Arts & Culture | Theater

Burns, Baby, Burns

10/25/2011 | Ted Merwin | Special To The Jewish Week | Theater

With the decline of the comedy duo, the straight man no longer plays a prominent role in our culture. But in Rupert Holmes’ “Say Goodnight, Gracie,” the revival of the one-man show that opens Sunday afternoon starring Joel Rooks as funnyman George Burns, the king of straight men gets his due.

A Rabbi’s Moral Choices

10/19/2011 | Ted Merwin | Special To The Jewish Week | Theater

Trauma leaves nothing whole. In Alan Lester Brooks’ new play, “A Splintered Soul,” a maverick rabbi in postwar San Francisco risks his life and career to resettle Jewish refugees from the Holocaust. Yet aiding others plunges the rabbi into a world of agonizing moral choices, in which things are not always what they seem. “A Splintered Soul” opens Off Broadway Oct. 21 at Theater Three in Midtown with a cast that features Ella Dershowitz, daughter of celebrity lawyer Alan Dershowitz, in her New York theatrical debut.

When Your Family Wants A Rewrite

10/18/2011 | Eric Herschthal | Staff Writer | Theater

If the generally liberal New York theater crowd has gotten a little tired of David Mamet, who with his acerbic wit and pugilistic mien now espouses mostly conservative views, it need not worry. There is another Jewish playwright with an equally dark and comic wit who is just breaking through. He is David Bar Katz, author of “The Atmosphere of Memory,” a play about a highly dysfunctional family, and he is one of the most watched mid-career playwrights in New York City.

Death Be Not … Cruel

10/04/2011 | Ted Merwin | Special To The Jewish Week | Theater

Death should not be proud, as the poet John Donne warned, but it certainly can be shameless. In Nicky Silver’s new play, “The Lyons,” the patriarch of a Jewish family, about to succumb to terminal cancer, suddenly vents the hatred that he feels for his wife and children, prompting them to uncork their own vitriol at him and at each other.

The ‘Key’ To ‘Kaddish’

09/27/2011 | Ted Merwin | Special To The Jewish Week | Theater

He was not a practicing Jew, but Allen Ginsberg’s poetry was deeply religious in its mystical energies, shimmering visions and profound longings for transcendence. Nowhere is this more apparent than in “Kaddish,” Ginsberg’s incantatory, surrealistic elegy for his mother, written in 1959. Now comes “Kaddish (or The Key in the Window)” as a one-man play starring Donnie Mather in a new production in the East Village.

Love And Marriage, Song And Dance

09/20/2011 | Ted Merwin | Special To The Jewish Week | Theater

From the rival lovers in “Oklahoma” to the interracial relationships in “South Pacific,” romance has always been a major theme of the Broadway musical. Now come three new productions in the New York Musical Theatre Festival (NYMF) that give a 21st-century Jewish spin to themes of love and sex.