Jewish culture
Saskia Baron
Ferenc Török is firmly aiming at the festival and art house circuit with his slow-paced recreation of one summer day in rural Hungary. A steam train stops at a rural siding, two Orthodox Jewish men descend and with minimal speech, oversee the unloading of two boxes onto a horse drawn cart and start their long walk into town. The station-master sets off on his bicycle to warn the inhabitants of the imminent arrival of these strangers. It’s not long after the end of hostilities but Japan has yet to surrender. This little Hungarian town is in limbo, liberated from the Germans but not yet Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Of all the great country superstars of his era, Willie Nelson is truly the last man standing (as was made clear by the title of his last album… Last Man Standing). In his mid-80s his output has, if anything, become more prolific. However, if his 1970s outlaw persona could peek into the future and see what 2018 Willie was up to, he might be surprised. His latest album, a tribute to his old pal Frank Sinatra, has wandered far off into the world of late night jazz bar shuffling.In truth, Nelson has form in this area. A couple of years ago he released a set of George Gershwin standards – and even Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Ari Shaffir ★★★★★There are some super-talented US comics at the Fringe this year, and Ari Shaffir is among them. The edgy, no-holds-barred New Yorker lays it out there with his show title, Jew, in which he charts why he has left his Orthodox upbringing behind. It started by asking questions of his rabbis – and two years at a yeshiva (a school that focuses on the study of the Talmud and the Torah) in Israel gave him the ammunition, but perhaps not in the way his teachers had intended.As you might expect of a dry-witted comic, the questions were not of the existential variety but rather ones Read more ...
Robert Beale
Adam Gorb’s The Path to Heaven, with libretto by Ben Kaye, is his longest work to date (almost two hours’ running time without interval) and on a story that could hardly be more tragic – the Holocaust. Its premiere at the Royal Northern College of Music was conducted by Mark Heron and given by members of Psappha with singers and musicians from the RNCM, directed by Stefan Janski.This was the culmination of a two-day festival of the music of Anthony Gilbert and Adam Gorb (pictured below), the first and present Heads of Composition of the RNCM respectively. It’s really a kind of opera Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
The show’s subtitle – “Songs banned by the Nazis” – is a catchy one, and somewhere under the confetti, the stilettos, the extravagant nudity, the sequins and even shinier repartee that are wrapped around Effigies of Wickedness like a mink coat on the shoulders of an SS officer’s mistress is the bruised and grubby story of one of history’s foulest episodes. As the evening progresses and the glossy fur slips lower and lower we see a reveal more shocking than any burlesque club or Weimar cabaret could offer.Effigies of Wickedness (a phrase borrowed from an official description of the Nazis’ Read more ...
Katie Colombus
They say that behind every successful man is a strong woman. The Flying Lovers of Vitebsk is as much – if not more so – the championing of the unsung hero in this story of the famous early modernist artist, Marc Chagall. His wife, Bella – early muse, sharer of world views and buckets of milk and mother of their daughter Ida, is paid tribute to, for her devotion and dedication to her husband's art.The birth of surrealism is played out on a small stage, made up of geometric shapes from the hyper-colour backdrop, wooden structure set and the angles at which the actors lean, holding onto ropes to Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The freeing of a plane-load of hostages by Israeli forces at Entebbe airport in Uganda in 1976 produced an instant spate of movie versions. Raid on Entebbe starred Peter Finch and Charles Bronson, Victory at Entebbe offered gainful employment to Elizabeth Taylor, Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster, while the Israeli-made Operation Thunderbolt featured Klaus Kinski as German hijacker Wilfried Böse.In this new update by Brazilian director José Padilha (RoboCop, Narcos), the Böse role goes to Daniel Brühl, playing opposite a disappointingly brittle Rosamund Pike as his partner in ideologically- Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Transangelic Exodus is a roller-coaster ride. Songs twist, turn, have sudden shifts in tempo, are punctuated by unexpected instrumental interjections, and come to a dead stop after which they resume their unpredictable course. Although Ezra Furman's musical touchstones of late Fifties pop and The Modern Lovers are still apparent, the follow-up to 2015’s Perpetual Motion People comes across as nothing less than a vigorously shaken-and-stirred take on pre-Born in the USA Bruce Springsteen.Furman says the narrative thread running through the frenzied Transangelic Exodus is his being “in Read more ...
David Nice
Time flies so much more beguilingly in Daniel Jamieson and Emma Rice's 90-minute musical fantasia than it ever has, for me, in Bock and Harnick's Fiddler on the Roof – and the songs aren't bad, either. The inspiration here – and inspiration's the word – is not Marc Chagall's trademark violinist on the tiles but the artist himself and his clever, talented Vitebsk other half Bella Rosenfeld as they wing their way through the fraught first half of the 20th century. Rice and Jamieson, young and in love, played the couple 25 years ago, which makes this superb small-scale piece of total theatre a Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Suitably enough, Nicholas Blincoe begins his personal history of the birthplace of Jesus with a Christmas pudding. He carries not gold, frankincense and myrrh but this “dark cannonball” of spices, fruit and stodge as a festive gift to his girlfriend’s parents in their home town of Bethlehem. Anton Sansour, a mathematician, academic and his partner’s father, jokes that all the fruit – from apricots to lemons – grows in his garden, while the seasonings traditionally arrived in town, on camel trains, along the ancient spice route from the East. This calorific symbol of “goodwill and fellow- Read more ...
Saskia Baron
On paper this film sounds so worthy: a widowed Orthodox Jewish father struggles to convince the Hassidic community elders that he can raise his young son alone after the death of his wife. But it’s the opposite of worthy on screen – Menashe is utterly absorbing, deeply charming, and very funny. It’s an impressive first narrative feature by documentarian Joshua Z Weinstein, who brings an assured intimacy to the screen from the outset. The film opens with a long-lens shot of Hassidic men walking on a city street; from their outfits and demeanour they could still be in pre-war Read more ...
Katherine Waters
Israel Zangwill’s 1908 play The Melting Pot characterises Europe as an old and worn-out continent racked by violence and injustice and in thrall to its own bloody past. America, on the other hand, represents a visionary project that will “melt up all race-difference and vendettas” to “purge and recreate” a new world. This timely revival of Zangwill's committed writing doesn’t merely prompt us to ask whether the quintessential American dream has permanently curdled – it’s also a great play, wonderfully produced.Mendel Quixano, played by Peter Marinker, is a Jewish musician and New Read more ...