itself did not. Both “Promises, Promises” and “Hair” lost in the best-musical category to the much more traditional “1776.” It was successfully revived on Broadway in 2010.

With success both in Hollywood and on Broadway, as well as a high-profile movie-star wife, Angie Dickinson, whom he had married in 1965, Mr. Bacharach entered the 1970s not just a hit songwriter but a glamorous star in his own right. It seemed as if he could do no wrong. But that soon changed.

In 1973, Mr. Bacharach and Mr. David wrote the score for the movie musical “Lost Horizon,” adapted from the 1937 Frank Capra fantasy film of the same name. The movie was a catastrophic failure. Shortly after that, the Bacharach-David-Warwick triumvirate, which had already begun to grow stale, split up acrimoniously amid a flurry of lawsuits.

Reflecting on his split with Mr. David in 2013 in his autobiography, “Anyone Who Had a Heart: My Life and Music,” written with Robert Greenfield, Mr. Bacharach acknowledged that “it was all my fault, and I can’t imagine how many great songs I could have written with Hal in the years we were apart.

A New Partnership

Mr. Bacharach endured several fallow years, personal as well as professional — his marriage to Ms. Dickinson was over long before they divorced in 1981 — but experienced a commercial resurgence in the 1980s through his collaboration with the lyricist Carole Bayer Sager [b. 1947], whom he married in 1982.

Mr. Bacharach and Ms. Sager hit their commercial peak in 1986 with two No. 1 hits: the Patti LaBelle-Michael McDonald duet “On My Own” and the AIDS fund-raising anthem “That’s What Friends Are For,” which went on to win the Grammy for song of the year. Originally recorded by Rod Stewart for the soundtrack of Ron Howard’s 1982 movie “Night Shift,” and redone by an all-star quartet billed as Dionne and Friends — Ms. Warwick, Stevie Wonder, Gladys Knight and Elton John. “That’s What Friends Are For” was Mr. Bacharach’s last major hit. He and Ms. Sager divorced in 1991.

Burt Freeman Bacharach was born in Kansas City, Mo., on May 12, 1928. His father, Bert Bacharach [1898-1983], was a nationally syndicated columnist and men’s fashion journalist who moved his family to Forest Hills, Queens, in 1932. His mother, Irma (Freeman) Bacharach [1902-87], was an amateur singer and pianist who encouraged Burt to study music. He learned cello, drums and piano.

While still under-age, he sneaked into Manhattan jazz clubs and became smitten with the modern harmonies of Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, which would exert a huge influence on him.

After graduating from Forest Hills High School, Burt studied music at several schools, including McGill University in Montreal and the Mannes School of Music in New York [now part of the College of Performing Arts at The New School].  Among his teachers were the composers Henry Cowell [1897-1965] and Darius Milhaud [1892-1974]. While serving in the Army in the early ’50s, he played piano, worked as a dance-band arranger and met the singer Vic Damone [1928-2018], with whom he later toured as an accompanist.

Mr. Bacharach became the German actress and singer Marlene Dietrich’s [1901-92] musical director in 1958 and toured with her for two years in the United States and Europe. Other performers he accompanied in the 1950s included the Ames Brothers, Polly Bergen, Georgia Gibbs, Joel Grey, Steve Lawrence and a little-known singer named Paula Stewart [b. 1929], who in 1953 became his first wife. They divorced in 1958.

The Bacharach-David songwriting team enjoyed immediate success in 1957 with Marty Robbins’s “The Story of My Life” and Perry Como’s “Magic Moments.” Mr. Bacharach’s emerging melodic signature was discernible in early 1960s hits like Chuck Jackson’s “Any Day Now” (lyrics by Mr. Hilliard) and “Make It Easy on Yourself” (lyrics by Mr. David), a success for Jerry Butler in the United States and the Walker Brothers in Britain. In their Gene Pitney hits “(The Man Who Shot)  Liberty Valance”  and “Twenty Four  Hours From Tulsa,” the team adopted a swaggering quasi-western sound.

All the elements of Mr. Bacharach’s style coalesced in Ms. Warwick’s recordings, which he produced with Mr. David and arranged himself. In the typical Warwick hit, her voice was surrounded by strings and backup singers, the arrangements emphatically punctuated by trumpets echoing the influence of Herb Alpert’s Tijuana Brass.

Among the other artists who had hits with the team’s songs were Jackie DeShannon (“What the World Needs Now Is Love”), Dusty Springfield (“Wishin’ and Hopin’,” “The Look of Love”), Tom Jones (“What’s New Pussycat?”)  and the 5th Dimension (“One Less Bell to Answer”). But Ms. Warwick was their definitive interpreter.

A Reunion

After the “Lost Horizon” debacle, Mr. Bacharach worked predominantly as a concert performer, conducting his own instrumental suites and singing his own songs in an easygoing voice with a narrow range. He periodically released solo albums, of which the most ambitious was “Woman” (1979), a primarily instrumental song cycle recorded with the Houston Symphony. But these records had a negligible commercial impact.

Time eventually healed the wounds from Mr. Bacharach’s split with Mr. David and Ms. Warwick, and he reunited first with Ms. Warwick most notably for “That’s What Friends Are For” and later with Mr. David, for “Sunny Weather Lover,” recorded by Ms. Warwick in the early 1990s. He found his greatest interpreter since Ms. Warwick in the pop-soul balladeer Luther Vandross [1951-2005], whose lush 1980s remakes of “A House Is Not a Home” and “Anyone Who Had a Heart” transformed them into dreamy quasi-operatic arias decorated with florid gospel melismas [singing a single syllable of text while moving between several different notes].

Mr. Bacharach married Jane Hansen [b. 1955], his fourth wife, in 1993. She survives him, along with their son, Oliver; their daughter, Raleigh; and a son, Cristopher, from his marriage to Ms. Sager. Nikki Bacharach, his daughter with Angie Dickinson, committed suicide in 2007.

In his 60s, Mr. Bacharach found himself regarded with awe by a younger generation of musicians. Bands like Oasis and Stereolab included his songs in their repertoire. The British singer-songwriter Elvis Costello [b. 1954], a longtime admirer, collaborated with him on the ballad “God Give Me Strength” for the 1996 film “Grace of My Heart,” loosely based on the life of Carole King. That led them to collaborate on an entire album, “Painted From Memory” (1998), arranged and conducted by Mr. Bacharach, for which they shared music and lyric credits.

A track from that album, “I Still Have That Other Girl,” won a Grammy for best pop vocal collaboration. It was the sixth Grammy of Mr. Bacharach’s career; he would win one more, in 2006, when his “At This Time” was named best pop instrumental album.

The Bacharach-David team was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1972. Forty years later, shortly before Mr. David died at age 91, the two received the Gershwin Prize for Popular Song from the Library of Congress.

Mr. Bacharach remained in the public eye until the end. In December 2011, “Some Lovers,” a musical for which he wrote the music and Steven Sater [b. 1954] wrote the lyrics, opened at the Old Globe in San Diego. “What’s It All About? Bacharach Reimagined,” a New York Theater Workshop production built on his songs, opened Off Broadway in December 2013. (An earlier revue based on the Bacharach-David catalog, “The Look of Love,” had a brief Broadway run in 2003.) As recently as 2020, Mr. Bacharach was still writing new music, releasing a collaboration with the singer-songwriter Melody Federer [b. c. 1988].

In 2013, Mr. Bacharach began collaborating with Mr. Costello, Mr. Sater and the television writer and producer Chuck Lorre [b. 1952] on a stage musical based on the “Painted From Memory” album but also including new songs. That project never came to fruition, although some of the new material ended up on Mr. Costello’s recent albums. All the music from the “Painted From Memory” project is included in “The Songs of Bacharach & Costello,” a boxed set that also includes Mr. Costello’s recordings of Bacharach songs, which is scheduled for release next month.

Looking back on his career in his autobiography, Mr. Bacharach suggested that as a songwriter he had been “luckier than most.”

“Most composers sit in a room by themselves and nobody knows what they look like,” he wrote. “People may have heard some of their songs, but they never get to see them onstage or on television.” Because he was also a performer, he noted, “I get to make a direct connection with people.”

“Whether it’s just a handshake or being stopped on the street and asked for an autograph or having someone comment on a song I’ve written,” Mr. Bacharach added, “that connection is really meaningful and powerful for me.”

Alex Traub contributed reporting.

"Yiddish Theatre: Not Just a Thing of the Past"

by AMELIA MERRILL 

[On 23 and 26 August 2012, I posted “National Yiddish Theatre – Folksbiene,” a two-part look at the Yiddish language, literature, and theater, and the history of the Folksbiene company, the longest-surviving Yiddish theater in the world.  The present piece, “Yiddish Theatre: Not Just a Thing of the Past,” can be seen as an update.

[I also published Carol Rocamora’s American Theatre report “Could It Happen Here?” last week on 10 February.  The post below, also from AT (on the website on 29 December 2022, AMERICAN THEATRE | Yiddish Theatre: Not Just a Thing of the Past), might be read as a contrast to Rocamora’s article, which examines how the English-speaking theater is responding to the current surge in anti-Semitic violence.  Amelia Merrill’s report looks at how the Yiddish-speaking stage is faring here in New York City after more than a century of producing plays.]

In New York City, once home to dozens of Yiddish theatres, 2 companies now tend the flame in different ways—just don’t call it a renaissance.

As a historic hub for both theatre and international immigration, New York is unsurprisingly home to many theatres created by and for ethnically specific audiences: Ma-Yi Theater Company develops new works by Asian American artists; multiple companies, from Teatro Latea and Pregones/Puerto Rican Traveling Theater to Repertorio Español, produce works in Spanish; the Irish Repertory Theatre and Irish Arts Center are key outposts for drama by and about this signature New York population.

Another integral immigrant population has had ample stage representation in the past: At one point in time, New York was home to more than 50 Yiddish theatres, where stars speaking the language of Ashkenazi Jews delighted audiences both Jewish and not, both fluent in the language and entirely unfamiliar with it. Today, reflecting both the relative decline and the cultural persistence of this unique heritage, there are two remaining Yiddish theatres in the city, New Yiddish Rep [founded in 2007; New Yiddish Rep] and National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene (NYTF [National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene]).

The latter company had a crossover hit in 2018 with its Yiddish-language production of the classic musical Fiddler on the Roof, Fidler afn Dakh ([directed by Joel Grey; Museum of Jewish Heritage, 16 July-30 December 2018; Off-Broadway, 21 February 2019-5 January 2020] now back in an encore engagement Off-Broadway [21 November 2022] through Jan. 1, 2023). The company had been no stranger to good fortune before then, keeping its doors open as competitors folded throughout the 20th century. But Fiddler has had the kind of mainstream success NYTF hadn’t experienced in years, leading critics to wonder if both the Yiddish theatre scene and the wider world of Yiddish were experiencing a rebirth. NYTF acknowledged the trend by naming a 2021 fundraiser “A Yiddish Renaissance.”

Many Yiddishists—the language’s champions, who include scholars, teachers, students, playwrights, musicians, archivists, podcasters, and more—dislike this term. “Renaissance” implies that the work of both professional and amateur Yiddishists stopped cold at some point or went underground of its own accord, rather than, as they see it, being deprived of funding and continued support. Too often, the Yiddishists feel, the theatre industry looks backward at Yiddish theatre as if paying homage to a bygone era is the only option left.

If we are in the midst of a Yiddish renaissance, it is one that has built up gradually, not sprung to life overnight. Long before the popular language-learning app Duolingo added Yiddish to its lexicon in 2021, organizations like YIVO [a partner of, and co-located with, the Center for Jewish History in the Flatiron District of New York City] and the Workers Circle offered classes in New York and online. Online learning options have gotten so popular that NPR covered the phenomenon last year. The Jewish Daily Forward, one of the oldest Jewish newspapers in the country [founded in 1897], still publishes a Yiddish edition online (the print publication folded in 2019). In 2016, Sandy Fox launched Vaybertaytsh, a feminist podcast in Yiddish whose name refers to Torah commentaries written for (but not by) women, and WUNR in Brookline, Mass., releases their weekly Yiddish radio show, the Yiddish Voice, as a podcast as well. Cameron Bernstein, an alum of the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Mass., boasts over 44,000 followers on TikTok, where she posts Yiddish music, memes, translations, and tidbits of historical information. Students can take Yiddish classes at select universities across the country, or even pursue doctoral programs in the language and its literature. Beyond academia’s walls, Yiddish is a first language to hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers. Though Yiddish remains a minority language, it would be inaccurate—and exquisitely annoying to Yiddishists—to call it a dead one.

The Yiddish theatre community has remained similarly steadfast for generations, even as it gradually lost its wide audience reach and now faces a dearth of actors who speak the language. What was a mainstream component of the theatre industry a century ago, selling well over a million tickets each year, is now categorized as affinity theatre [theater that attracts audiences with the same or similar interests].

There have been high points in Yiddish literature and arts since that height: Writer Isaac Bashevis Singer, whose Yiddish stories are characterized by a witty, tongue-in-cheek embrace of death and disaster, won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1978. And then there was klezmer, the jazzy, folksy dance music of Ashkenazi Jews, which Zalmen Mlotek, the artistic director of the NYTF, credits with keeping Yiddish performing arts afloat; playwright and Yiddishist Rokhl Kafrissen, a 2019 fellow at LABA Laboratory for Jewish Culture, said in an interview last year that the 1990s klezmer revival was her gateway to Yiddish and its theatre. Indeed, the Klezmatics’ original score for the 1997 Public Theater production of Tony Kushner’s A Dybbuk, an adaptation of S. Ansky’s most famous Yiddish play, was considered one of the production’s high points.

These musical and theatrical strains, and the persistence of theatres like NYTF, led to the success of Fidler Afn Dakh, which bridged the gap between niche or cultural affinity art and mainstream success, effectively taking one of the most iconic Broadway musicals back to its roots.

Fiddler has, of course, been revived on American stages, including on Broadway, numerous times since its 1964 debut, but it had never been produced in the original language of writer Sholem Aleichem (whose stories inspired Joseph Stein’s libretto) until NYTF produced Shraga Friedman’s translation. (Aleichem’s own Yiddish-language play about the character of Tevye the Dairyman was not produced in his lifetime.) The production resonated with audiences, prompting a 2019 transfer to Stage 42, a cast recording, and a Drama Desk Award.

But Fiddler was not the first Yiddish play to take hold of the New York theatre world in the 2010s: In 2016 and 2017, New Yiddish Rep produced God of Vengeance [22 December 2016-22 January 2017], a controversial Yiddish play by Sholem Asch whose 1923 production featured the first kiss between two women on a Broadway stage, resulting in the arrest of the company and theatre owners for obscenity. Playwright Paula Vogel in turn chronicled Asch’s life and creative process and the history of the play in Indecent [Off-Broadway. 17 May-19 June 2016; Broadway, 18 April-6 August 2017], which played on Broadway around the same time as New Yiddish Rep’s production and won director Rebecca Taichman a Tony Award. Indecent, which features both Asch and Hebrew and Yiddish writer I.L. Peretz as prominent characters, is primarily in English, but Vogel sprinkles Yiddish dialogue throughout the script and infuses the play with a spirit of song and dance essential to Yiddish theatre. The play ended up extending for six weeks after its initially announced closing date due to public outcry.

Yiddish cinema has shown strength as well: In 2017, Joshua Z. Weinstein released the Yiddish-language tale Menashe, featuring a company of native speakers from Brooklyn. The lead actor, Menashe Lustig, also lent his talent to the 2019 horror film The Vigil, an English and Yiddish production from Keith Thomas about a man hired to keep watch over the body of a deceased man from his Jewish community. The film’s protagonist, like the captivating Esty in Netflix’s controversial 2020 miniseries Unorthodox—the first American streaming series in Yiddish—is off the derech, or OTD, a Hebrew term for a formerly Orthodox person who has left the “path” (derech).

Many of New Yiddish Rep’s actors are OTD themselves, having been raised in Yiddish-speaking homes and communities in Brooklyn, Queens, and throughout the city. As OTD people face economic hardship after leaving their communities, New Yiddish Rep offers creatively inclined Yiddish speakers new opportunities.

Indeed, OTD artists and teachers from Yiddish-speaking backgrounds may be ideally suited to help foster a Yiddish theatre community committed to preservation of the language’s nuances and dialect differences; several of the OTD actors of New Yiddish Rep have also lent their voices to Duolingo’s Yiddish lessons. Not every Yiddish theatre company or program, however, requires performers to be native speakers, or even fluent: NYTF trains actors, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, in the dialogue and idiosyncrasies necessary to perform their Yiddish-speaking roles. NYTF’s approach views Yiddish as a component of actor training, not a disparate prerequisite for building a company of Yiddish-speaking performers.

“They’re learning phonetically,” Mlotek said in an interview last year about actors new to NYTF’s rehearsal processes. He said that Actors’ Equity Association allowed the Fiddler team to feed auditionees one sentence to repeat as a “test” of their Yiddish capabilities. “Of course they have to understand every word they’re saying so they can act in the language,” Mlotek said.

Though they both share the stages of a city once bursting with Yiddish theatre and its stars, NYTF and New Yiddish Rep sometimes clash ideologically over this core question: Is the Yiddish language an intrinsic part of the Yiddish theatre experience, or is it part of the acting?

“When you have a show with 27 actors, and only one of them speaks Yiddish or only two of them speak Yiddish, is it Yiddish theatre?” David Mandelbaum, the co-founder and artistic director of New Yiddish Rep, bluntly posed in an interview last year. “Would you go to see a French play with all non-French-speaking people onstage?”

Mandelbaum observed matter-of-factly that actors being coached in Yiddish dialogue who lack contextual knowledge of the language outside the script in their hands may not only struggle with their acting process but with a personal disconnect from their cultural heritage—one that plagues many Jews trying to learn Yiddish for the first time. Mandelbaum grew up in a Yiddish-speaking home with his parents, who were Polish Jewish immigrants. Mlotek’s father was a Yiddish writer who came to the U.S. after World War II, while his mother was an ethnomusicologist who “devoted her life’s work to collecting Yiddish songs.” (Bashevis Singer once called Mlotek’s parents the “Sherlock Holmeses of Yiddish folk songs,” according to Mlotek’s mother’s obituary.) This immersion in Yiddish language, let alone in the Yiddish literati, has grown rare outside of Haredi (or “ultra-Orthodox”) communities.

For many other American Jews, however, Yiddish has been the dividing line between religious and secular cultures, and some have chosen not to teach the language to their children to allow them—or force them—to assimilate into mainstream culture. My own family adopted this view generations ago; the Star of David atop a Christmas tree in Tom Stoppard’s Leopoldstadt [See Rick On Theater posts “Tom Stoppard & Leopoldstadt” (22 October 2022) and “Tom Stoppard” (26 December 2022)], on Broadway this season, reminds me of my great-grandfather’s decision to put the Christmas tree near the windows so that the neighbors would know that the family was similar, secular, “normal.”

“They wanted their kids to be Yankees,” Mandelbaum said of the waves of Jewish immigrants who encouraged their children to speak only English. Mlotek referred to Yiddish as a “secret language” spoken between parents and grandparents, but not to children. This assimilation trickled down: From 1980 to 2011, the population of Yiddish speakers in the U.S. declined by almost half, sitting at around 250,000 now.

Still, Yiddish theatre artists aren’t sure that native speakers are the ones buying tickets to Yiddish theatre productions and noticing mistakes or regional variations. In fact, Mandelbaum joked that Yiddish theatre survives because Yiddish speakers aren’t coming to see shows and point out mistakes. While some Yiddish-speaking Haredi Jews do engage in secular pop culture, others restrict their exposure and may not feel comfortable at a theatre performance not explicitly designed for religious audiences. Others may be wary of Yiddish theatre’s historic penchant for depicting religious life as archaic or anti-intellectual; some playwrights in the golden age of Yiddish theatre were reacting to the shtetls where they grew up, while others had never experienced such a life and were poking fun at their countryside brethren. 

“When the Museum of Jewish Heritage invited us to be the resident theatre company, I had to go through—not an inquisition, but a meeting,” Mlotek told me. A trustee believed that all Yiddish theatre had to offer was this stereotypical fare that denigrated religious Jews as primitive peasants. “I happen to be a traditional Jew in the sense that I keep Shabbos, I have a relationship with the Creator,” Mlotek said he told the trustee. “There’s no agenda to ridicule any segment of the Jewish population.”

By focusing on outreach work with OTD Yiddish artists, Mandelbaum also addresses the disparities between Jewish religious communities and Jewish performing arts. His work at New Yiddish Rep helps a niche within a niche: Yiddish speakers are a small demographic, and OTD people are an even smaller one who often struggle with tension in their former communities.

Onstage, however, neither New Yiddish Rep nor NYTF caters only to Yiddish audiences. The popularity of New Yiddish Rep’s God of Vengeance and NYTF’s Fiddler proved that the language is not a barrier but a part of the theatre experience, akin to going to the opera, with projected supertitles aiding comprehension. Assuming that there are no Yiddish-speaking Jews in the audiences of these shows may paint with too broad a brush, but we can safely assume that they are not the majority. Mlotek and Mandelbaum both spoke about trends they have noticed among Jewish audience members, but as of the time of my interviews, neither company had data about whether their patrons speak Yiddish at home or at all. Perhaps dividing Jewish audience members into groups of secular and religious, native Yiddish speakers and not, is an unproductive exercise—not all Jews will accept the labels applied to them. (You know the saying, “Two Jews, three opinions”?)

At the end of the day, most of the audience for NYTF’s storied Yiddish Fiddler production (also referred to as “Yiddler”) does not care if it represents an authentic linguistic interpretation of a language spoken mostly in cloistered communities, or if such a judgment can even be made. These conversations, while interesting from a scholarly point of view, feel more like splitting hairs to the average theatregoer. Fidler afn Dakh was popular enough to be revived this year, and may follow in the footsteps of other pre-COVID hits that have transferred to Broadway. Though Mlotek and Mandelbaum don’t agree on every facet of Yiddish artistic pedagogy, they don’t see themselves as rivals in their cultural and linguistic niche. Their companies simply offer different works from different perspectives, which Mandelbaum compared to the history of Yiddish theatre in New York.

“They used to do ‘claques,’ where fans of a particular impresario would be given free tickets to come to the theatre and clap, or to go to another theatre and create chaos,” he described. Yiddish theatre actors were not afraid to confront each other, directors, or audience members whose reactions they deemed not up to snuff. Perhaps this seems a little uncouth to the modern theatre attendee, but Mandelbaum called it a “wonderful, crazy, marvelous” time that encapsulated some of the vaudevillian spirit of Yiddish theatre.

The debate over accessibility versus authenticity—and whether these elements can live in harmony—grips the whole Yiddish world today, not just the Yiddish theatre. While some Jewish users and media celebrated Duolingo’s addition of Yiddish last year, others scoffed, deeming the program inferior to in-person, in-depth language learning. The platform does gamify learning to a degree, conflicting with pedagogical opinions of language acquisition, but it does incentivize users to keep coming back and, most significantly, it is free of charge. While organizations like YIVO and the Workers Circle offer classes, workshops, and immersion programs and sell textbooks for students to learn on their own, these pose financial barriers to many, and students outside New York don’t have the same opportunities for in-person learning. 

Kafrissen thinks the level of interest that young people, Jewish or otherwise, have shown in Yiddish in recent years doesn’t match the level of investment from Jewish institutions. “Something like Duolingo sort of rushes into the vacuum to provide that [learning], because it’s free,” she explained. “Duolingo can’t answer your questions. A real teacher is expensive and valuable.” 

Duolingo’s Yiddish voice actors also represent different backgrounds, which can affect accents, pronunciations, and even some words. These differences (which were once determined by regions of Eastern Europe and are now also determined by regions of New York) account for an inconsistent, and thus inauthentic, auditory experience on the app. Some Yiddishists may liken the disparity between Duolingo and other Yiddish learning experiences to the conversation about which Yiddish stories gain pop culture prominence: While quotable and beloved, stories like Fiddler and other depictions of the shtetl may not paint entirely accurate pictures of Jewish life—sometimes because Yiddish writers of the haskalah, or Jewish enlightenment, intended them that way.

Kafrissen, for example, admitted that she has a love/hate relationship with Fiddler.

“I love musical theatre and I love Fiddler, Fiddler is amazing,” she said. “At the same time, I’m done with Fiddler. I never want to see another revival.” She’s in good company: Jewish literary critic Irving Howe said the original 1964 production represented “the spiritual anemia of Broadway and of the middle-class Jewish world,” while Jewish novelists like Philip Roth and Cynthia Ozick similarly dismissed it as “kitsch.” Kafrissen likened the choice to revive Fiddler and even Funny Girl again and again rather than patronize new Yiddish playwrights and stories to “malpractice.”

“You would think that with the tremendous success of things like Hamilton that people would understand the value of developing new voices and seeing that new works can be financially successful,” she said.

Nostalgia, of course, comes with an economic cushion. But nostalgia can also erase the vibrant, living world of modern Yiddish. The presentation of Yiddish art that focuses only on the past can lead Americans, Jewish and otherwise, to believe that Yiddish only exists in the past. Art that relies on the jokes, insults, and quippy proverbs that Yiddish offers can sometimes reduce the language and its culture to such quips. When Billy Crystal performed Yiddish “scat” at this year’s Tony Awards, spouting off gibberish and almost no actual Yiddish words, some Yiddishists were perturbed. Kafrissen, for her part, said that Crystal’s performance of Yiddish as “a pre-verbal string of guttural grunts [. . .] index[ed] Yiddish speakers in a way that reflects unconscious discomfort/disgust with Yiddish itself.” Like the question of whether or not to teach novice actors Yiddish, such displays can easily toe the line between appreciation and appropriation. 

Perhaps this is why terms like “Yiddish renaissance” have become such a thorn in the side of some Yiddishists.

“Nostalgia is a kind of story that American Jewry tells itself,” Jessica Kirzane, a professor at the University of Chicago and the editor-in-chief of the Yiddish studies journal In geveb [Yiddish for 'in web'; a reference to a collection of poetry by Yiddish writer Yehoyash], said at a YIVO talk last June. (The talk was appropriately titled, “Are We in the Midst of a Yiddish Renaissance?”) Every generation of Yiddish students and speakers tussles with this debate of the Yiddish revival, and “renaissance,” Kirzane said, becomes nothing more than a marketing term.

“Renaissance” also risks dismissing the ongoing, active work of Yiddish creators and their compatriots. Within the theatre field, projects like the Digital Yiddish Theatre Project at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee document translations, digitize scripts and interviews, and review new Yiddish performances. The project, which functions as a living archive, hosts a database of Yiddish plays (including new ones), and scholars and critics alike can contribute work. The University of Haifa’s DYBBUK project has similar goals and hopes to soon launch its own database. The Royal Dramatic Theatre Stockholm staged Shane Baker’s Yiddish translation of Waiting for Godot in 2021 with the Congress for Jewish Culture; it was first produced with New Yiddish Rep and Castillo Theatre in 2013. Across the country, Yiddish artists gather, read, collaborate, and draft and redraft bold new Yiddish works.

In many ways, the challenges facing Yiddish theatre are no different from those facing any emerging or under-resourced artist or arts organization: Yiddish artists must find a way to uplift their work and strive for further recognition without relying only on legacy institutions for validation, in much the same way that theatre artists of color and the avant-garde disrupt, for example, the Broadway/Off-Broadway dichotomy. The origins of Yiddish theatre in America can offer a blueprint for a way forward. Kafrissen noted that amateur Yiddish theatres popped up alongside professional ones in the U.S., and were more likely to be “playwright-friendly” rather than produce only audience favorites.

“The amateur-professional theatre tension within the history of Yiddish theatre was very productive and generative,” Kafrissen said. With more Yiddish artists working and more Yiddish theatre projects springing to life, perhaps this sense of friendly competition—with or without the zealous staged clapping of the turn of the century—can return.

Or if not, as it is said: Az me ken nit vi me vill, men vi me ken (If you can’t do as you wish, do as you can).

[Amelia Merrill (she/her) is an arts and culture journalist, critic, playwright, and dramaturg.  A contributing editor at American Theatre, her work has been featured in Mic, Hey Alma, Narratively, and more.

[Merrill’s remarks about Christmas trees in Jewish homes made me think of my own family.  We had Christmas trees in our homes, though, like many American Jewish families, they later came to be renamed Hanukkah bushes, half jokingly.  My parents first Christmas tree as newlyweds, however, had a somewhat significant part to play in my family history.

[On Christmas Eve afternoon, my soon-to-be mother was decorating the tree with the help of her mother, visiting from New York, when she went into labor—with me.  They called my father at his office and rushed off to the hospital, only to be told that it was a false alarm.  I was not making an appearance that day.

[I did, however, make my entrance the next day, Christmas afternoon at 2 p.m.  I was born at Georgetown University Hospital, a Catholic institution, and the nurse at the admitting desk, who was an Irish nun, said to my mother—according to Mom—“That’s a dirty Irish trick!”

[Later, when I was a somewhat older boy, we stopped celebrating Christmas—but we continued to mark the day as a family holiday.  It was my birthday.]