Eighty years ago, as Yiddish writer and playwright Sholem Asch celebrated his 50th birthday in 1930, he seemed to be riding on top of the world. His newest book, Fam Mabul, was a critical and popular success among Yiddish readers– it would soon become vastly more popular in its English translation as Three Cities —…
From the Canadian Jewish News, December 2004 What do you get when you put a popular shtetl folk tale into a pot and add some flavourful compositions for full orchestra, rich klezmer sounds, a pinch of Hanukkah seasoning and live narration by Barbara Budd, the Toronto-based actor and co-host of the immensely popular CBC radio…
◊ Note: The film Hester Street came out in 1975 — so it is now 50 years old. The following article was posted 15 years ago, when Hester Street had turned 35. It has been 35 years since Joan Micklin Silver’s film Hester Street first appeared on the silver screen. Although the slow-paced, 90-minute black-and-white drama…
From The City Magazine (Toronto Star), 1978 Nat Taylor emits a throaty laugh and his eyes twinkle when he is asked about his latest venture, a mammoth, 18-theatre cinema complex now under construction in the Eaton Centre. When completed in January, the complex will boast three times as many screens as any other Toronto movie…
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…
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…
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…
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…
JUDY HOLLIDAY OBIT, 1965 From the Canadian Jewish Review, June 18, 1965 Judy Holliday, an actress whose professional career was all comedy and whose later private life was all tragedy, introduced the word “couth” to the English language. The etymological creation was part of her portrayal of one of the most memorable of a noted…
Devotion of Workers in Sweat Shops and Other East Side Hebrews to the Drama – The Productions of the Official Playwrights – Ways of the Yiddish Actors. From The New York Sun, October 18, 1896 New York is the only city in the world where the Jewish stage has achieved anything like prosperity. While in…
