Garth Drabinsky was appalled that day in 1987 when he heard that publishers were about to bid at auction for the rights to an unauthorized biography of himself. Realizing that “a book filled with misstatements and misrepresentations and ignorant reporting of the facts would do me a lot of harm,” he quickly took strong evasive…
Sailor and Fiddler: Reflections of a 100-Year-old Author, by Herman Wouk (Simon & Schuster) ◊ Note: This review of Herman Wouk’s memoir was first published in 2016. Herman Wouk died on May 17, 2019, age 103. This slim volume, which the author describes as a “non-autobiography,” will be of special interest to people interested in…
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…
The play is again the thing in the Southwark district of London as a newly-built replica of the Globe Theatre, where some of Shakespeare’s most famous plays debuted almost 400 years ago, is set to open in late August (1997) for a three-week dramatic season. Julius Caesar, As You Like It, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear,…
What was it like to see Jewish show business legend Al Jolson at his best in front of an adoring public? A high-budget musical profile of Jolson, now on stage at the historic Victoria Palace Theatre in London’s West End, seemingly rekindles that quintessential and electrifying spark that this most famous cantor’s son was able to…
The story has it that when Irving Berlin’s new musical Annie Get Your Gun was being readied for its 1946 Broadway opening with Ethel Merman in the title role, the legendary composer was so nervous about one particular number, There’s No Business Like Show Business, that he was prepared to yank it from the show.…
American comedian Gilbert Gottfried, whose most celebrated role was the voice of the parrot in the Disney movie Aladdin, brought his quirky brand of stand-up humor to Canada recently (1997) for two sold-out shows at Yuk Yuk’s Comedy Superclub as part of the Toronto Comedy Festival. Gottfried responds to the audience’s welcoming applause by pleading…
Although his current play It’s All True is based on a “labor opera” from the 1930s, and though many of his previous plays have been highly critical of Israel, Toronto playwright Jason Sherman told an audience at Harbourfront recently, “I don’t think of myself as a political playwright any more than I do a Jewish…
As he prepares to bring his recent smash Broadway revue to Toronto, stage and screen veteran Red Buttons, who is 76 and lives in Los Angeles, joked that he was contemplating taking French lessons just in case the Yes side won the Quebec referendum. “I might even bring my wife along, and introduce her as…
Jackie Mason, who performs his one-man Broadway show in Toronto on Monday Oct. 7, 1996, says he was ordained as a rabbi but was laughed out of his first synagogue in Weldon, North Carolina, in the 1950s. “As far back as you can go, they were all rabbis in my family,” the celebrated stand-up comic…
