Jewish Hollywood – Aria Entertainment at Upstairs at the Gatehouse

In times like these – and it seems like it’s getting more like “times like these” by the day – an evening of great music and escapist entertainment seems like just the thing. What did I know about the impact of Jews on Hollywood, or the presence of Jewish culture in American movies? Honestly, nothing, but I was looking forward to learning. I had high hopes for my return to Upstairs at the Gatehouse and I was not disappointed.

The show is done as a bit of a history lesson, with songs generously leavened in (not always in historical order) and lots of breaks for showbiz fun. It is a four hander, two women and two men (one pair twenties-ish – Mackenzie Mellen and Jack Reitman – and the other in the prime of middle age – Sue Kelvin and Howard Samuels), with a generously sized band that included a person who played flute (I think!), clarinet, and possibly saxophone. The reeds gave a more klezmer-y sound to the ensemble than the usual house band – and were perfect for the show.

We started with the birth of Hollywood – well, the birth of cinema in America, really! Jewish immigrants, very recently arrived escaping European pogroms and with names frequently sanitized by Ellis Island authorities, started in the business right away, even before there were movies (kinetoscopes, mutoscopes, etc, in penny arcades) in New York, which ws the original home of America’s film industry. It was a good business to get into if you were a nobody from nowhere as the mass entertainment industry was considered low class and thus had a lower barrier to entry.

Despite working quickly up to the point of owning many of the Hollywood studios (where the industry settled due to the ease of filming under sunnier skies), the studio owners didn’t pursue Jewish themes, although there was a notable exception for The Jazz Singer, the breakthrough talkie about a young man struggling between his father’s dream for him to take up his position as the cantor for their synagogue and his wish for a Broadway career that raked in the dough. This was (shock!) the last Jewish themed Hollywood movie for decades …. until Exodus became a best seller (then a blockbuster movie, with Paul Newman as the star) … paving the way for people to be themselves, to be Jewish, and to be stars.

Photo credit: Louis Burgess

There’s a lot more story to be told, but let’s skip that and get to the fun! In addition to comical retellings of the two pivotal movies above (no blackface, thank God), the show features just buckets of great tunes, and has a cast that knows how to belt them. Kelvin was great at recreating that great star Sophie Tucker (“My Yiddische Momme”) as well as the very modern Midler, while Samuels was perfect at clowning as well as delivering tunes. The cast threw themselves into “Tradition” (<I>Fiddler on the Roof</I>) just as much as “God Bless America” (although I questioned Irving Berlin being called a jingoist – he was a patriot, which is different) and the very troubling “Tomorrow Belongs to Me” and “Springtime for Hitler.” It covered a very wide range of American history but with such great songs to illustrate the stories, it, unsurprisingly, never got dull!

For me, though, the highlight of the evening was a brief turn given by Mackenzie Mellen performing “Don’t Rain on my Parade” – it was so heartfelt and vibrant it seemed for a moment the windows might just burst off the building to let her song radiate through the entire neighborhood – wow! Her bio was the shortest in the program but I feel that with her star power she’ll be crossing my path many times again.

(Jewish Hollywood continues at Upstairs at the Gatehouse until April 17th, 2022. This review is for a show that took place on March 17th.)

Review – “Thrill Me: The Leopold & Loeb Story” – Jermyn Street Theater

Coming out of Christmas time and before the schmaltz of Valentine’s day, it seems like there is a lull perfect for a bit of horror. And Jermyn Street is ready for that space with its production of Thrill Me, a 2005 off-Broadway musical based on the true story of 1920s “thrill killers” Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb. While a movie or a novel might focus the horrifying death at the core of this tale, the musical is, instead, focused on the relationship between these two men, and how two mostly ordinary, priveleged young men decided that the thrill they needed in their lives was to kill an adolescent boy.

Jermyn Street Theatre

Is this a story best served by music? Well, yes, really, it is, because explaining how an emotional journey takes place is a perfect job for song. Leopold’s obsession (and devotion) to Loeb, the pressure for each to provide what the other one wants, even the bizarre attraction of arson … a movie could never take us to that place of jubilation, attraction, physical chemistry, and basically all the forces that combined to make these two men think that sex, property destruction, and cold blooded murder were what you needed to make life good. You’re unlikely to agree with them, but you can feel the pressure of these intense emotions combining to make them take the path they did – and see how a few other notable psychopaths might have felt that same tug.

The songs wouldn’t really make it fly, though, if it weren’t for the intense physicality brought to the roles by Bart Lambert (Leopold) and Jack Reitman (Loeb). Loeb’s obsession with Nietzche, his belief that he was a “superman” that could never be caught by the dull plebs that surrounded him, and the genuine fire and “push me/pull you” relationship with Leopold were believable and toxic. I couldn’t help but think of modern incel culture, in which deluded young men think the women who reject them are in fact the defective ones and deserving of death, rather than realizing that they are actively being avoided because of their toxicity.

However, after living in the emotional cooker of Covid for nearly two years, I found that Lambert actually seemed to be taking the twitchiness of his character a bit too far for such an intimate venue as the Jermyn. The 1920s scenes (contrasting to the ones he does in the 50s with the parole board, as a much older and more mature character) seeemed almost like a silent movie, with his hands held like claws and his face screwed up as if in agony. And, as an aside, this play should NOT be seen as a true crime show; while it might make sense to have one character be more sympathetic, reading through the various information I could find made me think author Stephen Dolginoff in fact chose the wrong man to be portrayed as a villain. That said, you have to make your source material work in the medium in which it is going to be presented, and the many details that were changed up between reality and the show certainly served to make it a tighter evening.

Thankfully, though, director Matthew Parker handled the actual murderin a way that a queasy nellie like myself was able to ride through without damage – there was no body, no blood, no actual violence, and no horrible recounting of every little detail of what happened. I know that’s how some people like their thrillers, but I frankly could not have coped. Still, if you want a bracing, adrenaline-raising night out, Thrill Me is a most unusual musical and decidedly a welcome note of counter-programming in a West End that seems afraid to offer anything that isn’t escapist or nauseatingly cute.

(This review is for press night, which took place on January 18th, 2022. It continues through February 5th.)

Post script: here is a picture of Bobby Franks, because I think it’s important to remember him.

Review – Jew You Love Me – Jewish Cabaret Theatre at the Lion and Unicorn

The Jewish Cabaret Theater is a somewhat newish group, founded only 2016 (I unfortunately missed their last show, “Purim – Uncut!”). I had in fact misunderstood the topic of this show, Jew You Love Me, as I’d read a sentence in the press release wrong. “Gabi – a seemingly straight Jewish girl who ends up finding love in an unexpected partner, Ethan and Alon …” I honestly turned this around so that I thought this was about a straight girl who find love with two gay men, which is exactly the plot of A Home at the End of the World (but not Jewish). “Wow!” I thought. “A straight girl who decides to be with two gay guys and … all raise a kid together!” Since, again per the press release, the two guys were “a gay couple struggling with the concept of monogamy and hetero-normative love,” I thought it was great that they were reaching beyond the boundaries of same sex relationships, especially insofar as they do often censor bisexuality in partners (see Mike Bartlett’s Cock) and, as I know very well from the struggle of MY gay Jewish male friend, those waters can be especially difficult to navigate when you want to have children. So bingo, Ethan and Alon and Gabi as a trio … I thought this was SUCH an interesting plot for a musical I invited said gay Jewish male friend along with me to the show.

I can only imagine the writers of this show having a really good laugh at me. Let me tell you how the show ACTUALLY went. So, we’ve got a cafe in Golder’s Green, run by an adorable lesbian (Sam – Martha Pothen) who just happens to sing like Amy Winehouse, and we get to meet the other denizens of the cafe – Sam’s best friend Gabi (Ashley Racov), the adorable gay singer-songwriter Will (Jack Reitman), poet Ethan (Alex Ayliffe) and his wants-to-wander partner Alon (Ido Gonen), and finally the rather adorable aged couple Rachel (Batel Israel, not entirely convincing even with a silver wig) and Yakov (Josh Becker, rather jolly throughout). The show starts with many balls in the air – Sam has a crush on Gabi, Alon is pushing Ethan to open their relationship, and Rachel’s granddaughter Bracha (Tanya Trueman) has shown up from Israel with a chip on her shoulder and nothing nice to say about either the shiksa running the cafe or the gay men she sees being affectionate in it.

So … in the first act we get Gabi’s great comic song, “Swipe to the Right,” about the perils of Tinder, which winds up applying rather directly to Ethan and Alon … and Will!

But it’s when we finally get a moment alone with Bracha that the show, for me, moved to a higher plane. She came off as very uptight and unpleasant, choosing to not eat any food from Sam’s cafe and telling off the other people there for being ungodly. She’s newly arrived from Israel, and is very religiously conservative … not the kind of person we see represented much on the London stage. But as she sits outside, after being rejected by the other customers of the cafe, we get to hear her talk about how she sees the world, in the song, “Blessing,” which is mostly about her love for God and attempts to live a life that holds up to what he wants. Initially I was quite resistant to and uncomfortable with this song … I’m an atheist, and I don’t really enjoy listening to people sing about religion … but suddenly Bracha revealed something about herself that just flipped things right around.

I was reminded of a play I’d seen in New York, Indecent, about the controversy surrounding the 1923 Broadway debut of a play by Yiddish playwright Sholem Asch called God of Vengeance. Asch’s play was disturbing to the Jewish community in New York, because it portrayed Jewish people in a non-hagiographic way, as people with shortcomings and desires and conflicts; a reality much easier to hide from the goyim before the play was translated in English. The play toured in Europe AND in American without problem until it was shown in a language non-Yiddish Americans could understand; and when this happened, Jewish community leaders did not want it performed, and shut it down.

But the play showed to ME something I’d not known at all; that the Jewish community, the Yiddish speaking community of Europe, was rich enough to support its own theater, with touring groups and playwrights who wrote especially for it; this being just one elements that were lost to us when that great swathe of our friends and neighbors were systematically executed during World War II. And LOOK, here I was in London in 2018, and the community that I am not a part of but which lives side by side with me is doing their own theater, theater that represents THEM, and I am having this opportunity to get to learn about another culture (which exists in many different forms!) and other values and, look at Bracha, the same conflicts and heartaches that have been going on for centuries when you want to fit in, you want to do right, but you just can’t seem to live up to what is expected of you. And for Bracha, it was making her heart break. And in her, I could see the reincarnation of the female protagonists of God of Vengeance, and I wanted to hear her story and hear her speak for herself. I wanted to know what made her mom leave London behind; I wanted to know more. BANG it all came together for me and suddenly I was invested in what was going on.

Back in the rather more fluffy world of the cafe, Sam was struggling with Gabi (I’m unclear why they were not getting along), and Alon was wondering if he’d made a huge mistake in trying to change the terms of his relationship (in the great song “Falling Behind”). But zip and zest were coming from the Yakov and Rachel corner, which has to mark one of the few times I’ve ever seen an elderly couple with a healthy sexual relationship on stage. It was funny and it was a good time, and the idea that they were teaching the gay male trio a thing or two gave me a giggle.

In the end – and with no spoilers – I found myself somewhat overwhelmed by the many, many story lines, and wondering if perhaps some shortcuts had been taken to get us to the end in a reasonable amount of time when perhaps few stories more richly developed might have been a better choice. Still, I loved having the company turn its back on divisive hatred and face forward to the audience for a song that essentially said, we are you we are, and God accepts us, as if to say to all of London and the world, there really is no place for hatred of others … a message I feel we need to hear in times like these. It was a fun musical and a good (if sweaty) night out.

(This review is for a performance that took place on Friday, July 27, 2018.)