Musical Theatre
April 29, 2024
Tsvishn Falndike Vent: An Interview With Avram Mlotek, Zalmen Mlotek, and Motl Didner
Last November, the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene opened its final production of 2023, a musical revue called Amid Falling Walls (Tsvishn Falndike Vent): Unveiling Resilience and Hope During the Holocaust. The production was curated and written by Avram Mlotek, with music curated and arranged by Zalmen Mlotek, and directed by Motl Didner. The Folksbiene’s website explains […]
February 13, 2020
Interview with Joshua Horowitz on the Orchestration of Bas-Sheve
In February 2019, Josh Horowitz was sent the manuscript of Henekh Kon’s piano and vocal score of the only known pre-Holocaust Yiddish opera, Bas-Sheve.
May 17, 2019
Grand Opera for Yiddish Speakers in Early Twentieth-Century America! Who Knew?!
In the spring of 1904, New York witnessed the unlikely spectacle of a musical-dramatic adaptation of Richard Wagner’s Parsifal—in Yiddish.
July 26, 2018
A Yiddish Homecoming for Fiddler on the Roof
Fifteen years ago, I played violin in the pit orchestra for a high school production of Fiddler on the Roof in Sheldon, Iowa, a town whose five thousand residents were overwhelmingly white, Christian, and politically conservative. As the only Jew in at least a fifty-mile radius, I wondered how the show would resonate with the audience, most of whom […]
July 17, 2018
A fidler afn dakh: Fiddler on the Roof in Yiddish
Before there was Fiddler, there was Tevye.
May 9, 2018
Yiddish Theatre Stars & Matinee Girls on the Move
You didn’t need to be the Great Gatsby to have a good time in the Roaring Twenties.