Jewish culture
Matt Wolf
Solo plays and performances are, of necessity, the theatrical currency of the moment, whether across an entire season at the Bridge Theatre or last week at the Old Vic in the too briefly glimpsed Three Kings, starring a rarely-better Andrew Scott. This week's blink-and-you-miss-it offering, pre-recorded (unlike the Scott entry) but also available online for a few days only, is a new production courtesy the Hope Mill Theatre, Manchester, of Martin Sherman's 1999 play Rose, which premiered at the National before transferring the following year to Broadway. (A percentage of ticket sales are Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
Seth Rogen offers up double the laughs by taking on both lead roles in a time-hopping, Rip-Van-Winkle screwball comedy, but with an oddly mixed conservative message about the merits of family and religion.The screenplay is based on a four-part New Yorker short story called Sell-Out by Simon Rich. That piece of writing along with other short stories earned him a reputation as a modern-day PG Wodehouse, not to mention being SNL’s youngest ever writer and polishing scripts for Pixar. Rich’s writing is sharp, often high-concept, and very, very funny. But the story has lost some of its Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Czech director Alfréd Radok’s Distant Journey (Daleká cesta) has an unprecedented place in the history of cinema of the Holocaust. Initially released in March 1949, it has been called the first fictional treatment of the Jewish experience during the Nazi era, appearing less than four years after the liberation of the Terezin (Theresienstadt) transport camp, where the greater part of its action is set. As the world struggled to assimilate its recent history – if, indeed, assimilation of any kind can ever be possible – the fact of such a film appearing, from within a society that had been so Read more ...
Marianka Swain
There’s concept on top of concept in this revival of Jason Robert Brown’s beloved 2001 musical, which charts the ebb and flow of a relationship by juggling timelines: aspiring actress Cathy’s story is told in reverse chronological order, while aspiring writer Jamie’s moves forward. It’s an apt framing for a couple who are never on the same page, their dual ambitions and relative success wrenching them apart. Director Jonathan O’Boyle now adds another layer: this is an actor-musician production, with both performers playing the piano throughout, among other instruments.There are crystalline Read more ...
Marianka Swain
The theatre gods rained down not fire and pestilence, but a 45-minute technical delay on opening night of this substantially revised musical – a stage adaptation of the 1998 DreamWorks animated movie. But nothing could entirely halt this juggernaut; fittingly, for a show that earnestly values persistence and the unstoppable power of the epic.The story remains essentially faithful to its Biblical source, following Moses (Luke Brady, pictured below with Christine Allado) – child of a Hebrew slave family – from his fortunate adoption by Queen Tuya (Debbie Kurup), who finds him floating Read more ...
Ariana Neumann
It was during my first week at Tufts University in America, when I was 17, that I was told by a stranger that I was Jewish. As I left one of the orientation talks, I was approached by a slight young man with short brown hair and intense eyes. He spoke to me in Spanish and introduced himself as Elliot from Mexico.“I was told we should meet,” he said, beaming. “Because we’re both good-looking, Latin American, and Jewish.”I was baffled. I’ve never been good at witty comebacks, but I was thrilled to manage: “I’m sorry, you’re mistaken. I’m not Jewish, and you’re not good-looking.”“You need Read more ...
Marianka Swain
“Take our country back!” is the rallying cry of the self-identified “real” Americans gathered to protest the arrival of immigrants. It could be a contemporary Trump rally – or, indeed, the nastier side of current British political discourse – but in fact this scene is from a 1986 musical, set in 1910, from an all-star creative team: book by Joseph Stein (Fiddler on the Roof), score by Charles Strouse (Annie) and lyrics by Stephen Schwartz (Wicked). Despite that pedigree, it bombed on Broadway, but this opportune revival, transferred from Manchester’s Hope Mill Theatre, gains potency by Read more ...
Saskia Baron
The Safdie brothers, Josh and Benny, once programmed a season of films entitled Emotional Sloppy Manic Cinema, and if sloppy is subtracted from that description, it’s a pretty accurate summation of their work here in Uncut Gems. This is edge-of-the-seat filmmaking, with vertiginous camerawork by Darius Khondji and a relentless, immersive soundscape of electronica and layered dialogue.Adam Sandler, transformed with false teeth and a dazzling selection of designer shirts and shades, plays Howard Ratner. He’s a compulsive gambler and jewellery dealer who sells diamond encrusted Furbies and dodgy Read more ...
Graham Fuller
A lumbering, barrel-chested hulk with a weirdly Ancient Egyptian wedge of hair, the eponymous clay monster of Paul Wegener and Carl Boese’s The Golem: How He Came Into the World compensates for his limited intelligence with brute strength and a dogged determination to see every task through, whether he’s doing the shopping for his household or supporting a collapsing palace by its beams. When the Golem bares his teeth, he’s terrifying – though the 1920 German film’s cultural resonance is the eeriest thing about it.Written by Wegener and Henrik Galeen (who also scripted FW Murnau's Read more ...
Katherine Waters
For a loved one to die by suicide provokes both pain and hurt. Pain, because they are gone. Hurt, because it can feel like an indictment or a betrayal. For Charlotte Salomon, the suicides that ripped holes in her family were also foreshadowings which provided the structure for her monumental cycle of narrative paintings Leben? oder Theater? (Life? or Theatre?) which is now on show at the Jewish Museum in Camden.About a third of the 769 gouaches that Salomon selected of the roughly 1,300 she painted over the course of two years are displayed in the exhibition. Like the full work, and in Read more ...
Matt Wolf
An excellent director makes a rare misstep with Amsterdam, in which a compelling if tricksy play is given an arch and mannered production that only distances the audience further. Not to be confused with either Rotterdam or Europe, two similarly titled plays that in name alone form a de facto triptych, Israeli writer Maya Arad Yasur's short, jagged play doesn't so much challenge playgoers as wilfully try their patience: the 80 minutes (no interval) pass very slowly indeed. (The translation is by Eran Edry.) The irony is that Yasur has an important story to tell about the weight of the Read more ...
Matthew Xia
I’m currently opening Amsterdam, my first production for Actors Touring Company since being appointed Artistic Director last year, at the Orange Tree theatre in Richmond and then in Plymouth early in 2020. And what better time to premiere a play for the Europe of the present, triggered by the Europe of the past. The themes it tackles are once again becoming increasingly urgent, so I very much see this as a statement of intent. I was born in East London in the 1980s but have never felt particularly English, though perhaps twice in my adult life I have felt British. Somehow I’ve Read more ...