Arts & Culture | Theater

Sinatra, Under His Skin

08/02/2011 | Ted Merwin | Special To The Jewish Week | Theater

When does idolization cross over into obsession? Cary Hoffman, a shy Jewish kid growing up in postwar Queens, admired Frank Sinatra so much that he dreamed of becoming the singer himself. In Hoffman’s thought-provoking one-man show, “My Sinatra,” now playing Off-Broadway with musical direction by Alex Nelson, the performer interweaves the story of his infatuation with the singing of two dozen of the singer’s standards. His voice is so uncannily similar to Sinatra’s that few can tell them apart.

Sole Man

07/26/2011 | Ted Merwin | Special To The Jewish Week | Theater

Whether it is the piles of shoes left behind by Holocaust victims or the countless footwear-inspired idioms — filling someone’s shoes, walking a mile in someone’s shoes, putting the shoe on the other foot — the shoe is arguably our most evocative and symbolic item of clothing.

Women And The Blacklist

06/29/2011 | Ted Merwin | Special To The Jewish Week | Theater

Anti-Semitism was never far below the surface of the notorious blacklist of the 1950s. Did sexism play a role as well? In Julie S. Halpern’s new play, “Diminished Fifth,” two women with Jewish roots, writers Lillian Hellman (Stacey Scotte) and Dorothy Parker (Jacquelyn Poplar), along with three non-Jewish women, broadcaster Jean Muir (Mary McGloin), actress Margaret Webster (Elaine LeGaro) and civil rights activist Eslanda Robeson (Ronalda Ay Nicholas), grapple with the shattering experience of being blacklisted.

Love In Black And White (And Jewish)

06/14/2011 | Ted Merwin | Special To The Jewish Week | Theater

Loneliness, as an old Jewish proverb says, breaks the spirit. In Paul Manuel Kane’s new play, “Sam’s Romance,” set in Greenwich Village in the early 1950s, an awkward middle-aged Jewish housewares/hardware store owner, Sam (Ed Kershen) falls for his 20-year-old African-American female clerk, Natalie (Oni Brown). But Sam’s cousin Rose (LeeAnne Hutchison) — who is trapped in an unhappy marriage with a wounded vet, Joe (Todd Licea) has another agenda for her cousin — involving her brassy friend Luba (Neva Small).

Jewish Theatre Of NY’s Latest Censored?

06/14/2011 | Amy Spiro | Editorial Assistant | Theater

Tuvia Tenenbom is no stranger to controversy. He has staged plays about love letters to Hitler, Arab virgins being raped by Israeli soldiers and the sex lives of chasidic Jews.

But only recently did the U.S. State Department step in.

Read My Script Now!

06/07/2011 | Ted Merwin | Special To The Jewish Week | Theater

Against the most insurmountable odds, everyone in Hollywood is trying to peddle a screenplay. In Catherine Schreiber and Josh Grenrock’s one-act stage comedy at the Union Square Theatre, “Desperate Writers,” a pair of frustrated authors, who are also lovers, take extreme measures to win a hearing for their film script. When the show ran two years ago at the Edgemar Theater in Santa Monica, with Schreiber and Grenrock both in the cast, F.