Arts & Culture | Theater

A Little Chanukah Magic

11/27/2012 | Ted Merwin | Special To The Jewish Week | Theater

For all the stories of Maccabees and cruses of oil, Chanukah is ultimately a holiday about family togetherness. So mused the multitalented artist Arthur Yorinks when he sat down more than a decade ago to write “The Flying Latke,” a children’s book about a Chanukah pancake that magically circumnavigates the globe. Now the tale’s play version, which sold out its run last year in Tribeca at The Flea Theater, returns to the same theater just in time for this year’s Festival of Lights.

Streamlining The Double Life Of ‘Asher Lev’

11/20/2012 | Ted Merwin | Special to the Jewish Week | Theater

Does an artist have a responsibility to anything other than his or her art? In Chaim Potok’s novel, “My Name is Asher Lev,” a young chasidic painter in Brooklyn discovers that his artistic talent clashes irreconcilably with the dictates of his family and community.

‘No Exit’ For Yiddish Poets

11/20/2012 | Ted Merwin | Special To The Jewish Week | Theater

For the ancient Romans, life was short but art endured — “vita brevis, ars longa,” as the Latin saying goes. Alas, the helpless Yiddish writers in Nathan Englander’s first play, “The Twenty-Seventh Man,” directed by Barry Edelstein, can count on neither, as they face the extinction of both their earthly existences and the entire Jewish cultural life of Russia.

A Storyteller Turned Playwright

11/13/2012 | Ted Merwin | Special To The Jewish Week | Theater

Nathan Englander’s first play, “The Twenty-Seventh Man,” is about a struggling, unknown Jewish writer named Pinchas Pelovits apprehended by Stalin’s secret police along with prominent Yiddish poets slated for execution. Englander talked to The Jewish Week about the experience of becoming a playwright.

Godfather Meets Fiddler

11/13/2012 | Ted Merwin | Special To The Jewish Week | Theater

Call him the Jewish Mack the Knife. Benya Krik, the corrupt but compelling anti-hero of Isaac Babel’s Odessa stories, springs back to life in Denis Woychuk and Stephen Brennan’s new musical, “Isaac Babel and the Gangster King.”

Losing Yourself, Finding Yourself

11/06/2012 | Ted Merwin | Special To The Jewish Week | Theater

No one has articulated the plight of the immigrant better than Moses, who dolefully called himself a “stranger in a strange land.” That description would undoubtedly resonate with the characters in Sophia Romma’s absurdist new play, “Cabaret Émigré.”