(JTA) — Shows about the Holocaust and a notorious American antisemitic incident picked up several Tony Award nominations Tuesday morning, as Broadway’s biggest honors made room for a sizable Jewish presence.
Most notably, a revival of the 1998 musical “Parade,” starring Ben Platt as the early-20th-century Jewish lynching victim Leo Frank, scored six nominations, including best revival of a musical and a best actor nod for Platt....
(JTA) — Actor Steve Guttenberg has had the kind of career that put him in touch with nearly every trend in Hollywood. There were prestige films like “Diner” and “Cocoon” and the lighter but wildly successful fare like the first four movies in the “Police Academy” series. “Three Men and a Baby” was the biggest American box office hit of 1987; the 2004 Christmas movie “Single Santa...
(JTA) — Itamar Moses was 10 years old when he watched “An American Tail” at his Jewish day school in California. He was struck by the 1986 film, an animated musical about a family of Russian-Jewish mice who immigrate to America. Even though he was surrounded by Jewish classmates and teachers, he had never seen a cartoon with Jewish protagonists.
“Watching this mainstream hit American animated...
By ALAN SMASON, WYES-TV Theatre Critic (“Steppin’ Out“)
When it comes to an old chestnut like “Fiddler on the Roof,” the biggest challenge may be in keeping the Joseph Stein book fresh and the music and lyrics by Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick vibrant and relevant. This Bartlett Sher-directed production, based on the successful 2016 run at the Broadway Theatre, does just that.
(JTA) — Members of a neo-Nazi group rallied Tuesday night outside the Broadway theater that is hosting “Parade,” a play about the 1915 lynching of a Jewish man in Georgia.
“It was definitely very ugly and scary, but [also] a wonderful reminder of why we’re telling this particular story, and how special and powerful art and particularly theater can be,” star Ben Platt said in a statement...
By ALAN SMASON, WYES-TV Theatre Critic (“Steppin’ Out“)
Tom Stoppard had long established his credentials as one of the 20th century’s leading playwrights and authors before he learned the full extent of his Jewish heritage. A proud Englishman with a proper British name and standing, Stoppard had previously only been told by his mother that his father was Jewish.
The widow of a doctor killed in Singapore during the Japanese...
(JTA) — The London-based theater group behind a Romeo and Juliet-inspired Nazi-Jewish love story has canceled the play after receiving an onslaught of criticism related to the story’s premise and a botched casting call.
The Icarus Theatre Collective, the group behind the play, put out a casting call on Friday for their “Romeo and Juliet” over email and on social media, specifically calling for “non-binary artists, and/or...
It’s taken two lifetimes for Jewish actress Jessica Sherr to approach her role as Hollywood screen icon Bette Davis. Sherr, a New York City method actor, arrives in the Crescent City this weekend for two performances in which she will play the two-time Academy Award winner at BB’s Stage Door Canteen in a show she researched and wrote titled “Bette Davis – Larger...
(JTA) — Speaking on the phone from an empty balcony in the Longacre Theater in New York, several hours before a preview performance of his latest play, Tom Stoppard said the show is “one that people like to talk to me about.”
“Leopoldstadt,” which officially hits Broadway on Sunday after an award-winning London debut in 2019, follows multiple generations of a Jewish family in Vienna from the...
By ALAN SMASON, WYES-TV Theatre Critic (“Steppin’ Out“)
When the musical “Mrs. Doubtfire” was preparing to open in 2020, the show became a victim of the forced lockdown of all theaters in New York. When COVID restrictions were relaxed and it finally opened in December of 2021 at the Stephen Sondheim Theatre, producers had hoped the worst of the pandemic was over. But the Omicron variant caused the production to...
