Review: A Dark Night in Dalston ★★★ - A night of discovery at Park Theatre that will keep you guessing

Some years back, I interviewed Rabbi Jonathan Black for radio, making a cameo appearance in EastEnders conducting a Jewish wedding. Not already a viewer, I duly researched by watching an omnibus edition and learned how you ‘gotta talk’. Jewish (non-Orthodox) playwright Stewart Permutt did his research by consulting a Charedi friend. So there’s a real authenticity about his protagonist Gideon – what brands of bread and crisps he can eat (Kingsmill and Walkers) and what he cannot drink from (glass).

Permutt has form when writing strong female characters, often for well-known TV stars, including Lesley Joseph, Celia Imrie and the much-missed Miriam Karlin.

His latest play was specially commissioned by EastEnders and Coronation Street star Michelle Collins, who was born in Hackney. Collins' maternal grandfather was a Belgian Jew who moved to Wales to escape the Holocaust. Having played the confused mother Evelyn in Diane Samuels' Kindertransport, Collins sought another dramatic stage role and proactively commissioned a play with a juicy part for herself.

The resulting two-hander is a present-day drama set in the East End flat of Collins’ character Gina, a feisty, friendly ex-nurse living on a Dalston council estate, whose days are filled caring for her partner, who's been bed-bound after a stroke. When young Orthodox Jew Gideon (Joe Coen) is beaten up one Friday night on her doorstep, Gina takes him in. But Shabbat has begun and this strictly observant Jew can’t travel home to Stanmore, so is forced to spend the night with her, a night during which they find themselves drawn to each other as regrets about their lives emerge.

Tim Stark directs this dark comedy exploring the “madness of the human condition”, as he says, with a sensitive ear for dialogue so that the evolving emotional conflict is genuinely involving. Simon Shaw’s set beautifully evokes (now ex) council flats, with their signature external landings. However, it’s a challenge to sustain dramatic tension over a scenario that doesn’t evolve sufficiently during its playing time, so it might benefit from losing a few of its 105 minutes.

Collins and Coen admirably inhabit their characters despite gaps in their development over the drama’s duration. Collins convincingly captures the conflicted Gina, and her small-screen acting is well suited to the intimate Park90 space. Coen, fresh from The Mighty Walzer and Bad Jews, invests Gideon with that curious mix of self-righteousness and self-knowing often seen in the ultra-orthodox of any religion. Their final scenes together are touching, bringing out the common bonds shared by the characters and the chemistry between the actors.

A Dark Night in Dalston is a good night out, given enough good will and patience to discover Gina and Gideon’s deep-seated hopes and needs.

By Judi Herman

Photos by Helen Murray

A Dark Night in Dalston runs until Saturday 1 April. 7.45pm (Mon-Sat), 3.15pm (Thu & Sat only). £18, £16.50 concs. Park Theatre, N4 3JP. 020 7870 6876. www.parktheatre.co.uk

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Review: TAU film students’ shorts are long on talent and originality at the 10th anniversary showcase

Roads by Lior Geller This was the 10th anniversary of the Tel Aviv University (TAU) Trust’s gala UK showcase for students of The Steve Tisch School of Film & Television. Almost every Israeli film produced in the last 10 years has been made by alumni of the school and the evening gives an opportunity for four aspiring filmmakers to show their developing talent in a series of shorts.

This year the chosen films represent not only life in contemporary Israel for both Arabs and Jews, but also a documentary and a surrealist feature. There’s no doubting the creativity and originality of the work and it’s not surprising that previous entries and their directors have gone on to be recognised internationally.

Lior Geller’s Roads holds the Guinness World Record as the most highly-decorated student film of all time, and earned Lior an Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Student Film. The story follows 13-year-old Ismayil, who is searching for a new life for himself and his younger brother outside the Arab slums of the city of Lod. When a traumatised Israeli ex-soldier comes to the neighbourhood looking for drugs to escape his own reality, an unusual opportunity arises. Geller spares no one in this bleak look at life in the underbelly of Israel.

Maya Sarfaty received a gold medal at the US Academy Awards for her documentary The Most Beautiful Woman. Beneath the appealing title lies the story of a love affair between an SS guard and a young Jewish woman at Auschwitz death camp. It's based on the true story of Franz Wunsch, a guard who fell in love with Helena Citronova, a prisoner from Slovakia. In return for Helena’s affection, Wunsch saved the young woman and her sister Rosa from certain death, though he could not save Rosinka’s two children. Sarfaty  documents with tact and empathy the heart-breaking choices faced by the sisters and the effects on them over the decades; and with equal tact and great tenderness the surprising relationship between Wunsch’s daughter and the children of Helena and Rosa as she shares their meeting in Israel. She captures beautifully and poignantly the bravery of these women as they look into their joined past.

Keys is the modern-life comedy offering by Hadar Reichman. Aziz and his sister live in the mixed Jewish-Arab city Lod, where Aziz tries to teach his sister not to be afraid of Jews. On Saturday two Jewish neighbours ask Aziz to act as their Shabbas Goy (a non Jew who performs an action forbidden to a Jew on the Sabbath) and move their blocked car. Aziz wants to teach his sister not to be afraid of Jews, but the Jewish wife is afraid to give the keys to an Arab. Neither side comes out well from the exchange.

The Egg by Nadav Direktor

Finally, Nadav Direktor's The Egg explores the surreal experience that Noa undergoes to become a mother. When her husband leaves on a business trip, she thinks she is having a miscarriage. Too afraid to tell her husband the bad news, Noa nurses a strange egg into a beastly hatchling. Is it all in her mind or is there something more sinister going on? You may have to look away even as you choke back horrified laughter, but the originality of this rich little short, which includes a brilliantly designed and manipulated puppet in its cast, proves that Direktor lives up to the nominative determinism of his name.

"Pursuing the unknown" is TAU Trust's tag line and this 10th anniversary showcase certainly lives up to that aspiration.

By Judi Herman

http://tau-trust.co.uk

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JR OutLoud: Debbie Chazen, the only Jewish Calendar Girl, talks about her new musical The Girls

First it was a play, then a film and now Calendar Girls has been made into a musical – already nominated for several Olivier Awards – with book and lyrics  by Tim Firth, who wrote the play and co-wrote the film script (with Juliette Towhidi), and music by Gary Barlow.

The Girls tells the true story of members of a Yorkshire branch of the Women’s Institute who had the idea of posing for a nude calendar to raise money for Leukaemia Research, when the husband of one of the girls became ill and died from the disease.

As all the girls of the title are nominated jointly for an Olivier Award, Judi Herman spoke to Debbie Chazen, who has the distinction of being the only Jewish 'girl', as well as the only one who appeared in the original stage play.

Photo by Matt Crockett, Dewynters

The Girls runs until Saturday 15 July. 7.30pm (Tue-Sat), 2.30pm (Thu & Sat, plus Tue from 25 Apr). £29.50-£69.50. Phoenix Theatre, WC2H 0JP. 0844 871 7627.        www.phoenixtheatrelondon.co.uk

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JR OutLoud: Bulgarian-born Dora Reisser tells her life story, from child refugee to prima ballerina and beyond

It’s Dora Reisser’s ability to reinvent herself – from child refugee to prima ballerina, actor, screen star and fashion designer – and in such nail-biting circumstances, that makes her memoir, Dora’s Story, so gripping.  Judi Herman visited Reisser at her remarkable London home (it used to be a railway station) to hear more of the stories behind her book, which begins with the little-known history of how Bulgaria’s Jews survived the Holocaust; and about her life in the UK and Israel, including an eye-opening account of how she started her Reisser fashion house – just one of the many new stories Reisser has that could fill a sequel.

Dora's Story by Dora Reisser is out on Troubador. £9.99. www.troubador.co.uk

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Review: The Wild Party ★★★★ - Loud, lively and lovely, The Wild Party lives up to its name

What better way to open The Other Palace (formerly St James Theatre) than with a wild party? Michael John LaChiusa’s musical takes on Joseph Moncure March’s 1920s poem and paints an unglamorous picture of the dissolute decade with a cast of unsympathetic and pitiless characters. Guys and Dolls it ain’t!

The story follows vaudeville dancer Queenie (aka Frances Ruffelle, the magnificent Jewish musical theatre star, the original Eponine in Les Mis) and her tempestuous relationship with vaudeville clown Burrs (mighty-voiced John Owen-Jones, who has played Jean Valjean more than anyone else in Les Mis’s history). One Sunday, after a fight, Burrs suggests they throw a party and invite "all the old gang". Eagerly they prepare for a wild party fortified by bathtub gin, cocaine and sex.

Director/choreographer Drew McOnie’s winning formula is his powerful casting of a parade of wild guests, led by Chorus Line legend Donna McKechnie as fading star Dolores and Victoria Hamilton-Barritt’s scary alpha female Kate, Queenie's best friend and rival, with Simon Thomas, striking as her arm candy, Black, who is eyeing up Queenie – you get the picture.

There are two eye-catching double acts. Oscar and Phil D'Armano, a gay couple/brother act are actually played by two terrific women, Genesis Lynea and Gloria Obianyo, playing hookie with their sexuality. The Jewish interest lies in a matching pair of wannabe Broadway-bound theatre producers, Gold and Goldberg. That’s also the title of their number, which has Sebastian Torkia’s jaunty Gold working on Goldberg (an assertive Steven Serlin, the Rabbi from The Infidel) to change his name to Golden, hoping that playing down their Jewishness will help them strike, well, gold. They’re no match for predatory Dolores who plays the pair like a snake when she realises they could be her ticket to Moving Uptown (a deliciously witty, sexy number).

Moncure March’s poem has a driving repetitive rhythm, great for narrative but impossible to sustain in lyric and libretto. LaChiusa translates that into the show’s equally relentless freneticism, especially in the longer, louder first half, with most of the show’s almost 40 numbers following in quick succession.

Happily McOnie moves his nattily–dressed (designer Soutra Gilmour) party animals to create sophisticated stage pictures on Gilmour’s glitzy levels, dominated by MD Theo Jamieson’s fine eight-strong orchestra, on show on high, doing justice to LaChiusa’s challenging mix of 20s pastiche, vaudeville, jazz and more contemporary musical style.

The shorter second half comes as a relief, slowing the pace to allow for plot, pathos and some more intense numbers as melodrama takes over.

It makes a promising start to this new venture from Andrew Lloyd Webber and artistic director Paul Taylor-Mills offering a central London home and breeding ground for musicals in development.

By Judi Herman

Photos by Scott Rylander

The Wild Party runs until Saturday 1 April. 7.30pm (Mon-Sat), 2.30pm (Sat only). £10-£65. The Other Palace, SW1E 5JA. 084 4264 2121. ww.theotherpalace.co.uk

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Review: That’s Jewish Entertainment ★★★ - Much to discover and enjoy in a canter from cantor to cabaret

There was a terrific compilation movie that took the title of much-loved song That’s Entertainment (written by Jewish duo Arthur Schwartz and Howard Dietz for the MGM film The Band Wagon) to celebrate the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio’s prodigious output; celebrating songs by Jewish composers and lyricists written for films produced by a studio founded and run by the eponymous Jewish entertainment moguls. Producer Katy Lipson proves her love and knowledge of "the magic of the musical" by touring her show The MGM Story this February. So in a way That’s Jewish Entertainment is a given, but there’s still so much to discover and enjoy as four talented performers and a four-strong band give their all to entertaining Yiddish style and tracing the trajectory of Jewish entertainment from shtetl to showbiz.

Kate Golledge directs, starring gals Joanna Lee (the petite brunette one) and Emma Odell (the tall blonde one) and guys Matthew Barrow (the bearded one) and David McKechnie (the smooth one). They dress as individuals (there's no designer credit, but lighting designer Ben M Rogers and programmer Toby Darvill provide a glitzy backdrop of twinkling lights), but their powerful voices blend beautifully (musical director Charlie Ingles, arranger Andy Collyer) and they move as one (choreography Adam Scown). And just when you think McKechnie has nailed Groucho Marx, Barrow takes over with the next quip. Similarly both Odell and Lee get to give their Sophie Tucker at different stages of the red hot mamma's long career.

Opening with a perky new title number of his own, writer Chris Burgess traces the rise and rise of Jewish entertainers on stage and screen and behind the scenes pulling the strings – both creative and financial – from those first valiant 19th-century arrivals from the shtetl to the second migration to Hollywood and through two world wars. He's mindful of the emotional baggage and the legacy of the music of the old country; and the outside events and forces buffeting the Jewish community. The Holocaust looms largest, of course. Burgess includes the powerful song of the defiant Jewish partisans The Final Road in his own excellent translation, and explores the endemic antisemitism in the USA that means so many Jews keep a low profile, even in showbiz, often deploring the overtly Jewish shtick of Jackie Mason and even Mel Brooks.

The best nuggets are the gallop through the schmaltzy plot of The Jazz Singer (his was just one of the mamas behind all those papas) and the heart and soul in all those Yiddish gems contrasting with the glitz. Whether you are Jewish or not, it would be hard not find something to entertain you here.

By Judi Herman

Photos by Pamela Raith

That’s Jewish Entertainment runs until Saturday 11 March in London and on Sunday 12 March in Hertfordshire. Details below:

London: 7.30pm (Tue-Sat), 4pm (Sun only), 3pm (25 Feb, 4 & 11 Mar only). £18-£22, £16-£20 concs. Upstairs at the Gatehouse, N6 4BD. 020 8340 3488. www.upstairsatthegatehouse.com

Hertfordshire: 7.30pm & 3.30pm. £20. Radlett Centre, WD7 8HL. 01923 859291. www.radlettcentre.co.uk

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JR OutLoud: Dutch artist Sira Soetendorp discusses the family portraits in her exhibition Vanished Families

Following a visit to Auschwitz in 2012, Sira Soetendorp felt a deep need to preserve the memory of all the lost family members. The Dutch artist used carved outlines drawn in oil paint to fashion portraits based on family photographs, which make up her exhibition Vanished Families. Here she discusses the exhibit with JR's Arts Editor Judi Herman, plus you will hear Rabbi Awraham Soetendorp, Sira’s husband and Emeritus Rabbi of the Hague, who is an award-winning human rights advocate.

Vanished Families runs until Monday 27 February at Etz Chayim Gallery, Northwood & Pinner Liberal Synagogue, HA6 3AA. 019 2382 2592. Viewing by appointment: caroleannek17@gmail.com. www.npls.org.uk/etzchayim.htm

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Review: Death Takes a Holiday ★★★ - Magic realism in 1920s Italy makes for a haunting musical

Lush romantic stories are bread and butter to composer/lyricist Maury Yeston, and he writes scores to match. His elegiac music conjures time and place and whether the place is the doomed Titanic ocean liner or Grand Hotel Berlin 1928, the first half of the 20th century seems to be his preferred time.

Yeston and Peter Stone, who wrote the book for Titanic, next turned to Italian playwright Alberto Casella’s 1924 romance, Death Takes a Holiday, with its glamorous setting – an aristocrat’s villa on Lake Garda. This fanciful story has Death falling for Grazia, a beautiful newly-engaged young aristocrat so that he allows her to escape unscathed from a catastrophic car crash; and taking the guise of a handsome young Russian Prince to gatecrash her father’s weekend house party, courts her himself. In a programme note Yeston points to what’s behind Casella’s story – a preoccupation with death in the survivors of the Great War and the ensuing deadly influenza pandemic which between them claimed 60 million lives. So there’s a thematic link with Yeston’s earlier work. It’s a sad irony that Stone’s death in 2003 meant that Thomas Meehan had to take over.

The strange dreamlike chamber musical gets its dream production, thanks to director Thom Southerland’s fine cast and creative team and MD Dean Austin’s 10-piece band. Set designer Morgan Large belies his name, creating on a pocket-sized stage terraces and colonnades of an Italian lakeside villa as convincing as any in an Ivory/Merchant film. And Jonathan Lipman’s stunning take on period costumes complements perfectly, for Southerland cleverly makes his 14-strong cast part of the set, for example standing on chairs to suggest the doomed car.

There are uniformly elegant performances too. Chris Peluso’s Death and Zoë Doano’s Grazia look perfect in each other’s arms and have soaring voices to match the music Yeston gives them. Peluso is both appealingly ardent and as sinister as his real identity demands and Doano is so alive and fresh that you fear for her as she falls for him, even as she recognizes him.  Mark Inscoe commands as the Count, her worried father, and among his guests, Samuel Thomas stands out as Major Eric Fenton, closest friend of his son, Roberto, killed in the Great War, with one of the show’s best numbers, Roberto’s Eyes. Scarlett Courtney as Eric’s sister and Helen Turner as Roberto’s widow Alice are touching representatives of girls without husbands post-war. Gay Soper and Anthony Cable are touching and funny as the vintage couple rediscovering youthful vigour while Death has taken time out. There are though perhaps too many musical numbers and it’s just a shame that Yeston’s pot pourri of styles doesn’t quite make for a killer musical.

By Judi Herman

Photos by Scott Rylander

Death Takes a Holiday runs until Saturday 4 March, 7.30pm (Mon-Sat), 2.30pm (Wed only), 3pm (Sat only), £17.50-£39.50, at Charing Cross Theatre, WC2N 6NL. www.charingcrosstheatre.co.uk

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Review: Denial ★★★★ - Fine performances prove attack is the best form of defence to demolish Holocaust denial

Hitler apologist David Irving would have loved to have his day – or days – in court face to face with Deborah Lipstadt, the historian he sued for libel for labelling him “one of the most dangerous spokesmen of Holocaust denial”. It is more a strength than a weakness of the film charting Irving’s high-profile defeat by Lipstadt's team of lawyers that Lipstadt herself maintains a dignified ‘silence in court’.

Mick Jackson’s film (script David Edgar) is elegantly structured, giving a taste early on of what might happen if Rachel Weisz’s passionate, intelligent Lipstadt does not keep her own counsel. Timothy Spall’s Irving is chilling from the first glimpse of his eyes, narrowed balefully with Lipstadt in his sights, preparing to hijack her keynote lecture at UCLA by interrupting, shouting her down, and publicising his latest pro-Hitler book.

Once Irving has sued her, in the British legal system where she must prove her innocence, the action moves to London, and the imposing Inns of Court. The exteriors are shot on location. The wood-panelled interiors, crammed with clubbable members of the huge defence team meeting over wine and cheese, conjure up fusty, yet reassuringly British legal traditions. It’s heartening to see the older, experienced legal eagles bringing on the bright youngsters who research the case.

Less heartening is the reaction of British Jewry’s great and good. They advise Lipstadt to fundraise and settle out of court rather than risk defeat and affording Irving the oxygen of publicity. But really the spotlight here is on the twin stars of the legal firmament, Jewish celebrity solicitor Anthony Julius, and non-Jewish, avowedly philosemitic chain-smoking barrister Richard Rampton QC. Andrew Scott (Julius) and Tom Wilkinson (Rampton) give extraordinarily detailed portraits of a pair with incisive brilliant minds used to working seamlessly together.

There’s no such meeting of minds with the spiky Lipstadt. The Kafkaesque legalities make her frustrated and suspicious. Even a trip to Auschwitz does little to endear Rampton to her (she does not see what we do – that he’s visibly moved by his painstaking onsite research) and only when they share a nightcap in her London hotel does she thaw. Thus they establish the trust that enables her in turn to reassure the anxious Holocaust survivors whom Rampton and Julius know would be easy meat for Irving if called as witnesses. During our interview with Rampton in the January 2017 issue of JR, he confided that this moment in the hotel didn’t happen, though he appreciates the poetic licence.

So despite his displays of virulently antisemitic histrionics conducting his own case in gripping court scenes, Irving simply doesn’t get the chance to tempt Lipstadt into the ring and the rest, as they say, is (genuine) history.

By Judi Herman

Denial will be available on DVD from Monday 5 June.

Read Judi's interview with Richard Rampton QC in the January 2017 issue of Jewish Renaissance, or find it on this site by following the link on the home page.

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Review: Promises, Promises ★★★ - The swinging 60s live up to their name in a musical with pedigree

With its stellar writing team – music and lyrics Burt Bacharach and Hal David, book Neil Simon (based on Billy Wilder’s screenplay for hit comedy The Apartment) – this musical set in early 60s New York is as lovable and eager to be loved as any pedigree pup. It boasts a hero of self-deprecating charm in Chuck Baxter, insurance company junior and wannabe executive dining room key holder. Happily for Chuck, he already holds the keys to a Manhattan studio apartment, discreet walking distance from the office. Jaded middle-aged senior executives aspire to these keys to happiness in their turn for the odd hour’s dalliance with their very personal assistants before they go home to their wives. Chuck seems to hold the keys to his own advancement – the promises are the promotion his superiors offer in return.

Chuck’s problem is Fran, the girl of his dreams (dreams shared with the audience in ‘confidential’ asides) who waits in that dining room. She turns out to be the long-term squeeze of the all-important personnel director Sheldrake, who wants exclusive use of Chuck's apartment in return for promotion.

In Gabriel Vick, director Bronagh Lagan has found the perfect Chuck, as appealing as he is talented. But there’s a potential problem with this period piece. The show is self-knowing, necessarily considering its central premise to be droll, whereas to dissenters (post-feminist perhaps) it is, frankly, seedy. Given that back in the aptly-named swinging 60s everyone was apparently at it – think Mad Men – why the problem? I think it’s because the girls have so little voice here. Definitely not on top (except possibly in bed), they are secretaries teetering smartly on their heels in the wake of their bosses, taking letters, keeping diaries, exchanging favours (presumably also for advancement) – and backing songs. At first most numbers are sung by the guys – often by Chuck himself. Happily, you do eventually get to hear from Daisy Maywood’s Fran, who manages to combine fragility and vulnerability with a voice of glorious power and subtlety. It almost justifies the interpolated hit, A House is not a Home, which doesn't quite fit into the action, but who cares when you get to hear Maywood’s rendition.

Elsewhere Alex Young suggests she is destined for stardom with a delicious turn as Marge – up for Christmas cheer with Chuck, whom she picks up in a bar. Plus all those sassy secretaries turn in great performances with archly exaggerated body language in Cressida Carré’s spot-on choreography and designer Simon Wells’s matching period frocks. Given the unusual chorus of middle-aged lotharios and Paul Robinson’s excellently unappealing and unfeeling Sheldrake, Lagan at any rate is aware of the story’s ambiguity, as indeed is that writing team.

By Judi Herman

Photos by Claire Bilyard

Promises, Promises runs until Saturday 18 February, 7.30pm (Mon-Sat), 3pm (Sat & some weekdays), £25, £20 concs, at Southwark Playhouse, SE1 6BD. 020 7407 0234. www.southwarkplayhouse.co.uk

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