\”Enigma Variations,\” directed by French Canadian Daniel Roussel and starring Donald Sutherland as the author and Jamey Sheridan as the reporter, is that rare work in which every prospect pleases.
Peter Mehlman, the former writer and co-executive producer of \”Seinfeld,\” is sitting at a corner table at Shutters on the Beach, wearing mismatched sweats and a day\’s worth of stubble.
I am a comedian and I have been lucky enough to have worked in my business for 20 years. This is a huge thing because most people in comedy never even work 20 days in 20 years. I have also been blessed to be part of a great group of comedians who have emerged in that time. Three of them are not just my peers, but also good friends. I both love and respect them as comedians and as human beings. Jerry Seinfeld, Paul Reiser and Larry Miller.
In Persis Knobbe\’s sweet, semi-autobiogrpahical short story, \”Highlights,\” Morris, an octogenarian, describes his exodus from the oppressive old country, on the holiday that commemorates the Jewish exodus from slavery in Egypt.
A few years ago, at the age of 24, Brooklyn-born Danny Hoch got the kind of phone call most struggling actors dream of. It was his agent, telling him that the people from \”Seinfeld\” had called: they wanted Hoch to get on a plane the next morning to tape a guest-starring role on the hit television series.
Playwright Paula Vogel grew up in suburban Maryland, where the country clubs did not accept her Jewish father.
The dynamics of the boiler room have levels of exploitation. While it functions as a concerted effort to part suckers from their money, the brokers are often not fully conscious of the complexity of the scam.
It\’s common knowledge that the Jewish exodus from Russia in the late 1980s brought to Israel a flood of talented artists and musicians.
Jonathan Tolins\’ first play, \”Twilight of the Golds,\” caused a strong tremor when it was produced at the Pasadena Playhouse in 1993. A science-fictional comedy, it bounced off the provocative theory that sexual orientation could be biologically determined by analyzing the DNA of the fetus, and dealt with the terror of a New York Jewish family faced with the prospect that they were shortly to become the parents of a \”bent\” son.
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, with front-runners such as T.S. Eliot, Christopher Fry and Archibald Macleish, there was a concerted effort to revive language in the American theater. The buzzword was \”heightened speech\” and, although all of these writers essentially wrote verse, producers tried to steer clear of the word \”poetry.\” They sensed that American theatergoers would recoil from any attempts to have anything as exotic as that foisted upon them. Just as, at around the same period, when they were risking capital on shows like \”The Most Happy Fella\” and the early works of Gian Carlo Menotti, they avoided the word \”opera.\” Music-drama seemed a safer rubric.
More news and opinions than at a Shabbat dinner, right in your inbox.