2019 began the way 2018 ended: with one disaster after another—and with many more to come. We live in a country where those in power love to kill little Sesame Street to build THE TRUMP WALL, even if it means that thousands of Americans are shut out of important government jobs without pay—while the politicians who created this mess go on grand vacations.

Making money out of reheated old chestnuts
​
Now that Santas and elves have mothballed their uniforms, executive directors and accountants are wondering if it’s true that Christmas is the financial Savior for their theaters and choruses.

Frequently, cultural institutions pay an artistic price for focusing on income by letting innovative new plays or songs fall by the wayside during the holiday season. Few people talk about this open secret. The decline in popularity of songs of seduction like “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” (1949)—because of the awareness generated by the #MeToo movement—does not mitigate the fact that old chestnuts, roasted nicely during the holidays, often bring in the cash that pays for new productions.

​“We have nothing against a good holiday show, but . . .”

Seth Rozin, artistic director of InterAct Theatre Company, directly challenges culture-making institutions which rely on traditional money-making holiday shows:  

“We have nothing against a good holiday show, but we’d rather focus on finding the boldest and bravest living playwrights who tell important new stories and ask important new questions about today’s world [. . .] We have proudly and defiantly eschewed the strategy of relying on an annual ‘cash cow.’ This is what distinguishes InterAct Theatre Company. It is also what distinguishes our audiences and supporters.”

Rozin made that statement in a fund-raising letter a few Christmases ago. However, when looking for a new show this December, I could not find a major production at the InterAct. So, with no menorah, no Christmas tree, and no new play on the stage of the InterAct, I went Christmas “cash cowing” by attending a winter concert and a holiday musical:

Rejoice: A Multicultural Holiday Celebration by the Philadelphia Gay Men’s Chorus (PGMC) at the Prince Theatre; and Oliver! in the Quintessence production at the Sedgwick Theatre in Germantown.

Philadelphia Gay Men’s Chorus: Rejoice

Against the elegantly decorated stage of the Prince Theatre—with Christmas trees, lights, and garlands that flickered for dramatic effect—a group of elves (some bearded) came running in. They made us chuckle and even created a sense of goofy camaraderie. Usually, choral dance groups are made up of slim young performers. However, PGMC’s “Brotherly Love” (choreographed by Edward Stash) presented men of all ages and body sizes—for me, a sign of acceptance.

The large chorus—103 singers—filled the hall with a glorious sound, supported by a fine, small orchestra (unfortunately, not mentioned in the program), all conducted by Joseph J. Buches, the artistic director of 14 years. Pianist and opera coach Gabriel Rebolla, originally from Brazil, accompanied the popular chorus, while Brian Morrison provided ASL interpretation.

This year’s concert reflected the cultural background of its members, including songs in Spanish, Italian, Hebrew, and Ukrainian—from “Ave Maria” to “Stille Nacht”—rendered movingly by various soloists and the backing of the chorus.

PGMC and other LGBT choruses tend to present classical and contemporary music for the holidays, but more importantly, they unite the gay community and their allies. This concert featured solo performances by two trans members—evoking strong applause from the audience.

Guest conductors Tony La Salle, a painter, and his husband Robert Maggio, a composer—both academics—bolstered the evening’s entertainment with their rendition of “We Need a Little Christmas.” They had won the auction for the privilege of conducting the chorus however they wished—leading to some hilarious directing with Buches beaming in the wings.

The second part of the evening brought in modern arrangements, ending with “Go! Go! Rudy!” sung so rhythmically that the audience insisted on an encore.

As a non-religious person, happily humming along to Christmas songs, I became aware again of the deeply seated, cultural demands made on producers to connect us to old traditions during the holiday seasons.

Adam R. Funk, PGMC’s president, thanked the Prince Theatre for many years of support and announced that, because the Prince is rebranding itself as the Philadelphia Film Center, PGMC will move to the Suzanne Roberts Theater next year as their “resident chorus.”

Quintessence Theatre Group: Oliver! integrating the audience

Despite Rozin’s comment about holiday “cash cows,” I went to the Sedgwick Theatre and immediately found myself drawn into the action of Oliver! by sitting onstage at one of the many long tables with other theatergoers—all of us having morphed into orphans.

Bill Sikes (Brock D. Vickers), the brutal murderer, wore a long black leather coat, reminiscent of Nazi and KGB agents. Nancy (Hanna Gaffney), Sikes’ lover and a prostitute, wore a modern leopard fur-print outfit to attract johns. Costume designer Christina Bullard’s mix of traditional historical outfits with contemporary ones in this Quintessence production made the connection between exploitation in Victorian England and our own time more transparent.

Just as the LGBT chorus presented remarkable voices, some of the professional performers in Oliver!—like Daniel Miller and Tasha Waters as street criers—harmonized so powerfully that they moved me to tears.

I left the Sedgwick Theatre not only entertained, but deep in thought. Cash cows or no cash cows, ultimately, we the audience demand high professional standards, musically and dramatically, but also songs and plays that speak to us during the holiday season.

Lawd, it’s already January, 2019. Time to reflect on how much I owe to the many playwrights, directors, all the creative and technical teams, and all the actors, dancers, singers, and musicians who created thought-provoking and/or entertaining shows this past year.
 
As I couldn’t possibly see every show, I tried my best to read as many reviews as possible by my colleagues, who often write fascinating, thoughtful, but also challenging, articles in various publications, including Phindie and BSR. A big thank you to all of you, including:
 
Mark Cofta, Steve Cohen, Julius Ferraro, Michael Fisher, Jessica Foley, Merilyn Jackson, Alaina Johns, Cameron Kelsall, Debra Miller, Chris Munden, Naomi Orwin, Kathryn Osenlund, Lisa Panzer, Darnelle Radford, Wendy Rosenfield, Dan Rottenberg, Howard Shapiro, Lewis Whittington, and Toby Zinman.
 
“Here at Phindie we think about the articles you loved in the year just ending,” Chris Munden, editor-in-chief, wrote about the Phindie list of the most widely-read theater articles, interviews, and reviews in 2018.
 
I was thrilled. The statistics showed that my texts appeared 15 times among the various categories of the TOP TEN most widely-read Phindie pieces in 2018. I enjoyed creating this illustrated article, which includes two runners-up, plus one article each in BSR and a national publication, The Progressive.

​It gave me a special joy to read that two of my features, both relating to German culture, made it to the top in these categories: 
​#1 in FILM: “Dinner for One” 
#1 in MUSIC: Berlin’s “Max Raabe, ‘I can’t kiss myself alone’” 

Below the categories and rankings for all pieces on Phindie 2018:

MOST POPULAR NEW ARTICLES 2018:
 
#5 of all NEW ARTICLES: Dinner for One: The greatest cult film you’ve never heard of

MUSIC:
 
#1 of all MUSIC ARTICLES: “I Can’t Kiss Myself Alone”: The Wit and Retro Style of Berlin’s Max Raabe and His Palast Orchestra.
#3: German Cabaret in Philadelphia: Interview with Berlin’s Dieter Rita Scholl
#8: Berlin to Broadway, a Musical Voyage with Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill: Cast interview

FILM:
 
#1 of all FILM reviews: Dinner for One: The greatest cult film you’ve never heard of
 
INTERVIEWS:
 
#2 of all INTERVIEWS: “I Can’t Kiss Myself Alone”: The Wit and Retro Style of Berlin’s Max Raabe and His Palast Orchestra.
#3: German Cabaret in Philadelphia: Interview with Berlin’s Dieter Rita Scholl
#4: Theater of the Extreme: Amanda Schoonover looks back on PHAEDRA’S LOVE
#6: MEDEA, A Woman in Crisis: Interview with Jennifer Summerfield

FEATURES:
 
#3 of all FEATURE articles: Dinner for One: The greatest cult film you’ve never heard of
#6: Remembering Joel Markowitz, founding editor of DC Metro Theater Arts

Two of my articles came close to being in the TOP TEN on Phindie ​in 2018:

“Why Wait?" Director Ken Marini talks about Quintessence Theatre’s brilliant Waiting for Godot, and 
“Mentors and protégés exist everywhere”: Interview with playwright Donald Margulies on Collected Stories. 

I was happy when a national publication, The Progressive, published my interview with one of the most committed actors in Philadelphia: Bob Weick, who took Marx in Soho all over Britain and the US in celebration of Karl Marx's 200th birthday.

​I also appreciated Broad Street Review opening its doors for Meg Saligman and Brian Sanders’ JUNK in their presentation of ‘FIGMAGO’ Through the looking glass. 

​Philadelphia prepared itself for the first snow storm this season. Within minutes, the large Buddha in my garden looked like Santa Claus and the life-sized sculpture of a young centurion looked like one of the wise men who had aged before his time. One news flash after another warned about accidents, especially with a long downpour of rain afterwards.

One of the secrets of the Walnut Street Theatre success story

I had hoped that the Walnut Street Theatre would reschedule its opening of its Studio 3 production of WINTER WONDERETTES, directed by Richard Parison. At 5:43 PM, 107 minutes before curtain time, I received this email from AnnaBeth Crittenden, the new press person at WST: “It’s Snowing Outside and WINTER WONDERETTES Opens Tonight”.

That update reminded me of a conversation I had with Denise Daher Hodgson, the former chair of the board of directors. She told me how, a few years ago, when there was a really bad snow storm, she and the entire WST board called every single ticket holder to let them know how much they appreciate their support and that the show was still on.

Such commitment from everybody, including the board of directors, explains part of the reason why the Walnut has the world’s largest subscriber base and plays to mostly sold-out performances night after night, matinee after matinee—rain or shine, or Philly snow and sleet.

Frankly, I didn’t want to brave the weather, but after that email, I didn’t want to ask for a rain check. As I didn’t trust the roads with my car, I walked 10 minutes toward the nearest Septa stop. Big mistake. In both the suburbs and the city, many storm drains were clogged. The trains were delayed, but I managed to make it to the Walnut on time, looking like a madman who had waded into a lake, with my trousers dripping and my shoes squishing because of all the water. I still didn’t want to see the show.

And then the magic of theater took over, making me forget all about my wet and ice-cold feet.

Wacky female barbershop quartet at a wacky store

The brilliant Billy Thompson from California—pianist and vocal director for this show—created the musical backbone to the WINTER WONDERETTES. Sitting at the back of Studio 3 in a cleverly-devised place where furniture, even trees, could be turned into something else within seconds (designed by Colin McIlvaine), the pianist sat behind what looked like an upright piano dressed up with cheap Christmas wrapping—actually a musical wonder machine that created any sound imaginable (enhanced by John Kolbinski’s sound design).

Four ditzy employees at Harper’s Hardware Store in a Midwestern town (talented actors and singers Jenna Pastuszek, Rebecca Robbins, Amanda Jill Robinson, and Kayla Tarpley) dressed to the hilt with sets of the glitziest, most elegantly overdone costumes and shoes (dazzlingly created by Amanda Wolff and enhanced by Robert Perry’s lighting design), went all out to produce their annual holiday party—with the audience cast as the other employees. Yes, squishy shoes or not, we all became part of the most unusual Christmas party ever.

I asked the director, Richard Parison, long-time casting director at the Walnut, former associate artistic director at the Prince Music Theater, and now artistic director for The American Theatre in Hampton, VA, to tell me about the selection process of the delightfully wacky country bumpkins: “The ladies in auditions each brought a unique authenticity to the role. Bernard Havard and I saw each of these [artists] as talented singers, actresses, and comediennes.  The show doesn’t allow itself to be taken too seriously, and audiences will enjoy it only when the actresses do take it seriously. Comedy is hard, but [they] make it look easy.”

Going by the laughter in the audience in scene after scene, the hilarious script by Roger Bean and the work of the director, the actors, and the creative team created a most entertaining evening, with a number of thought-provoking moments. Studio 3 at America’s oldest theater got into the Christmas spirit just in time for Thanksgiving.

Christmas: “In honor of our friends of the Jewish persuasion”

We laughed when one of the lovely ditzies earnestly declared that there was something for everybody:

SUZY: And just by coincidence, I’m wearing blue in honor of our friends of the Jewish persuasion. [SHE looks proudly to the others.] Happy Hanukah! [SHE mispronounces Hanukah as Hanookah. The girls correct her.]

BETTY JEAN, CINDY LOU & MISSY: Happy Hanukah! [THEY form a living menorah]

Studio 3, decorated to the hilt with Christmas paraphernalia, exploded with joyful, sparkling laughter.

In his review of WINTER WONDERETTES—in the 11th Hour Theatre Company production at Theatre Horizonin 2012—theater critic Steve Cohen asked, “Was Santa Claus Jewish?” and listed some of the many Jewish writers or composers of Christmas songs: “Irving Berlin (“White Christmas”), Mel Tormé (“Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire”), Jay Livingston (“Silver Bells”), Johnny Marks (“Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer”) and Sammy Cahn and Jule Styne (“Let It Snow”). He ended his review with a question that some folks with kippahs might ask each other at a Chinese restaurant on Christmas Eve: “Where would the Christmas season be without the chosen people?”

Carving up an old German Christmas tree

Coming from Germany, I was intrigued when one of the employees (the hilarious Amanda Jill Robinson) took apart the old German song “O Tannenbaum” from 1824, with the music going back to a Silesian folk song from the 16th century. “The lyrics do not actually refer to Christmas, or describe a decorated Christmas tree. Instead, they refer to the fir’s evergreen quality as a symbol of constancy and faithfulness,” as my old friend Wiki reported.

The American employee didn’t want to sing the song in German and had to be persuaded—nay, forced—by her three coworkers. She sang it with such disgust that the audience laughed out loud, even though there were moments when, I must admit, I cringed a bit at the old stereotypes of German culture. However, throughout the whole show, these loveable characters made fun of themselves and each other—all part of an evening filled with humor and satire, making fun of and even celebrating human foibles.

I couldn’t think of a more enjoyable evening during the holiday season—German, Jewish, or American, even Chinese!

An Almost Complete History of Lambda Toastmasters
 
In the following chapters I will describe the development of Lambda Toastmasters, club # 4820-30, from its earliest beginning to our First Anniversary Celebration on December 12, 1982. But first, what are some of the impressions gay and non-gay people have of us?
 
“Learn to Speak Up …”
 
The other day I called Mrs. Myra Williams who, together with her husband Harvey, regularly advertises in Chicago’s widely-read The Reader (“Learn to speak up … join Toastmasters.”) Mrs. Williams’ enthusiasm for Toastmasters outdid mine—and that takes some doing! The good lady, not knowing who I was, suddenly lowered her voice a bit and said, “… and do you know, we even have a gay Toastmasters club in Chicago!” “No, really,” I said and cleared my throat, “actually, I’m the president.” It didn’t take Mrs. Williams long to get used to the new situation: “You know,” she said, “we’ve heard a number of nice things about Lambda and I was wondering whether we could visit your club. Perhaps you’ll have something special for us?” We do: Our first anniversary. Welcome, Mr. and Mrs. Williams.
 
Lambda at Lambda
 
At a recent reception for the Lambda Resource Center for the Blind we met Paul, a young doctor, who said, “I can’t believe that your club is only one year old. Going by all the news items in Gaylife and Gay Chicago I was convinced that Lambda Toastmasters had been around for quite a number of years. My friends often talk about your organization. It sounds great.”
 
Thank you, Paul. Come and participate; see for yourself.
 
Lambda Wouldn’t Exist Without the Help of the Ayatollah Khomeini
 
I often get asked, “How did a gay chapter of Toastmasters ever get started?” “Because of the Ayatollah Khomeini,” I frequently reply. To be more precise: I was teaching at a Persian university and would probably still live in Iran had it not been for the revolution which forced me out of that land and, eventually, led me to America and this country’s finest organization for communication and leadership skills.
 
“The Arse of the World, Darling!”
 
After travelling and working around half the globe, I ended up teaching at Oklahoma State in Stillwater, Oklahoma—“The arse of the world, darling,” as I had been forewarned by a well-bred English lady. Her point was well taken, with one exception: the Stillwater branch of Toastmasters International. Their weekly meetings turned out to be not only an excellent training ground for communication and leadership skills, but a place of sanity, an island in the sea of the Moral Majority. Yes, learning the ropes of toastmastering can compensate for many losses.
 
A Topic Worse Than The Plague
 
On the day that you have successfully conducted your first meeting, you know that you have become a Toastmaster. But on the day that your fellow Toastmasters tell you that they never had table topics as tough, as challenging, and as moving as the ones that you handed out, you know that you have integrated toastmastering into your system. On that evening in the spring of ’81 when I was Table Topics Master for the first time, I was shaking inwardly because I did not know how my “straight” fellow Toastmasters would react to a topic which to some people is worse than the plague: ho-mo-sex-u-al-i-ty. But try I did.
 
Anita Bryant vs. Civil Rights for Gays
 
“Mary,” I said to our first participant and plucked up all my courage, “you have just heard Anita Bryant sing the Battle Hymn of the Republic and her infamous aria on “queers” ruining the country. Tulsa Television has asked you to present a two minute rebuttal. After you have sung the praise of Toastmasters, you’re talking about the civil rights of gay people.” Mary rose, full of unexpected enthusiasm: “Gay rights,” she said, “are part of our civil rights. I’m proud of our heritage, even if we haven’t always lived up to it. But times are changing, as witnessed by my chance to answer Ms. Bryant …” The club members applauded right there. Had I underestimated my fellow Toastmasters?
 
Homosexuality: Variation or Deviation?
 
A few minutes later I asked Scott, a young biology professor, what he would tell his students about homosexuality: deviation or variation? The man who looked like a redneck blushed for a moment but then delivered an excellent speech: “…and so, as shown by my definitions and my examples the answer is clear: homosexuality is a variation of human sexuality.” I couldn’t believe it; the applause wouldn’t end.
 
“I Believe in Equality, But …”
 
Well, everything went well, including a fine speech on “If my daughter had a lesbian friend,” until the club president got up to tell us in all seriousness that he would veto any attempt of the gay and lesbian students at OSU to start their own support group: “I believe in equality,” he said, “but most American students are too young and too immature to decide about their sexuality.” I asked him afterwards about his age and that of his wife when they got married at college, and about the age of most Americans when they are asked to risk their life during a war. “That’s all quite different,” he said.
 
God and Gays
 
Cooper, our youngest member, won the table topics trophy that night for his moving speech on “God and Gays.” At the end of our Toastmasters meeting, nobody wanted to go home right away. And during the following days, several members called me to tell me of their relatives and friends who were gay. I hadn’t come out, but, at least, I had made a number of new friends.
 
“My Gay Brother—The Most Loving Person I Know”
 
Two weeks later, Barbara, my favorite Toastmaster, gave her manual speech on her gay brother in New York: “He’s the most loving person I know, but he’s also a hard working American citizen—like you, and a tax-payer—like you.” Barbara won the speech contest that night and I began to long for the day on which I could speak freely about any subject in the world.
 
That Moment, the Idea of Lambda Toastmasters was conceived.
 
Thank you, Oklahoma.
 
Lambda at Discovery ‘81
 
A few months later, in the summer of ’81, I moved to Chicago. As soon as I had discovered the Williams’ ad in the Reader, I called them and asked for information. Slowly, the idea of a gay-oriented Toastmasters club began to grow in my mind. In the fall, I presented a workshop at the Discovery ’81 conference (“Gay life in Europe, Asia, and America—How to communicate better”) and told the participants about a gay-oriented Toastmasters group. The response was excellent and very promising.
 
Lambda at the Chicago Toastmasters Fall Conference ‘81
 
At around the same time, Karen Dowler of Chicago Toastmasters called me (the Williams connection) to ask about my joining a Chicago-based Toastmasters club. “I’d love to,” I heard myself say, “provided it’s gay.” I then shared with Karen my ideas about founding a new chapter; she promised to discuss it with the governor and the leading lights in Toastmasters and to contact me to tell me of their response.

Shortly thereafter I received an invitation to attend the Toastmasters conference. I never found out what exactly went on before the decision was made to invite me, but all I can say is that I was treated very well. I even received an invitation for the recognition luncheon. Everybody at my table wanted to know what type of a club I was representing. “The club” didn’t even exist yet! All there was of that club happened to sit at the dinner table. I felt honored yet uncomfortable for the fact that I had to change my name to “Martin Thomas”—for security reasons. Otherwise, I loved being amongst my fellow Toastmasters.
 
“When Can We Start Lambda, Martin?”
 
Of the many wonderful people at the conference, I particularly remember Dick Storer, our former International Director, and his unashamed enthusiasm for helping in the establishment of a predominantly gay Toastmasters club: “When can we start Lambda, Martin?” he asked and would have liked it the most if I could have started the next day. Actually, I did, but things went differently from the way I had planned them. Someone important said to me, “We can’t ask Dick Storer to help. He’s too enthusiastic.” I was too inexperienced and in no position to reply. But if ever I were to get into a similar situation, I would always ask for the advice and active assistance of the Dick Storers of this world, the enthusiasts who actually deliver the goods.
 
November 22, 1981: Lambda’s Preliminary Meeting at Gay Horizons
 
I had made several hundred telephone calls within the gay and lesbian community—sometimes speaking to the same people several times over a period of time—until I had created enough interest to call for a preliminary meeting. Ma Bell was in its heydays. My friends responded enthusiastically, and the day after the Toastmasters conference the meeting took place at Gay Horizons. They didn’t have enough chairs for all the participants. In short, the meeting was a roaring success, what with all the mini-workshops and the fun. I was convinced that everybody was going to join Toastmasters that very night.
 
Disaster, or: The Influence of Right-Wing Homophobes?
 
And then disaster struck. No sooner had I handed out the official Toastmasters pamphlets, when one participant discovered names and photographs of some American business men and millionaires whose apparent right-wing and anti-gay attitudes had led to a lot of injustice in the past (Coors et al.). Within seconds, I found myself confronted by a critical audience: Was I misleading them? Was I getting the gay community involved with a professional John Birch society? Besides, where was our membership money going to go? Would it help to pay for further publicity which featured “right-wing exploiters”?
 
Toastmasters Non-Political and Non-Religious?
 
I saw the Lambda baby die during its delivery. Frankly, I felt like almost giving up, but Toastmasters never give up when they believe in a worthwhile project. And so I struggled on, explained that we were neither a political nor a religious organization, although I had my own doubts: why does Toastmasters International feature mainly personalities which reinforce a very conservative image, to say the least? Why do many clubs start or end their meetings with a prayer and the pledge of allegiance to the American flag—clearly two very obvious political/religious statements?

In short, what had started as the greatest club-initiation-success-story in the annals of Toastmasters International turned out to be a rather difficult and even painful process. But I promised the 20 potential Toastmasters that I would check out all the facts and that Lambda would be as good a club as the members that joined it.
 
The First Few Lambda Apostles
 
And join they did: The first one was Adriel from Gary, Indiana. I walked home that night with his check for Toastmasters in my pocket, finally convinced that Lambda would come to live. During the next few days the mailman brought it in the checks of Patrick, Hubert, Carl, and Jim. And with it, the baby was making noises: always a good sign.
 
December 6, 1981: First Official Lambda Toastmasters Meeting
 
On the first Sunday in December ’81, the first official Lambda Toastmasters meeting took place at the Good Shepherd Parish/MCC, a branch of the world’s largest gay church and our home ever since. I conducted the first meeting together with Karen Dowler: I as Toastmaster, she as general evaluator, and both of us together as table topics masters.
 
“Hearing a Different Drummer”
 
The first speaker was asked to talk for two minutes about Thoreau’s famous quotation: “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.” Maybe I should have chosen a less symbolically “appropriate” topic. At any rate, our first volunteer froze and sat down. I felt terrible, in spite of all the applause which we gave him as a sort of consolation prize; I realized that it wasn’t easy to start a club from scratch.

​Fortunately, the rest of the meeting went smoothly; not that people would wait behind the lectern for the Toastmaster; not that people would shake hands or go in for eye contact, voice variety, etc. etc. But so what? This, our first meeting, with all its shortcomings, was like a baby learning to crawl from one side of the room to the other. But move it did, our Lambda kid.
 
“Join the Successful People”—Lambda’s First Article in GayLife
 
At the same time, Bill Williams, the editor of GayLife, wrote a wonderful article about us, called “Join the Successful People” (Dec. 4, 1981). It covered almost a whole page, including an attractive illustration, introducing Toastmasters to the gay and lesbian community for the first time. In addition, I placed ads in both GayLife and Gay Chicago which ran for many months, initially with my own telephone number and, a few months later, with Hubert’s. From the very beginning the phone wouldn’t stop running: “Could you tell me more about your workshops?”
 
Lambda at Officers Training at Sears Towers
 
Although we were too young to have had elections, we were invited to send our officers to the annual Toastmasters training session.  Of the first six members, five actually showed up: each one an officer from that moment onward. As it turned out, we had one of the largest teams at the training session, but we kept as low a profile as possible. Everybody treated us nicely, and afterwards we celebrated the first public appearance of a gay Toastmasters group with champagne and X-mas cookies at my apartment. We reported on the many suggestions from our respective workshops and brainstormed relevant Lambda topics: how to get more publicity, how to present useful workshops, but above all, how to get more members and, as the ultimate goal, how to get chartered.
 
Membership Growth, Paperwork, and X-mas 1981
 
Making Illinois Bell richer by calling non-stop paid off: at almost every meeting we welcomed new members and guests. And with it came an avalanche of paperwork. Thanks to Hubert’s organizational talents, things went smoothly. Jim invited us to his house to celebrate our first success, to hold our board meetings and to discuss possible charter dates while decorating his X-mas tree.
 
Lambda and the Coldest Day in Recorded Chicago History
 
After two meetings with us, Karen Dowler decided not to return any more. I saw myself faced with the task of raising the Lambda kid all by myself. Looking back, I am grateful to all those members who attended our meetings regularly every second and fourth Sunday afternoon from 2:30–5, including those like Patrick and Carl who were so enthusiastic about our Toastmasters sessions that they insisted we even meet on the day on which Chicago came to a standstill. Yes, I am proud of all you regulars. As it turned out, we never missed any other meeting.
 
The Lambda Rocket, or: How to Encourage Prospective Members
 
Spring arrived and with it the deadline for our charter application. According to the rules of Toastmasters International, we had to have at least 20 paid-up members before we could even apply for a charter. But that’s easier said than done, especially when your annual membership fee is $60.00. To encourage prospective members, we sent out two rocket letters with the number of paid-up members written on its body and the offer to join us for half the price for a six months trial period.

That special offer, together with regular telephone calls and a first-class program every second week, achieved the necessary results. We managed to sign up 23 members and sent our money and our application to Toastmasters headquarters in Santa Ana, California, anxious to know whether we would get accepted. After all, we knew that everybody at headquarters knew that we were a somewhat unusual club.
 
April 26, 1982: Toastmasters International Charters Lambda
 
Our group had become a great success in the gay community, thanks to our constant publicity and our programs, including workshops on assertiveness training, procrastination and time management, and interpersonal skills, but there was no response from Toastmasters headquarters. I was determined to continue my work with Lambda, even if it would not get accepted by Santa Ana. Some of us even developed emergency plans: What if ...?

Finally, tired of waiting, I simply called California. “Oh, yes,” said a woman, “your club has been chartered on April 26. Your club number? Let me see—4820-30. Someone is just lettering your official charter.” That day was probably one of the most exuberant in my life: having managed to convince a large international organization that a gay and lesbian chapter would be an asset to them.

Word spread in Chicago like wildfire: Lambda Toastmasters had been officially chartered (and beaten Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York). I am proud of Toastmasters International: they are way ahead of Rotary International, Lyons International … organizations which still bar women from membership, let alone gay and lesbian chapters.
 
Preparations for the Celebration of Celebrations
 
We were fortunate in having Dr. Dan Henderson as the chairman for our charter committee; he set up 399 subcommittees (or were there 4,711?) and made numerous invaluable suggestions. Hubert and I, together with Earl and the majority of our club members, helped Dan in bringing about what we considered to be the best of both worlds: the best of Toastmasters and the best of the gay community.

With a flow chart which took into consideration details as minute as the lighting over the piano and the type of print on the name tags for our guests, we tried to get at least some control of the uncontrollable. In the process, which stretched over many weeks, tempers flew, personalities clashed, threats of resignation outdid the intake of new members, but, lo and behold, the event of events finally did take place.
 
June 19, 1982: Lambda Toastmasters Charter Celebration
 
It so happened that our event coincided with Gay Pride Week. “Lambda Toastmaster Charter Celebration—coat and tie,” I read on numerous posters outside restaurants in Newtown; the same was true of GayLife and particularly Gay Chicago. It dawned on me that, apart from the Windy City Gay Chorus, we’re probably the only group in our community which always dresses professionally. When I arrived at the Bismarck Hotel in downtown Chicago, way ahead of time, I was greeted by live music from Tom H., one of the first members. Earl’s dinner jacket together with his welcome smile, the fresh flower bouquets on the table (one of his presents to us), the dimmed lights, and, above all, the air of excitement and expectation made me realize that my Lambda Toastmasters, when working together, outdid any group of professionals that I had come across in a voluntary organization.
 
But how would our guests from Toastmasters International react? And what would the many representatives of the gay community say?
 
“One of the Happiest Days in Our Life”
 
From the moment Lou Kiriazis and his wife walked in and greeted our parents who were sitting together with their Lambda sons at a special table of honor, I knew that we would experience a very harmonious evening. And when the head of Gay Horizons and the editor of GayLife began to converse with Sherry Sala, our governor, I felt mightily relieved. The two families had come together, at long last, to celebrate the union by chartering Lambda Toastmasters, the world’s first gay and lesbian Toastmasters club.

When the governor officially handed over the charter to me, I felt like jumping to the ceiling with joy (but that you reserve for your talk on, say, body language.) And when all 75 participants stood together and toasted, then held hands to say “Guten Apetit” before eating their dinner (to the music of Tom H., who probably went hungry that night)—gays and non-gays peacefully sitting together and communicating—I pinched myself secretly: had my dream really come true?

After several interesting speeches, including one by Ron Eheman, the lawyer and GayLife columnist, his colleague (in both capacities) and our dear friend, Paul R. Goldman, and Bill Kelley who did an excellent job in representing Chuck Renslow, and after a moving program by fellow Toastmasters (“Guess who’s coming to dinner—Famous gays and lesbians in history”) and a surprise speech by Terry Gorman, the director of the Lambda Resource Center for the Blind—somewhere in the middle of the performance of Garry Jones’ Blackstreet USA Puppet Theatre and the Windy City Gay Chorus’ concert—I realized that, yes, the union had taken place.

I’d like to take this opportunity to thank everybody who has contributed to this beautiful and historic event by quoting Lou Kiriazis, our International Director and Toastmaster of 14 years’ standing: “We’ve been to many charter celebrations but none could even be compared to yours. Your professionalism and your kindness overwhelmed us. It was one of the happiest days in our life.”
 
Lambda Newsletter
 
Earl, our editor, managed to get the first issue of our new newsletter out on time for the charter celebration and has kept producing one monthly issue ever since. A selection of the many different subjects reflects our development:

Famous Gays and Lesbians at Maturity; Hall of Fame: Lambda Rewards for Outstanding Achievements to Toastmasters and Leaders in the Gay Community; Griping Session; Regular Maturity support; Goldman and Renslow fellowships; Lambda Workshops at Discovery ’82; Lambda at Toastmasters Fall ’82 Conference; Lambda at Third Annual Gay Arts Festival; Lambda buddy system; Quotes from our visitors; Material on Lambda in America’s largest gay paper (The Advocate #356); Election for 1983 Lambda president and board members; and, for the Dec. 12 issue, an anniversary special: “Lambda Dialogue—Things which one usually doesn’t say.”

Again, many thanks to Earl (and Hubert) and to all those people who have helped with the newsletter, if only by creating Lambda Toastmasters news.
 
Paul R. Goldman & Chuck Renslow Fellowships
 
Two of the most active and influential people in Chicago’s gay world are attorney Paul R. Goldman, founder and president of Maturity, and GayLife publisher Chuck Renslow, gay rights activist, and owner of some of the most famous gay establishments (Goldcoast, Man’s Country). After I had successfully obtained a free vacation for two at Big Ruby’s in Florida (won by Adriel) and at the Saugatuck Lodges in Michigan (won by Chuck Renslow’s representative Bill Kelley), I tried to convince both Paul Goldman and Chuck Renslow of the importance of financing gays and lesbians to improve their communication and leadership skills and to pass them on to members of their own gay churches, synagogues, clubs, libraries, or clinics. Both Paul and Chuck agreed immediately.

In order to discuss the details, I tried to get through to the famous Renslow for many weeks—in vain. My letters were not answered, my calls were not returned—yet the charter celebration was about to take place and with it the announcement of the fellowships. In my desperation I tried a daring act of communication: I called his office and, when told for the umpteenth time that Mr. Renslow was in a conference (which, no doubt, he was), I said to the secretary in a stern voice, “This is the German ambassador. I have to speak to Mr. Renslow at once.” A few seconds later, the King of gay Chicago came on the line and agreed immediately to all the requests and details: the fellowships were secured. I have never found out whether Chuck Renslow was more puzzled by my chutzpah to ask for such an expensive gift or puzzled by my ambassadorial daring. At any rate, we received our ten fellowships on time. Thank you both, Chuck and Paul.
 
The First Three Fellowship Recipients
 
The first three fellowship recipients have become valuable club members: Sharon Davis, co-chair of Northwestern University’s Gay and Lesbian Alliance; Carl Offutt, active member of Dignity (the Roman Catholic gay group) and Black and White Men Together; and Tom M., a young lawyer and member of the Newtown Writers Group. In the future, we will continue to select carefully the recipients, give them our Toastmasters training, and hope that they will apply their skills both in their own life and in their respective community organizations.
 
Women and Lambda
 
Elaine was the first woman ever to participate in our programs; later, Eleonore, Britt, Arneda, Marge, and Harriet joined us. We were delighted. Unfortunately, most women did not stay for long, perhaps because they hardly ever came on the same day and probably felt isolated—a minority within a minority. However, when Faith joined, we all had great hopes that she would help to build up the number of women in Lambda.

​Faith was probably one of the most loved members, whose enthusiasm for our club was infectious: she played Sappho at our charter celebration without being even a club member at that time, she represented us at the Toastmasters training session for new Toastmasters without having a portfolio, and she created a dialogue amongst both men and women which represented the best in Lambda Toastmasters. Unfortunately, she moved to Minneapolis. Let’s think harder of how we can make our meetings more attractive to women in our community.
 
From the Present to the Future
 
The last paragraph already indicates that we have some way to go before we are fully integrated. But, a good beginning has been made. The same goes for our programs. I believe them to be amongst the best in Toastmasters, especially after reading 44 essays by my students at UIC who had visited two different Toastmasters clubs each. Our mentor and friend, Jim McNitt, shared with me the other day what he had told Toastmasters: “Lambda is as good a club as any. They’re doing a fine job.” Thank you, Jim. I am delighted that we have found Jim Merrill who has been elected to serve as the new president in 1983, together with a dynamic new board, all of whom have promised to help the Lambda kid to grow from adolescence to adulthood.
 
Dialogue, Instead of a Final Farewell
 
Before this short history turns into book length—it easily could, just look at the many minutes of our board meetings, let alone the best and the worst which happened and went unreported—I’d like to come to a close by saying that my experiences with Toastmasters and with the gay community in America have opened my eyes to some of the most beautiful aspects of human interaction. For that I’m grateful. But they have also made me aware of some of the traps which await anybody who’s dealing with a large group of people. I have learned a lot. For that, too, I’m grateful. This past year, the year of Lambda, has presented me with more friends than ever before, but also with a few extra gray hairs; I’ve experienced more joy than before, but also more unexpected pain. But that’s life.
 
Sappho & Plato: Lambda Heritage 2500 Years Old
 
Dear Lambda, our “baby,” now that you’ve come of age let me explain your heritage. It dates back 2500 years when all citizens of Athens were required to develop their oratory skills in order to better serve the community—a kind of obligatory Toastmasters society for all adults. Plato, the philosopher who had stressed the search for truth rather than the mere technical approach to the persuasive aspect of rhetoric, and Sappho, the famous poet from the island of Lesbos who taught her art to “a group of maiden to whom she was devotedly attached” (Funk Wagnalls New Encyclopedia 21:109), are amongst the first people in recorded history who have contributed to our gay and lesbian heritage and awareness.
 
Lambda: From Greek Letter to International Symbol
 
Lambda, the eleventh letter of the Greek alphabet, stands for love, learning, liberation, and leadership. During the last few years, the international gay and lesbian community has adopted the name Lambda as a significant symbol which links us with all gay and lesbian people in the past, in spite of all the historic documents which were either manipulated, destroyed, or never written in the first place. Lambda stands for gay and lesbian sensitivity and awareness, and so, dear Lambda kid, carry your name proudly, for you represent the best of both worlds.
 
From Lambda to Stonewall and Triangle Toastmasters?
 
In the years to come, dear Lambda, you might even grow and mature in such a way that you want to spawn and raise your own children: Toastmasters clubs which you might want to call Triangle, or Stonewall, or. . . Remember, the future is yours!
 
Happy Birthday, Dear Lambda
 
I hope that all of you at Lambda Toastmasters and you, our gay and non-gay friends, will continue to give us your support. We need you to grow. We need you to become the club we really would like to be: not the best or the biggest, but a Toastmasters club which works consistently, professionally, and effectively, made up of members who care and who show an active commitment to Toastmasters and the communication and leadership program—a club which is open to all people who believe in equality and growth through dialogue. Once more, many thanks to all of you who cared for the growth and development of our kid. HAPPY BIRTHDAY, DEAR LAMBDA.
 
I Will Always Remember
 
I have been honored to serve you as the founder and first president of Lambda Toastmasters. I will always remember this year, and I will always remember and be grateful for your encouragement and your support.
 
With all my love,
Martin Thomas [my pseudonym at the time] 

By “event,” I employ the Passover question: “Why is this night different from all other nights?” In other words, why is the story that’s being told happening tonight? What was happening yesterday? How would it differ if it began the day after? The stakes must be high for the characters in the play for sparks to fly.

Eger: Which plays that show characters with “sparks flying” inspired you the most?

Margulies: My playwriting curriculum contains plays I read and was inspired by when I was becoming a playwright—plays like Betrayal, Glengarry Glen Ross, Top Girls, Mad Forest, Six Degrees of Separation, Fires in the Mirror, Aunt Dan and Lemon, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and Our Town.
​
Eger: I have seen many performances of COLLECTED STORIES over the years. Two of the most powerful ones featured the late Lynn Redgrave as Professor Ruth Steiner and Karina Mackenzie as her protégée (at the Grand Opera in Wilmington, DE). I also witnessed an even more brutal performance by Renee Weisband as the aging professor and Kirsten Quinn as her enthusiastic graduate student and assistant at Walnut Street Theatre’s Studio 5.

Could you describe some of the most striking and creative productions of COLLECTED STORIES that you have seen?

Margulies: I regret that I didn’t get to see Lynn Redgrave’s performance. I met her only once, a short time before her death, and she told me that playing Ruth was one of the highlights of her career.
​
I have been honored by the great actresses who have taken Ruth on, starting with Kandis Chappell, who was present at the play’s creation at the Sundance Playwrights’ Institute in 1995, and later did the premiere at South Coast Rep (SCR), and at least two other regional productions before returning to SCR for the 20th anniversary production; Maria Tucci (opposite Debra Messing) and Uta Hagen, who starred in off-Broadway productions; Helen Mirren was in it on the West End with Anne-Marie Duff; Stockard Channing and Laura Benanti did a marvelous one-night benefit reading in New York; and Linda Lavin first played Ruth at the Geffen, on PBS, at a small theater in North Carolina, and finally on Broadway, in 2010, opposite Sarah Paulson.

Eger: Do you try to see all productions of COLLECTED STORIES? 

Margulies: I don’t make a habit of seeing productions of my plays beyond their premieres, so aside from the ones listed above, I haven’t seen too many of them. I was intrigued when I learned that a Berlin production was performed in someone’s living room, and that a recent reading in New York took place in the Rare Books Room at the Strand Book Store—those I would have liked to have seen.

Eger: You once wrote, “I think COLLECTED STORIES has traveled well because its themes cross cultures. Mentors and protégés exist everywhere.” Into how many languages has your extraordinary drama been translated, and how was it received overseas? Similarly, how many productions have taken place in North America and overseas?
​
Margulies: I don’t know the exact number of productions in regional and nonprofessional theaters across the United States, but I would guess dozens—over a hundred in the U.S. in the past eight years. I am aware of foreign-language productions taking place in France, Germany, Denmark, Japan, Italy, Bulgaria, Romania, Israel, Brazil, Belgium, and Spain. It’s also been done in Australia, Canada, and the U.K.

Eger: What do you think is the ultimate secret of the success of this shocking, yet profoundly moving play?

Margulies: Ruth and Lisa may be teacher and student, but theirs is also an intense surrogate mother-daughter relationship; parents get old as children grow and succeed them. It’s a timeless story, really.

Eger: In spite of any social restraints—real or perceived—have you found that over the course of time you have become increasingly willing to tackle sensitive subjects?

Margulies: Readers and observers of my work may be better equipped to make that judgment because I’m not aware of approaching my work any differently. I don’t set out to write political plays, but am often told that my plays are political. I just try to tell the truth. If that’s political, then I’m a political writer.

Eger: With more experience and plays under your belt, has writing become any easier? Have audiences and critics impacted your way of writing and seeing your work?
​
Margulies: When I was just starting out as a writer, I used to imagine that time and experience would make writing come more naturally, that it wouldn’t always feel like, well, work. Instead, I’ve discovered that it hasn’t gotten any easier; the expectations that accompany honors and a growing audience make writing more difficult. There are more eyes on you. People are eager to see what you come up with next. Critics compare your work and rank them.

Eger: I loved your admission, “My writing process is fitful.”

Margulies: It can take me four years between plays, during which I’m busy with teaching, productions, and film projects, even if I don’t immediately have a new play in the works. I’m not the kind of playwright who has ten play ideas sitting in a file. My inspiration comes one play at a time; I know it when I feel it, and I can’t fake it.

When my latest play, The Country House, was on Broadway, I accepted a fellowship from Nashville Repertory’s Ingram New Works Festival because I thought it would give me the impetus to start a new play. It did. I began exploring the relationship between estranged adult brothers, in Long Lost.

Like most of my work, it began with snippets of dialogue, chunks of monologues, and over-writing. I don’t know where I’m going when I start out, only that I have a visceral feeling that something is indeed there and I have to locate it. I can only find it by writing; sometimes the writing isn’t toward it but around it or nowhere near it.

Eger: What are you working on these days—fitfully or otherwise?

Margulies: I don’t always start at the beginning. I start wherever I think my characters will have the most interesting things to say. A structure begins to emerge from the pages; I rarely know how a play is shaped when I’m starting out. I like staying busy, so I always have more than one project in the works, each at a different stage of development.

While doing press for the film, The End of the Tour—which I adapted from Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip With David Foster Wallace by David Lipsky—it’s difficult to concentrate on much else.
Long Lost has been dormant for weeks but tugs at me incessantly; I’m writing the book for a musical based on Father of the Bride, for Disney Theatricals, while researching a new screenplay, this one based on Kevin Birmingham’s book, The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle For James Joyce’s Ulysses, and I will soon begin research for a historical miniseries.
Now I’m getting anxious thinking about all the work I have to do.

Eger: I’m sure I’m not the only one who can’t wait for your next play—anxious or non-anxious.

​The folk opera A Night in the Old Marketplace had its world premiere at Philadelphia’s Prince Music Theater. Based on Isaac Leib Peretz’s Bei Nakht Oyfn Altn Mark, the play presents poetic images in a dream-like atmosphere where a multitude of different characters appear onstage. 

According to Glen Berger, who wrote the book and lyrics for Marketplace, “Peretz’s original play is filled to brimming with moving, startling poetry, but is lacking in anything that could be called ‘plot’.” Not wanting to lose the poetry of the play, he and composer Frank London and director Alexandra Aron (who conceptualized the project), “married it to music, with many of Peretz’s original lines either directly incorporated into song or inspiring the songs.” 

Berger’s editing of Peretz’s language allowed for one unusual statement after another, for example, “he will drown in a spoonful of water,” turning the old marketplace into a landscape of hell, and stripping the original Yiddish text down to its essence while trying to translate old joys and fears into our own hopeful, though angst-ridden times. 

The creative team—Aron, Berger, and London—tried to stay true to the absurdist view of Jewish life that Peretz had presented, while at the same time incorporating it into a modern medium where Eastern European klezmer music blends with American jazz. 

Peretz presented an almost Gordian Knot for the New York-based theatre artists who recognized that to make this old play come alive again, they had to cut through the many hundreds of figures, apparitions, and even animals that appeared in Peretz’s original Yiddish manuscript. 

The resulting work, part musical, part folk opera, looked and felt like a Vaudevillian mosaic, created out of the “seemingly unproduceable vision in verse,” which brought to the stage what Aron calls “a fevered dreamscape” that showed the “contradictory impulses toward Jewish culture” in a writer “whose heart was devoted to the religious world of the shtetl, despite all of its seemingly backward mores.” To create some kind of coherence, the team foregrounded three protagonists: the Recluse, the passed-over bridegroom Nosn, and the wedding jester Badkhn, who planned rebellion in Russian-dominated Poland—ten years before the October Revolution of 1917—raising his fist against "God or whoever is running this universe." 

The plot centers on the transformation of a wealthy, ugly old man (Guil Fisher) who marries a beautiful young woman (Deborah Grausman) who pines for a handsome young fellow (the lively Steven Rattazzi), but for economic reasons gets forced to put her family over her feelings. After she commits suicide by drowning in a well at the marketplace of the little shtetl, the old husband turns into a recluse, making him act like the half brother of Moses in a mental desert and the blinded King Lear in a Polish shtetl. 

The mad Badkhn (the stunning Ray Wills) adds to the play’s coherence. His extraordinary wide-range presented a kind of visual vox populi, with as many facial expressions as characters in the original Peretz play, and a voice so alluring that he even managed to get the audience to sing along. 

With these eccentric characters, plus a very tall, attractive young woman Gargoyle (the beautifully voiced Charlotte Cohn), made to look like a pre-op transvestite with platform-heeled boots racing, almost flying, across the stage, and playing tricks on the main characters, some theatre-goers may misread this musical as a campy Halloween entertainment. 

However, the Gargoyle acted as one of the prime movers in bringing out the multi-layered character of this play where past, present, and future come together as frighteningly as in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, but without Dickens’ neat and logical plot. Rather, the viewers are drawn into a wild, medieval, Jewish Totentanz—a modern Danse Macabre—uniting everyone, the living and the dead alike. 

Tine Kindermann and Mor Erlich’s brilliant stop motion animations flashed onto a backdrop above a cemetery (designed by Lauren Helpern), making old woodcuts come alive, and enhancing the eerie nature of a production in which a headless (Melinda Blake) and a tongueless (Mathew Burrow) character added to the surreal, dream-like, nightmarish atmosphere. 

Tyler Micoleau’s lighting ran a red beam across the stage like curdled blood when the dead were being called from the grave, all supported by Nick Kourtides’ electrifying sound design. The costumes by Levi Okunov, the 22-year old Hassidic wunderkind fashion designer from New York City, might have stunned on a catwalk in Paris, but here they varied between illuminating the dream-like quality of the play and giving design historians a reason to cringe. 

Lauren Helpern’s scenic design seemed plain in contrast to the rich subject matter this play explored, although when the gates to the cemetery opened, the stage came alive, as it did beautifully when a white chuppah flowed from above like a blessing with the young couple walking right underneath it. Recent Barrymore winner Karen Getz’s choreography tried to blend traditional Jewish dances with modern elements, but only managed to create embarrassing, awkward movements, particularly when the four Yashiva students—two “Yashiva boys” and two bearded “Yahiva girls” dressed like men with stuck on beards—were prancing across the stage. 

To appreciate this unusual musical, one has to accept melodrama as part of the dream-like convention that was popular in 19th C. drama, with young women dying and spirits bringing them back to the stage. To understand this play, one has to see the wider picture, namely, the attempt to create a whole new vision of life, however fantastic, and I admire the Prince Music Theater for their courage to once again open their season with an ambitious new work. 

In a way, experiencing A Night in the Old Marketplace feels like seeing Dadaism having reached a Polish shtetl. This musical unearthed a wide-range of human experiences, including doubting God, conflicted feelings about “the revolution,” a belief in the supernatural, and a chance for redemption that Job, the torn soul in the most difficult part of the Bible, experienced, except that the Jobs in this play are down-to-earth, small-village folks who rise and fall with their feelings and experiences for the entire uninterrupted 90 minutes of the play. 

The scene with the smashed wedding glass presents perhaps one of the most symbolic parts of the play. Nosn, once a hopeful young bridegroom who got deprived of his bride, now an aging bachelor, permanently carries around a red bag with the wedding shards of his rival—a daily reminder of his defeat and his guilty memory of his part in the premature death of his bride. However, at the end, in the wedding with the dead, the Badkhn transforms those splinters and shards of the past into a new glass and holds it up for all to see: a moment where hope wins over guilt and even death.
​
----------------------------------------
A Night in the Old Marketplace
at Philadelphia’s Prince Music Theater 
September 28 - October 21 2007 
Book and Lyrics by Glen Berger 
Music by Frank London 
Conceived by Alexandra Aron 
Inspired by I.L. Peretz

This review was originally published by All About Jewish Theatre, Tel Aviv, Israel, September 2007. Available via the Wayback Machine.

​Although Philadelphia is separated from Jerusalem by 9313 kilometers (or 5787 miles), in the city of Brotherly Love feelings still run high among Jewish-Americans on Israeli-Palestinian issues. The Interact Theatre, under Artistic Director Seth Rozin, which aims to “change the world, one play at a time," presented free staged readings of four plays (see below) and a panel discussion as part of the Israeli-Palestinian Theatre Festival, all centered around the world premiere of Larry Loebell’s House, Divided. 

While House, Divided received outstanding reviews and large audiences, many in the Philadelphia Jewish Community seem skeptical vis-à-vis Palestinian-Israeli dialogues. However, no event brought in more people than the reading of My Name is Rachel Corrie, delivered with a wide-range of feelings and a powerful sense of humanity by Philadelphia actress Julianna Zinkel. Corrie, who acknowledged the suffering of Jewish people, also wrote, “The scariest thing for non-Jewish Americans in talking about Palestinian self-determination is the fear of being or sounding anti-Semitic. [. . . .] but I think it’s important to draw a firm distinction between the policies of Israel as a state and Jewish people."

Corrie’s story found resonance during the panel discussion, which featured Rosi Greenberg, a young Jewish woman and daughter of a rabbi who went to Israel with Birthright, stayed with an ultra-Orthodox family in Jerusalem for one month, and then lived with a Palestinian family for two months. As a result of these experiences, she said she felt strengthened in her Jewish heritage; however, like Corrie, she identified with Palestinians and clearly distinguished between Israeli state policies and Jewish people who reach out and search for peaceful solutions. 

The reading and the panel prompted a great deal of discussion among panel members and from the audience. Several older people present told me that they were very skeptical and had heard negative things about the diary of Rachel Corrie. However, they admitted that they were deeply moved and even cried, but most of all, recognized that there needs to be more dialogue. 

Panelist Rabbi Nancy Fuchs Kreimer said that Jewish people have been oppressed for over 2000 years and were always the victims, people without any power. However, since 1948, things have changed dramatically, and Israelis now struggle with a human use of power and force. She added that these conflicts have fractured Jewish communities, and that even within Jewish families, the rifts can run very deep, well illustrated by Interact’s production of Loebell’s play. 

Responding to her comments, one person present compared the treatment of Palestinians to that of Native Americans, who were deprived of their land and their rights. Another audience member offered a litmus test for learning and understanding, explaining that putting oneself into the position of the other can create a shift in perspective, where dialogue and more creative solutions can evolve. The Rabbi concluded the panel by encouraging everyone to read Israeli books and newspapers, including Haaretz, and pointed out that while Jewish-Americans often tend to see things in black-and-white terms, many Israelis are significantly more informed and far more flexible. 

Afterwards, a Jewish attendee wrote to say, “Many of us here spend much time trying to make sense of it all. Tough, heartfelt, eye-opening conversations occur between folks who are willing to not just listen, but really hear. Sometimes it's not very easy -- especially letting go of long held beliefs that can trigger anger, fear, disappointment . . . [But] Much good work around this is being done by the Jewish Dialogue Group and those that support them." Clearly, the Interact’s Israeli/Palestinian festival had not only stirred up feelings, but initiated future dialogues by using these plays and issues to generate a process of thought and reflection. 

Below, the full schedule of Interact Theatre Company’s Israeli/Palestinian Play Festival: 

Saturday, June 7, 2008 
11:00 a.m. Concert Reading : Dirty Story
written by John Patrick Shanley, directed by Sean Christopher Lewis 
From the acclaimed author of Doubt and Moonstruck comes this metaphorical and satirical take on the relationship between Israel and the Palestinian people, as an itinerant young writer moves in with her surly middle-aged mentor only to embark on a truly dysfunctional relationship, abetted by an equally dysfunctional British and American duo. 

2:00 p.m Concert Reading : My Name is Rachel Corrie,
Adapted from Rachel Corrie’s personal diary by Alan Rickman and Katharine Viner, directed by John Bellomo, featuring Julianna Zinkel 
The controversial one-woman play chronicles a young American woman’s observations and insights as she travels to the West Bank to fight for the Palestinian cause and, ultimately, dies at the hands of an Israeli bulldozer while standing in front of a Palestinian home. 

4:00 p.m.: Symposium 
A panel discussion examining different perspectives on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. 
Featuring Rosie Greenberg, Rabbi Nancy Fuchs Kreimer & Marlena Santoyo of the Jewish Voice for Peace 

8:00 p.m.: Mainstage Performance House, Divided, written by Larry Loebell, directed by Seth Rozin 

Sunday, June 8, 2008 
11:00 a.m.: Concert Reading : Reading Hebron,
written by Jason Sherman, directed by Seth Reichgott 
A Canadian Jew, while struggling with his own religious and cultural identity, becomes obsessed with the Palestinian cause in the wake of the massacre at the mosque in Hebron. 

2:00 p.m.: Mainstage Performance House, Divided, written by Larry Loebell, directed by Seth Rozin 

7:00 p.m.: Concert Reading : Goliath,
written by Karen Hartmann, directed by Lisa Jo Epstein 
A family of settlers are forced to evacuate their house by a conflicted Israeli army officer, revealing divisions within the Jewish community. 

This review was originally published by All About Jewish Theatre, Tel Aviv, Israel, June 2008. Available via the Wayback Machine.

​My grandfather, a military officer during WWI brought up his sons to believe in militarism as a kind of religion where Germany had to be defended against evil on a permanent basis. One of his sons, my father, although critical of his father’s life, became a propaganda officer and foreign correspondent in Occupied France during WWII, where he vehemently supported the Third Reich. My father had nothing but negative things to say about Jewish people whom he clearly did not know, let alone understand. 

Two years ago, I found his correspondence with my mother and wrote Metronome Ticking, a docudrama about the Third Reich and the Holocaust. Sitting inside Philadelphia’s intimate Interact Theatre and witnessing the clashes of Jewish parents and their children in Israel and the United States, I was powerfully reminded of the struggles of ideologies among siblings, among fathers and sons in this world premiere of Larry Loebell’s House, Divided, a play about two brothers and their sons who are divided by faith, yet held loosely together by blood. 

I realized very quickly that this play goes way beyond a struggle among people of one ethnic or religious minority; rather, a House, Divided is the youngest successor to the old struggle of Titans that we know from Greek mythology, where the Titanic Elders—a race of powerful deities—ruled during the legendary Golden Age before being overthrown by a race of younger gods, the Olympians, a Greek borrowing from the Ancient Near East, which included (modern) Israel and Palestine. 

Loebell’s deeply challenging play shows two primeval characters: Doug Goldstein (Paul Meshejian), a liberal director of Amnesty International, who sees himself as a citizen of the world, trying to bring together warring factions in Israel and Palestine, and his brother Lou Goldstein (David Howey), who left the United States at a young age to live in Israel, where he became a militant Zionist, joined the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), and after retirement, works as a tour guide, arguing his version of history to American tourists. Both these Titan brothers see their Jewish identity in dramatically different ways: 

Doug married a Catholic woman, and despite Lou telling him “that this isn’t a Jewish house,” desperately tried to keep the relationship with his brother and father together, feeling terrible that neither of them had anything to do with him and would not even attend his wedding to a non-Jew. His brother Lou remained as inflexible as the old Greek Titans and brought up his son Oren (Davy Raphaely) to become an ardent defender of Israel as a young soldier in the IDF. Back in the US, Doug’s son Paul (Dan Hodge)—who is neither Jewish by birth nor by upbringing—leads the life of a modern American twenty-something with very few traditions and with computer science becoming his religion, at least at first glance. 

Like the best of Johann Sebastian Bach’s music, Loebell composed his latest play with rich detail and an almost mathematical construction, reminiscent of Leibniz’s insight that music, like a good play, “is a secret exercise in arithmetic of the soul.” Loebell probes deep into those two souls by showing their younger selves, who appear physically onstage in a filmic device that flashbacks over 30 years ago to show the young Doug (Noah Herman) and young Lou (Robert Daponte) clashing as they slowly begin to discover those ideologies that will shape their values and fuel their actions and reactions for the rest of their lives. 

Following the fate of the Greek Elders, those Titans who appeared all powerful but who were challenged and eventually replaced by the younger Olympians, Doug and Lou each seem invulnerable only to discover eventually that their two sons are challenging their fathers in unexpected ways. Doug’s son Paul—the ultra-modern American with no values other than a belief in technology—not only irks his father’s pacifist tradition by designing violent video war games, but in spite of his father’s refusal to raise him in the Jewish tradition, later longs for some Jewish identity that will ground him, stunning the audience with an unexpected shift in his allegiance. 

Similarly, the militant Zionist with Orthodox Jewish values and a firm belief in Jewish traditions—that goes so deep that he would not even attend the funeral of his sister-in-law—suddenly discovers that his son Oren, like the Olympians of old, challenges those power positions by beginning to sympathize with the Palestinians after he has been ordered to participate in collective punishments, the destruction of houses, and arrests on no evidence. His conclusion: the IDF only creates bitterness and anger for Arabs, Palestinians, and Israelis alike. 

When Lou’s son Oren realizes that “it is impossible for anyone in our esteemed military to see resistance as anything except a mental deficiency,” he tries to desert the IDF by fleeing to the US. In response, his inflexible father hurls this almost Biblical threat at his confused son: “If you do not come back now, you will never again be allowed into Israel. You will never be able to come home.” 

In one of several challenges to his father, young Oren asks, “Didn’t you teach me there’s a civic duty to resist evil? What we blame the average German for. Not resisting the evil of Hitler?” Outraged over such a comparison, the father slaps his adult son hard: “How dare you suggest . . . We have no concentration camps. We’re not exterminating.” 

But while it outrages Lou when his son makes a Nazi comparison, thirty years earlier, Young Lou clearly wanted to use Hitler for his own purposes when he said to his brother Doug about his Catholic fiancée: “If you marry this woman and you have children with her, your children will not be Jewish. You annihilate thirty five hundred years of history in one generation. You annihilate yourself just as surely as if you had let the Nazis do it. If you marry her, you finish Hitler’s work.” 

Loebell takes his audience on a rollercoaster journey into Hades. Several times during the play, members of the audience gasped and made comments, especially during the scene in which Oren describes how he was “ordered to remove a woman from her house . . . So I had to drag her–with her baby, into the street.” 

At that moment, an elderly lady in the second row shouted, “oh, bullshit.” The play clearly was getting under the skin of a number of people in the audience, demonstrating, literally, a house divided, hopefully leading to many fruitful discussions about our actions as human beings, often based on deeply seated, hidden values. Loebell’s play relentlessly shines a light on almost every corner of this divided house, for example, when he has the young Israeli soldier confess to a brutal treatment of Palestinians: “I was holding his wife prisoner while our soldiers, my friends, shot her husband. I was expected to shoot her if she ran. He hadn’t done anything but run away in fear. We were doing business as usual.” 

Just as Bach used a highly calculated approach to musical composition, Loebell presents an almost mathematical balance of different views and ideologies in his play, but with a conversational, intuitive writing style. He fills his script with an extraordinary mixture of poison and counter-poison, of understanding and misunderstanding, of love and hate, of foolishness and wisdom, and often shows these aspects through facts and insights that are based on talking with countless people, many years of studying modern history, and visiting Israel (commissioned through a grant from the  Foundation for Jewish Culture). 

For example, Loebell has the Zionist brother present a view that hits the audience hard with this statement: “All those years Arafat promised compromise in English he was saying death to Israel to his followers in Arabic. And they [Westerners] loved him because he lied to the West and proved you [Americans] foolish.” Later, Doug, the liberal American pacifist who gave up on following Jewish traditions, let alone religious practices, gets equally challenged by his brother and near the end of the play, by his own son in ways that stunned this reviewer and most likely, the audience. 

Although House, Divided spans three decades across two nations separated by thousands of miles, on the small stage at the Interact Theatre, Seth Rozin’s staging created a battlefield on which the two Titans could clash, almost non-stop and from the very beginning. The production was supported by Dirk Durossett’s scenic design, costumes by Susan Smythe, and the dramaturgy of Rebecca Wright who, according to Loebell, had strongly impacted the play’s development by asking a number of helpful, challenging questions from the very beginning. Additionally, Loebell told me that the actors all contributed to the final version of his play. 

In spite of the clashing ideologies and the age differences, the actors formed a balanced ensemble with well-developed characters, strong giants with clay feet, giving the actors a chance to show fine nuances.
Howey showed a very aggressive Lou, who relentlessly hammered away at everyone who did not share his views, especially the more balanced Meshejian, who got rattled by his brother and allowed himself to get drawn into the verbal fights. I was particularly impressed by Hodge’s natural portrayal of the young American Olympian who seemed a computer nerd at first but who transformed into a very committed man, a role played without any signs of effort. Similarly, the Israeli-born Raphaely’s performance as Oren showed a subtlety of feelings and thoughts that suited this role perfectly, almost developing his character into an Israeli Hamlet, a young man unsure of which choice to make. 

I left the theatre still hearing the many voices in Arabic, Hebrew, English, German and other languages that at the conclusion of the show created a cacophony of radio and television comments, each drowning out the other one. Out of the depth of these voices, I heard my father, the man who hated Jews until he witnessed a mass execution in Russia in 1944 and then wrote: “Read more than my letters, read that which I did not write, read that which could shatter my heart.” 

Just as I, as a non-Jewish person, am struggling with my own identity, dethroning those old German Titans of the Third Reich, I strongly identify with Loebell’s play, which most likely will shatter many perceptions that people might have of Jewish people. I am convinced that this play will be performed and studied not only in Israel and in the US, but in many other countries. Even though I am aware that we live in a fractured world, through Loebell’s play, the house divided can perhaps become a house united, or at least become a place where peaceful inquiry on all sides is made possible. 
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The World Premiere of HOUSE, DIVIDED 
Written by Larry Loebell 
Directed by Seth Rozin 
May 23 - June 22, 2008 
intimate Interact Theatre 2030 Sansom Street • Philadelphia, PA 19103 • Phone: 215-568-8077
Web: http://www.interacttheatre.org/2007-2008-feature-4.html 
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​This review was originally published by All About Jewish Theatre, Tel Aviv, Israel, July 2008. Available via the Wayback Machine.

​This review was originally published by All About Jewish Theatre, Tel Aviv, Israel, September 2009. Available via the Wayback Machine.

​Adolf Hitler liked the grand, 1,750-seat Admiralspalast Theater in Berlin so much that he had a huge royal box built for him and his Nazi entourage to see a fare of his favorites: light operettas like The Merry Widow which he saw during World War II. Little did he know that three generations later, he would be ridiculed at the same theatre with the gay mayor of Berlin, Klaus Wowereit, sitting in that famous, although now reduced, royal box during opening night of The Producers by Mel Brooks and Thomas Meehan. During the Third Reich, Hitler’s henchmen would have dragged the mayor, Mel Brooks, and all Jews and gays in the audience out of the theatre and deported them to a concentration camp. 

Before the Nazis made the Admiralspalast one of their favorite theaters, it was, as Britain’s Daily Mail pointed out, “a 1920s 'pleasure palace', complete with a variety theatre, spa, casino and brothel. Its basement bar was said to be the inspiration for the Kit Kat Club in the musical Cabaret. Goebbels kept a close eye on the repertoire. The management still has his signed edict banning the works of singer Richard Tauber because of his Jewish ancestry.” 

The Führer Returns to Berlin 

It’s against this background of a unique, history-heavy location that the very first performance of The Producers in Germany brought in critics from around the world to witness not only the production itself but to observe audience responses and to interview people in Berlin. Many of the critics, German and non-German alike, reflected on any possible connection between a Jewish-American playwright—who makes fun of Jewish business people, Hitler, gays, blond bombshells, even old ladies—and the German psyche today. 

Not so in the United States. Reviewing The Producers at the famous Walnut Street Theatre in Philadelphia, which was playing at the same time as the one in Berlin, most American critics might as well have written about a production of Oklahoma in Oklahoma City or Madame Butterfly in Nagasaki. With a few exceptions, I did not find many reviewers who probed nooks and crannies of the American psyche—“Can we really laugh at Jews and all the other groups?” the way critics and audience members in Germany asked. Rather, it seemed self-understood that, yes, in America one can make fun of almost anyone. What’s the fuss? 

Historical Countdown: Berlin and Philadelphia 

Ultimately, critics on both sides of the Atlantic constructed their own versions of The Producers, with some critics happily deconstructing the musical. Clearly, writers are schlepping around as many histories and ideologies as anyone else, as witnessed by the many reviews that were written about productions at the Walnut Street Theatre, the oldest, continually operating theater in the English-speaking world, now 200 years old. Today, with over 56,000 subscribers annually, the Walnut is the most subscribed theater company in the world. It has seen on its stage some of the greatest entertainers and actors since 1809. 

For example, when Hitler arrived on the world stage in 1933, the Walnut produced The Curtain Rises, a play which takes place in Vienna, a city which, five years later, raised the Hitler salute in such a way that it extended the hunt for Jewish and gay people all over Austria. The Walnut, by contrast, presented Yiddish theatre in the mid 1930’s under the guidance of Maurice Schwartz who was often called the “Yiddish Barrymore.” “When we finally stamp out the plague,” Hitler confided in Martin Borman via a memorandum in 1941, “we shall have accomplished for mankind a deed whose significance our men out there on the battlefield cannot even imagine yet." In December of 1941, Hitler declared war on the United States. 

Unperturbed, the Walnut Street Theatre produced Native Son by Orson Wells in 1942. The same year, the Walnut cast famous stars like Katherine Hepburn, Gregory Peck, and Gloria Swanson. And in 1944, at the height of the extermination of Jews, gays, gypsies, Communists, and countless other groups, the Walnut Street Theatre produced the stage adaptation of Embezzled Heaven by Franz Werfel, the internationally acclaimed Jewish expressionist writer and contemporary of Franz Kafka, Max Brod, Martin Buber, and other Jewish intellectuals. Werfel who had married Gustav Mahler’s widow, managed to escape first Anschluss-Austria and then occupied France to settle in the United States. 

No Poetry, No Humor after Auschwitz 

In 1945, Hitler committed suicide; his Reich of a thousand years collapsed after only twelve years, leaving millions of people dead. The name Hitler and anything to do with the Nazi regime became a subject so horrendous that hardly anyone in Germany dared to talk about it. This sense of guilt may have been what led Theodor Adorno, four years after the end of World War II, to quit composing and declare: “Nach Auschwitz noch ein Gedicht zu schreiben ist barbarisch” (“Writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric”).

And yet, only a few weeks ago, the Berliner Zeitung asked, “Can there still be humor after Hitler?” The answer may have shocked Adorno: Yes, “Comedians like Mel Brooks have proved it.” 

Alices in Wonderland & The Wizard of Oz: East Coast Critics 

Most of the critics who reviewed the Walnut Street Theatre production of The Producers shared that perspective and took the readers on an enjoyable, if at times bumpy journey. Joel Markowitz, of the DC Theatre Scene, wrote that the director and choreographer of the Philadelphia production, Mark Robin, had helped the actors “find the heart of the musical in, of all places, The Wizard of Oz.” 

Dan Rottenberg, editor of the Broad Street Review, compared the Philadelphia production with a classical Victorian fantasy world inhabited by larger-than-life creatures: “In the Walnut’s production the roles of Max and Leo are capably handled by Ben Lipitz and Ben Dibble, but they come across less as zany characters in their own right than as Alices in Wonderland confronting a succession of far more memorable goofballs: Jeffrey Coon as the crazy Nazi playwright Franz Liebkind, Amy Bodnar as the Swedish bombshell Ulla, Jeremy Webb as the prancing director, Roger DeBris, and above all Robert McClure, who as Roger’s assistant/lover Carmen Ghia steals every scene with his over-the-top mincing theatrics.” 

Similarly, Toby Zinman of the Philadelphia Inquirer presents “a jolly revival at the Walnut Street Theatre” where “The minor characters steal the show, especially the sublimely funny Robert McClure as Carmen Ghia, the moue-making, fluttery assistant to gay director Roger DeBris (Jeremy Webb). Jeffrey Coon as the Nazi playwright, keeper of the Nazi pigeons, with his mighty voice and huge stage presence, is a treat.” 

Enthusiasm for The Walnut Street Theatre Production 

Patti Buehler of the Broadway World saw the Walnut Street Theatre production as “definitely one of their best recent stage offerings as the opening night roars attested to . . . Colleen Grady's costume designs and Robert Andrew Kovach's sets are impressive and well suit this madcap musical. The cast, a mix of New York and Philly regulars is wonderful overall.” 

Not surprisingly, Lewis Whittington, reviewing the Philadelphia production of The Producers for the Edge, a Boston-based hip and gay-friendly publication, observed how “Brooks dishes out the burlesque and schmaltz, plus a high degree of glittering camp, making the show a bubbling over gay soufflé.” Dibble, who played one of the producers, laughed when he shared that Marc Robin, the director-choreographer, “wanted to make this a pretty bawdy production. We were shocked some of what we were rehearsing stayed in.” Critic Rottenberg wryly added: “While recalling the good old days when his chorus girls had ‘the biggest tits,’ Leo’s gesticulating hands inadvertently administer a feel to a passing nun.” 

Claudia Perry of Aisle Say joined the chorus of those reviewers who gave a standing ovation to the Walnut Street production. She described Jeremy Webb as “simply super as Roger de Bris, the very fey director. Standing with impunity in a dress that makes him look like the Chrysler Building.” Lesley Valdes, of Public Broadcasting, summarized the show: “The old gags still work and there are fresh ones in a new production that makes the downright bawdy look smart. So many showpieces are show stoppers.” 

Not every writer, however, was pleased with the Walnut Street production. For example, a number of critics like Patty Buehler of Broadway World objected to the “lack of chemistry between the two ‘Bens’ who play the key roles.” She describes “Ben Lipitz, who does an admirable job, [but who] seems to labor a bit getting into this tough role, while Ben Dibble simply soars as the innocent, slightly neurotic partner. Vocally, Dibble nails his songs while Lipitz seems to struggle with some of his scenes and runs out of steam on the difficult song ‘Betrayed’. The role of Ulla played by Amy Bodnar, a lovely vocal angel, leaves you wanting more over the top comedy and naughtiness. Jeremy Webb's Roger DeBris is eccentrically wonderful, while his Hitler is not all that funny and lacks direction.” 

Standard theatre reviews 

A widely read theatre critic of the Philadelphia Weekly glosses over the deeper issues which The Producers raises. Like a number of other reviewers in Philadelphia, he has little to say that goes beyond general observations: “Along the way Brooks manages to insult everyone: gays, Jews, blacks, women—no group is spared. Because he offends all groups equally, the humor never seems mean-spirited.” 

Overall, it appears that many Philadelphia critics limited themselves to a description of the action, direction, dancing, acting, singing, stage design, etc., and spent precious little time discussing deeper issues that the critics in Tel Aviv, Moscow, and Berlin raised when The Producers came to town. These erasures in many reviews of the Walnut Street Theatre production, seen from a German perspective, may at first glance appear puzzling, until one realizes that Americans are carrying around their necks different millstones of history than Germans. To be fair, many critics have only a few hours to write their review for publication the next day, a process that doesn’t always allow for an in-depth analysis. 

“Today’s Germans Are Actually More Pacifist and Rational than We Americans Are” 

Mercifully, some writers like Dan Rottenberg of the Broad Street Review presented critiques that probed and sparkled as much as The Producers: “In effect, what the Marx brothers did to Il Trovatore in A Night at the Opera, Mel Brooks in The Producers does to an even more deserving target: Nazi Germany. The difference is that the Marx brothers’ primary schtick involved popping the pretensions of the rich and powerful. Hitler and the Nazis, by contrast, were dead and gone when Brooks made his hilariously audacious 1968 film (also called The Producers)— and by now they’ve been gone so long that today’s Germans are actually more pacifist and rational than we Americans are.” 

Wow, that’s a rare and very special tribute, especially coming from the author of Finding Our Fathers: A Guidebook to Jewish Genealogy. 

Cool Reception for The Producers in Vienna 

German producers were reluctant to take the risk of staging this much-talked-about musical in Germany, a country where to this day it’s forbidden to display swastikas or to import Hitler’s Mein Kampf from eBay or Amazon. However, Vienna went ahead with a production that, after the initial enthusiasm, didn’t do too well. According to Cornelia Rudat of The Economist, Cornelius Obonya, co-starring as Max Bialystock in both the Vienna and the Berlin production, made a devastating comment about Austrian audiences when he “explained the absence of enthusiasm in Vienna as a result of the country's many ‘honest and serious admirers’ of Adolf Hitler, who may have been offended by the way he is mocked on stage.” 

Writing for Der Spiegel, Germany’s most influential magazine, David Crossland presents a more realistic view: paraphrasing Falk Walter, the driving force behind the Berlin production, who believed that “the Austrian production had been marketed too narrowly, focusing only on traditional musical aficionados, and that he was targeting a broader range of people who wouldn't usually go to see a stage musical.” In short, the cool reception in Vienna could perhaps be explained by a combination of deeply seated ideologies and ineffective marketing. 

Non-German critics at the Admiralspalast 

Walter, the man behind the German production, gets quoted by Crossland about the role of Berlin which to Walter was “the root of all the evil,” even though today the town “also happens to be the most tolerant and exciting city in Germany.” The Berlin impresario then gets quoted as saying, "This isn't about laughing at Hitler but basically about conveying in a humorous way what he was. It addresses the darkest chapter of German history. How could it happen that the country threw morals and ethics overboard and followed this megalomaniac charlatan? The Producers fits wonderfully into the city because at the moment musical theater is categorized as being either opera for culture vultures or mainstream musicals for morons," according to Walter. "This show proves musical theater can be more than that."
But despite Walter’s optimism, before The Producers came to Berlin, many people were concerned about how the audiences would react, as witnessed by David Crossland‘s article in Der Spiegel,written a few weeks before opening night: “Some say Germany isn't ready for tap-dancing stormtroopers and a camp Hitler singing ‘Heil Myself.’” 

“Audiences in London, Tokyo, Athens and even Tel Aviv have all fallen for the crazy comedy. But a German-language version was lacking,” until Titus Hoffmann, highly innovative resident director at the Admiralspalast, brought the play to Germany, according to Susan Stone of Deutsche Welle, the international public radio program. Nigel West, the production’s director in Berlin, explained the different perceptions of German and American audiences: “When you see the show in America, you don't think twice about it. [However,] Because of where we are, you do think twice about it’.” 

To gauge the mood in the German capital, Michael Kimmelman of the New York Times quoted the Berlin press: “’Should one be allowed to laugh about Hitler?’ The Berliner Morgenpost worried needlessly a few days earlier. ‘People in Tel Aviv laughed,’ answered the Berliner Zeitung, as if the spectacle of knee-slapping Israelis might give Germans a little comedic wiggle room. German intellectuals naturally weighed in, too, about the healing effects of laughter.“

However, as witnessed by a number of writers, some audience members felt uneasy–and even pained—during certain moments of the musical. For example, the NY Times correspondent noted that “when SS guards, arms raised in the Hitler salute, shouting Nazi slogans, marched onstage during the second act’s big Busby Berkeley-like ‘Springtime for Hitler’ number, it seemed to me that the temperature in the theater did drop ever so slightly.” 

Of all the critics from around the world who came to Berlin, Robert Hardman of Britain’s Mail wrote one of the most perceptive and entertaining reviews, ranging from his mock-German heading (“Ve have vays of making you laugh!”)—a regular staple among many British writers—to his verdict that The Producers in Berlin represents “a cultural milestone for modern Germany. The Nazis are now, officially, joke material.” 

Given that Anglo-German relationships have been strained for a long time, it does not come as a surprise to have this British critic probe the German soul: “This has been a risky business, [. . .] a bold move to bring it to Germany—and an even bolder one to wrap the entire theatre in red Nazi-style drapes and banners just like a Nuremberg rally. The whole exercise has been a test of the German psyche.” Hardman concludes that after the opening night there was “a palpable sense of relief.” 

The Producers vs. Hollywood Productions of One-Dimensional Resistance Heroes 

Writing for one of Germany’s prestigious weekly magazines, Der Spiegel, Christine Wahl observed that “At the public preview on Friday evening, the audience put the pretzel flags, which were distributed at the entrance as a risqué prop, to good use, as if they were at a child's birthday party. There was hardly a song that didn't receive—somewhat excessive—applause accompanied by plenty of flag waving.” Not quite sure about what she has just witnessed, she asks, “It remains to be seen what kind of reaction the show will get here.” 

The Spiegel critic concludes: “This version of The Producers, staged by Nigel West, clearly fits perfectly into the current wave of mainstream Third Reich-themed entertainment as the light-hearted counterpart to Hollywood productions such as Valkyrie or Defiance, with their one-dimensional resistance heroes and tired clichés.” 

“Enthusiastic Leni Riefenstahl” 

The growing, often brutal awareness that played an important part in the development of Germany since 1945 is now surfacing in many a review of The Producers and its first stage production in Berlin. Presenting old German sensitivities, former East German journalist, Cornelia Rudat, now writing for the Economist in London, admits: “There was one scene I had trouble with. It was when storm troopers in Nazi uniforms with swastika armbands goose-step on stage singing ‘Springtime for Hitler and winter for France and Poland!’ I just could not bring myself to clap. Reassuringly, I was not the only one. To me this scene was no longer making fun of Hitler but fun of the war (this music number features paper-mâché tanks and some noisy bullet shots). I worried about how Polish or French guests in the audience might feel.” 

Rudat then second-guesses some of the production’s political choices: “It was a clever move on the part of the show's producers to replace the swastika on the red banners outside the theatre with images of pretzels and sausages. Why not for the armbands on stage?” Not surprisingly, Rudat, reporting about “the opening night’s standing ovation” then wonders: “It remains to be seen whether Berlin's audience will continue to be so liberal.” 

Perhaps one of the most vivid reviews comes from Frederik Hanssen of Berlin’s liberal Tagesspiegel: “For one moment the audience stopped breathing when the swastika flags were unveiled; when the chorus paraded in, goose-stepping, and when Adolf Hitler arrives at the top of the stairs . . . a fantastic spectacle took place then, just as in those days in Nuremberg. One could almost hear Leni Riefenstahl whose bony fingers, full of enthusiasm, are knocking against the lid of her coffin.” 

Standing Ovation for the Berlin Cast of The Producers 

Giving credit to “Phillip Bloom [who] managed to salvage a maximum of wit in his German translation,” Hanssen considers the cast “the greatest triumph of the German version: Cornelius Obonya lends his Max Bialystock the precarious height of a Mack the Knife. The entrancingly awkward Andreas Bieber as Leo Bloom, a milquetoast who hangs on for dear life to his sniffle-cloth, who would love to be an asshole like the producer, but cannot shed his honest skin. Bettina Mönch as the Swedish sex-bomb Ulla is the perfectly played blonde joke. Herbert Steinböck’s Bavarian blubbering as the old Nazi Franz Liebkind contrasts in a heart-warming way with the quintet of queens around Martin Sommerlatte’s Roger Debris. The ensemble sings and dances with grandiosity, the musicians have the right swing for Mel Brooks’ wonderful, old-fashioned, infectious melodies, which Doug Besterman and Larry Blank arranged congenially in the style of the 40’s.” 

Vox Britanniae and The Producers 

The anonymous, unedited responses to the review in Britain’s Mail seem to suggest that even in the UK views of Germany seems to improve: 

“well Done Mel Brookes - he can't have imagined, when he wrote this, that it would ever appear in Berlin!” 
“If the Germans can laugh at Hitler & making the Swaztika a Symbol of fun instead of something to fear then maybe those who still use it as a Nazi symbol will be laughed at too.” 

“Now the Third Reich and Hitler can be considered as 'funny' enough to mock and parody, the Germans and Austrians can finally start to move on from the crushing guilt most of them feel. And we should, too. This shows that the healing is complete.”

Vox Germaniae and The Producers 

Going by most of the articles that appeared in print and on the Internet, it seems the vast majority of theatre-goers in Berlin thoroughly enjoyed themselves as Judith Bonesky and Michael Schacht of Bild, Germany’s largest daily newspaper, documented: “Can One, Should One, May One Laugh About Hitler?” the paper asked and reported: “1400 Guests were united in their response: YES!” A cross-section of the theatre-goers was then interviewed. Their responses seemed truly supportive of a musical that touched many a nerve. 

Actress Judy Winter, 65: “Of course, what else, in the name of God?! I am more afraid of the new Nazis who are running around and taking all of that seriously.” 

Fashion designer Wolfgang Joop, 64: “The best way of coming to terms with the past is through humor. Hitler was a little nobody. To make fun of him is easy, because—seen from our perspective today—he comes over as a comic figure.” 

Best-selling author Eckhart von Hirschhausen, 41: “I believe that humor plays an important role in strengthening a democracy. A totalitarian state is always devoid of humor.” 

Similarly, anonymous readers of Berlin’s Tagespiegel wrote the following: 

“Even though Hitler is not the main figure of the film and the musical (2001), he is, however, perceived as the ‘star’ that he is, especially in Germany, and everyone is talking about the black pretzels and the red flags and the ‘gay Hitler’.” 

“Altogether there seems to be a new Hitler wave . . . it hitlers everywhere. Even in the late-night programs on T.V. I have never before seen so much Hitler as during the last two years. Is that a sign of the new ease in handling history?” 

And Deutsche Welle, Germany’s equivalent to the BBC, cites several people whose views seem representative of the zeitgeist, including 34-year-old Sven Schmidt: “It's another generation. We don't have that much to do with it anymore . . . it's OK to laugh. It's not OK to make fun of the Holocaust. But Hitler as a person is OK to ridicule.” 

Location, Location, Location and Its Impact on Theatre-goers and Critics 

Comparing the reviews of The Producers in Philadelphia and Berlin it becomes apparent that the physical and mental location of a play can lead to dramatically different perceptions and interpretations. The emotional impact of The Producers, a parody, on some members of a German audience could not be guaranteed beforehand just as it’s difficult to gauge the impact of a performance of My Name is Rachel Corrie, a play based on diaries and email, on Jewish audiences. For either audience-member, Jew or non-Jew, the presentation of such controversial material may give some people fits—as in the following example of a letter to the editor at the Mail, complaining about the Berlin production of The Producers: “This is just about the crassest and dumbest attempt at humour I have ever heard of [. . .] This ridiculous vomit-inducing production has just no place at all in modern German society.” 

While the American responses to The Producers in Philadelphia were very positive, the same could not be said for all reviews of films like Fahrenheit 911 or Sick by Michael Moore as they seemed to hit close to home, unlike overseas responses to Fahrenheit 911 which led to waves of uncharacteristic applause by European audiences at the end of many showings of the film. Similarly, the reviews in the 1960’s of some of the plays by Leroi Jones (who changed his name to Amiri Baraka), confronting white Americans, such as The Toilet or The Dutchman, showed a searching of the American psyche and led to extraordinary discussions by critics and audience members alike: responses ran the gamut from an earnest mea culpa to total rejection and ridicule.

Jewish Wit Returns to Germany

Time can impact the perception of earlier, painful periods in one’s own history. For example, while no one laughed at the Baraka plays in the 60’s, today’s black stand-up comedians on US basic cable programs attack certain racial and sexual relations—often taking the audience along on a rollercoaster of laughter and disgust. 

Something similar has happened in Germany: time and its distancing effect have ameliorated the fear of a recurrence of a Nazi regime and its brutalities. As a result, modern plays and musicals which deal with the past also are perceived differently than they might have been decades ago. For example, actor Andreas Bieber, who played Bloom in both the Vienna and Berlin productions, concluded: "It's really not about denying history and what happened, but we have to move on, and we have to look at things from a different angle, and it's great to do that in the city where it all happened" –indeed, in the Berlin of the 1920’s, notes Michael Kimmelman of the New York Times, “a slew of Jewish performers, Mr. Brooks’s comedic relatives and inspiration, did their shtick onstage,” before the brownshirts took over. 

No wonder that the Berlin production of The Producers made the New York Times conclude: “amid the laughter of the German crowd, you can almost hear a page of history turn.” Similarly, Frederik Hanssen of Berlin’s Tagesspiegel, looking back at history, concludes with a realistic, sad, and yet hopeful view: 
​
“When did Berlin see such witty, such brilliantly naughty comedy? Before 1933 there were these elegant, cynical script authors, composers, and gag-writers à la Mel Brooks who were in love with life, even here in the capital of the German Reich. The Nazis with their racial stupidity have persecuted, ostracized, and destroyed them-–or expelled them into exile to America. From there, we Germans, 64 years after the end of the Nazi period, can now, at best, re-import Jewish wit. With The Producers the feisty, free spirit of the often cited Golden Twenties has arrived in Berlin again.” 

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Admiralspalast Theater in Berlin web: http://www.admiralspalast.de/
Walnut Street Theatre in Philadelphia web: http://www.walnutstreettheatre.org/
Mel Brooks web: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mel_Brooks
The Producers (musical) web: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Producers_(musical)
The Producers (2005 film)  web: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Producers_(2005_film)
Springtime for Hitler - The Producers(1968)  on YouTube : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K08akOt2kuo
The Producers (2005) on You Tube : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNXj-SCx5dY&NR=1
The Audition - The Producers (1968)  on You Tube : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ni_RtKMpak&feature=related   
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This review was originally published by All About Jewish Theatre, Tel Aviv, Israel, July 2009. Available via the Wayback Machine.