Arts & Culture | Theater

String Theory

03/19/2013 | Ted Merwin | Special To The Jewish Week | Theater

Puppets may be lifeless objects, but in the right hands, they command extraordinary emotional power. So veteran puppeteer and playwright Vit Horejš has demonstrated time and again with his Czechoslovak-American Marionette Theater, which returns this week with “King Executioner.” It’s a mysterious fable about a friendship between a Jewish musician and a young member of the Polish resistance at the outbreak of the Second World War.

‘Dybbuk,’ The Prequel

03/12/2013 | Ted Merwin | Special To The Jewish Week | Theater

Call it a play that dares not speak its name.

Remembering Oscar Levant

03/05/2013 | Ted Merwin | Special To The Jewish Week | Theater

One of the most colorful and controversial performers of his generation, Oscar Levant was an immensely gifted composer, pianist and raconteur whose life and career were hobbled by a ferocious addiction to prescription drugs.

Magic Mushrooms Cure Comic’s OCD

03/01/2013 | Ted Merwin | Special To The Jewish Week | Theater

With its multiplicity of rituals and its insistence on punctilious observance, Judaism is often jokingly referred to as a religion for obsessive-compulsives. Now comes Adam Strauss’ one-man show, “Varieties of Religious Experience,” which details the Jewish stand-up comedian’s struggles with real OCD, his last-ditch effort to cure it with psychedelic mushrooms, and his ultimate discovery of spiritual enlightenment.

‘LUCK!’ Needs A Little Luck

02/26/2013 | Ted Merwin | Special To The Jewish Week | Theater

Luck is always in high demand for characters in musicals. From “Luck Be a Lady Tonight” in “Guys and Dolls” to “With a Little Bit of Luck” in “My Fair Lady,” good fortune can make all the difference in a character’s romantic and financial prospects.

Black Box Spirituality

02/12/2013 | Ted Merwin | Special To The Jewish Week | Theater

Can a Jewish parent forgive a child’s gravitating toward another faith? In Antonia Lassar’s one-woman show, “The God Box,” a Jewish mother discovers, after her 30-year-old daughter, Rebecca, has been killed in a car accident, that the daughter had been experimenting with a plethora of religious traditions.