Category: Movies, Theatre

Showboat controversy revisited

Born in 1887 to Jewish parents in Kalamazoo, Mich., American novelist and playwright Edna Ferber was a hardworking, overly modest, frequently self-effacing writer who read the critics too carefully and was too easily wounded by their sloppily-aimed slings and arrows. Convinced, for instance, that no one would want to read her novel So Big, she advised…

Gas lights and radiant stars in Toronto’s old Grand Opera House

THIS story, highlighting Toronto’s fabled old Grand Opera House on Adelaide Street, has been reprinted from the Toronto Telegram of 1924. * * * Glamor and Magic of the Great Old Days in Toronto, when Footlights Flickered While Real Brilliance Held the Stage A THEATRICAL SERIES Reminiscences of Thos. H. Scott, Sr., Who Was for…

William Fox: forgotten movie mogul

Review of The Man Who Made the Movies: The Meteoric Rise and Tragic Fall of William Fox, by Vanda Krefft Theda Bara (nicknamed ‘The Vamp’), one of Fox’s biggest stars, in a lavish 1917 production of Cleopatra. No known copy of the film survives. From the Canadian Jewish News, 2019 Although his surname appears in…

Broadway’s newest Fiddler is one for the ages

  Wonder of wonder and miracle of miracles, the new production of Fiddler On The Roof at the Broadway Theatre in New York — directed by Bartlett Sher and freshly choreographed by Israeli choreographer Hofesh Schechter — is good enough to make seasoned theatregoers forget that they ever saw a previous production of Fiddler or…

‘Bushmeat,’ documentary by Dawna Treibicz (2001)

From Canadian Jewish News, October 22, 2001 Bushmeat, an hour-long television documentary soon to air on the Discovery Channel, is a riveting, tautly-edited expose of the illicit trade in gorilla and chimpanzee meat in Cameroon and other countries of Central Africa. Toronto filmmaker Dawna Treibicz defied the odds to make this film about a subject that…

Repentant: A new role for the divine Sarah Bernhardt (1922)

From the Canadian Jewish Review, September 8, 1922 It will be remembered that Sarah Bernhardt was born in Paris in 1844 of Dutch Jewish parents and was received into the Roman Catholic Church at the request of her father. She has recently given an interview to Miss Elsie Roow, of the New York Herald, in…

Screenwriting guru Syd Field fades to black

From the Canadian Jewish News, February 2014 As announced in obituaries in Variety, the Hollywood Reporter, the New York Times and other publications, screenwriting guru Syd Alvin Field died last November in Los Angeles at the age of 77. It’s been 35 years since Field’s book Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting was first published in…

Meeting Nehemiah Persoff at David’s Deli, San Francisco

The rumbling is sudden and loud and the floor vibrates intensely. Yet patrons in this darkened theatre on Pier 39 in the Fisherman’s Wharf district remain calm. And why not? They have paid $7 to attend the San Francisco Experience, a 28-minute multi-media show that promises that “you will feel the earth shake.” Utilizing a…