Doctorow was wary when the call from Toronto came four years ago. Garth Drabinsky, the maverick theater producer who runs his company like a 1930s movie mogul, had a proposition: He wanted to turn Doctorow\’s 1975 best seller, \”Ragtime,\” into a musical. Drabinsky had won Tonys and made millions with \”Show Boat\” and \”Kiss of the Spider Woman,\” and wanted to repeat with \”Ragtime.\”
If you didn\’t know that David Rose was one of our priceless assets, proceed to his pen and ink drawings on exhibit at the University of Judaism\’s Platt Gallery. A look at this lively body of work suggests that virtually everywhere 20th-century Jewish history was being made, David Rose was there.
When Mendel Moscowitz is transported from Brooklyn to ancient Egypt, the juxtaposition of a whiny New Yorker on the eve of the Exodus is supposed to create the setting for campy high jinks and musical hilarity.
Like the uneven romantic fortunes of a veteran dater, \”Sex\” plays like a series of disparate encounters that range from memorable to better-off-forgotten.
In April 1942, the Gestapo closed down the Grosse Hamburgerstrasse Schule, the last Jewish school in Berlin.
At the Dixieland Jubilee in Sacramento, the annual super bowl of jazz, the band that got the most ecstatic reception a couple of years ago was cradled a few thousand miles east of New Orleans.\n\nIt was the Jerusalem Jazz Band, whose members hail each other by such fine old Southern names as Boris, Mika, Shmulik, Stanislav and Aaron.
Donald Freed is a rarity among playwrights: He is primarily an ideologue who, instead of producing documentary films or constructing journalistic accounts of the \”truth\” behind the news headlines, writes plays.
While it may be true that if you ask two Jews a question, you\’re likely to get three different opinions, it appears that thousands were in agreement last Sunday: The Israel Independence Day Festival at Hansen Dam was the place to be to celebrate the Jewish State\’s 49th birthday. Festival organizers said that attendance reached 10,000 for the daylong event, which featured food, live entertainment, cultural exhibits, picnic areas and a children\’s amusement park.
Back in the heyday of the self-made Jewish movie moguls, the studios were, to a certain degree, family businesses.
More news and opinions than at a Shabbat dinner, right in your inbox.