Arts & Culture | Theater

Win Some, Lose Some At Oscars

02/28/2012 | Los Angeles (JTA) | Theater

Jewish director Michel Hazanavicius won top honors at the Oscars for “The Artist,” while Israel’s entry in the awards, “Footnote” by Joseph Cedar, lost to an Iranian film.

“The Artist,” a black-and-white homage to Hollywood’s silent film era, won five Oscars — for best picture, director, actor, costume design and original musical score — at the ceremony Sunday.

GPS As Prophet

02/21/2012 | Ted Merwin | Special To The Jewish Week | Theater

What if our machines started talking back? In Eddie Antar’s new comedy, “The Navigator,” an omniscient GPS dispenses solutions to an unemployed man’s financial and marital woes. The play, which was nominated for eight Off-Off-Broadway theater awards last year (and won two) has been remounted at the WorkShop Theater Company near Penn Station. Jonathan Mandell of Back Stage called it a “clever, cautionary comedy about our tech-dependent era.”

Paradise Lost

02/14/2012 | Ted Merwin | Special To The Jewish Week | Theater

When last we saw Eve Adams, the intrepid Jewish bookseller at the center of Barbara Kahn’s play, “The Spring and Fall of Eve Adams,” she was under arrest. The charge was selling “obscene” novels by Henry Miller and Anais Nin, from her Jazz Age lesbian speakeasy and tearoom in Greenwich Village.

Making It In America?

02/08/2012 | Ted Merwin | Special To The Jewish Week | Theater

A working-class Jewish family struggling to make ends meet. A gangster uncle newly arrived from Russia. Conflicts between immigrant parents and their more Americanized children. It all sounds a lot like the early-20th century world of Samson Raphaelson’s “The Jazz Singer” or Neil Simon’s “Lost in Yonkers.”

Schnitzler’s ‘Masterpiece’

01/31/2012 | Ted Merwin | Special To The Jewish Week | Theater

Fin de siècle Vienna was, in the words of Jewish satirist Karl Kraus, a “research laboratory for world destruction.” Viennese playwright Arthur Schnitzler agreed; his play, “Professor Bernhardi,” was one of the first plays in German to confront the rising tide of anti-Semitism in early 20th-century Central Europe. Translated by C.J. Weinberger, “Professor Bernhardi” opened in Midtown this week at the TBG Theatre as part of a series of works that were “banned and burned” at some point in their history.

‘Marx Brothers Meet Ionesco’

01/24/2012 | Ted Merwin | Special To The Jewish Week | Theater

Given the vicissitudes of Jewish history, it is no wonder that Jews developed a bleakly comic vision, a sense of life as teetering awkwardly on the edge of an abyss. Such a philosophy is amply on display in Lazarre Seymour Simckes’ absurdist new play, “Open Rehearsal,” in which a troupe of actors who are members of the same family rehearse a bizarre drama that enfolds with the fractured logic of a variety show. As the play-within-a-play keeps turning itself inside out, the characters finally find security only by clinging to one another.