In \”Ragtime,\” the part of Tateh, a widowed, immigrant Jew who comes to New York with a young daughter in tow, is in many ways a role that is especially close to the heart of actor John Rubinstein.
After the countless ads, fluff pieces and an advance press packet thick enough to choke a horse, the question hung in the celebrity-studded lobby of the Shubert Theatre last Sunday evening: Could \”Ragtime\” pull it off?
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.
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