{"id":1245,"date":"2018-01-09T11:06:00","date_gmt":"2018-01-09T17:06:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/uwm.edu\/yiddish-stage\/?p=1245"},"modified":"2023-05-12T11:30:51","modified_gmt":"2023-05-12T16:30:51","slug":"revival-and-homage-productions-of-yiddish-theatre","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/uwm.edu\/yiddish-stage\/revival-and-homage-productions-of-yiddish-theatre\/","title":{"rendered":"Revival and Homage Productions of Yiddish Theatre"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Since the 1970s,\u00a0Yiddish theatre has been brought back to audiences in several ways, and the number of productions keeps increasing. There\u2019s something about the popular entertainment of the 1880s-1930s that draws people to fool around with creative ways of making it contemporary. I\u2019ve done my own experimentation, so have some sense of the possibilities and pitfalls. There are two main types of reconstruction: Revival and Homage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Revival<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The recent\u00a0Di goldene kale<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>(The Golden Bride) production at the Folksbiene took\u00a0Michael Ochs<\/a>\u00a0years to construct, from research to grant writing. It offered the first full-scale revival of a classic operetta by the top dog of the genre,\u00a0Joseph Rumshinsky<\/a>. Looking more closely, Ochs and his creative partner\u00a0Zalman Mlotek<\/a>\u00a0had to make a lot of choices. Yiddish theatre was never standardized, so you have to pick your way through variant scripts, make orchestration choices, and adjust to the aesthetic of our day. It\u2019s like doing early music.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Andy Szegedy-Maszak as Solomon in Joseph Lateiner\u2019s\u00a0Dovids fidele<\/em>, Wesleyan University, 1976. Photographer: Carol Reck.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

I faced those challenges back in 1976, when I produced a full-length performing version of\u00a0Lateiner<\/a>\u2019s\u00a0Dovids fidele, oder der tsoyberkraft fun muzik<\/em>\u00a0(David\u2019s Violin, or The Magic Power of Music) written thirty years before\u00a0Di goldene kale<\/em>.1<\/a><\/sup>\u00a0It was even murkier in its sources, including what its musical content might actually have been on a given night in 1897, from Cleveland to Cape Town, the homes for just a couple of the scripts that I found in the\u00a0YIVO archives<\/a>. The versions didn\u2019t even agree on the dramatis personae, let alone the music. So, like all restoration of heritage, as Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett pointed out long ago, \u201crevival\u201d is actually reconstruction. To simulate the popular culture reception of Yiddish melodrama, I did the play in English, with a local campus cast of faculty and students that the audience could identify with.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I also experimented with\u00a0vaudeville<\/a>, using our only surviving Yiddish playlet,\u00a0Tsvishn indianer<\/em>\u00a0(Among the Indians) of 1895, by K. Y. Minikes.2<\/a><\/sup>\u00a0This question of staging a piece that was innocuous at the time, but seems off-limits to today\u2019s audience, extends to a huge swath of the American repertoire. In the case of an in-house genre like Yiddish-language entertainment, the issue looks different than it does for mainstream products, e.g. blackface in Hollywood film. In its day (and it probably was only one day at the Windsor Theatre),\u00a0Among the Indians<\/em>\u00a0demonstrated mastery of American popular culture, perhaps even educating its audience into those stereotypes, as part of a long process of acculturation. Whether nowadays one wants to just read it on the page, in translation, or consider staging the playlet involves a different set of concerns.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Joseph Lateiner\u2019s Dovids fidele<\/em>, Wesleyan University, 1976. Photographer: Carol Reck.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Homage Plays<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

This category might include Tony Kushner<\/a>\u2019s adaptation of The Dybbuk<\/a><\/em>, ostensibly a revival, but with a few alterations that shifted the play\u2019s meaning, especially a moment of Holocaust forecast. The Klezmatics<\/a>\u2019 accomplished score paid tribute to the original music we associate with the play while adding its own creative take on tradition.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Paula Vogel\u2019<\/a>s Indecent<\/a> <\/em>has brought to Broadway itself a more advanced version of homage to a Yiddish classic, in this case Sholem Asch\u2019s play Got fun nekome<\/a><\/em> (God of Vengeance). Asch<\/a> and his collaborators become full-scale characters while the play is backgrounded to serve as a plot device for covering a long chronology of productions and their consequences. The fine score by Lisa Gutkin<\/a> and Aaron Halva<\/a> helps ground a period sense and keeps alive the necessary importance of music in Yiddish theater, and the show has been well received, partly due to the current interest in same-sex content and moral censorship.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I paid my own homage to the early Yiddish theatre in a one-act musical called\u00a0Mogulesco: A Tale of the Yiddish Theater<\/a><\/em>, which premiered at Wesleyan University in 2011, though it was written decades earlier. I had received a grant from the NEA to do a performing version in English of\u00a0Goldfaden<\/a>\u2019s classic\u00a0Shulamis<\/em>, but found the play so unwieldy and intractable (pace<\/em>\u00a0Zalmen Mlotek, who eventually did produce a modern version) that I gave the project up, instead creating my own tribute to that neglected hero of the early Yiddish stage and music, Zigmund\/Zelig Mogulesco, Goldfaden\u2019s main early collaborator. The frame is a staging of the interview that\u00a0Abraham Cahan<\/a>\u00a0of the\u00a0Forverts<\/a><\/em>\u00a0did with Mogulesco in his last years. As they talk about the past, the scene switches to the actor\/composer\u2019s memories of how he worked with Goldfaden on\u00a0Shmendrik<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0Shulamis<\/em>, with some newly-composed interpolations Mogulesco claims to have written. There is a substitute opening march of pilgrims\u2014really clunky in Goldfaden\u2019s version\u2014written by my late friend, the composer\u00a0Louis Weingarden<\/a>. He also penned a fine aria for Shulamis, when she\u2019s lost in the desert. Standard items I included are from the bride-swapping scene in\u00a0Shmendrik<\/em>\u00a0and \u201cRozhinkes mit mandlen<\/a>\u201d and the maiden\u2019s dance from\u00a0Shulamis.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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