Everything’s Coming Up Moses, written by Tablet contributing editor Rachel Shukert (with a small assist from Jule Styne and Stephen Sondheim), is a musical retelling of the Exodus as seen through the larger-than-life journey of Moses, the original pushy stage mother. Through an irresistible blend of Broadway razzledazzle and old-fashioned show-biz moxie, Moses tirelessly shepherds ...

Competitive ballroom dance, the high-testosterone, low-art pastime fittingly referred to as “dancesport” by enthusiasts and regulated by a global body recognized by the International Olympic Committee, is pursued and followed in much of the world—generally, the parts with discotheques and good soccer teams. It remains relatively obscure in the United States, but that’s begun to ...

Shane Baker was about 5 years old, growing up in Kansas City in the 1970s, when he heard a Yiddish word for the first time. He had gone to see the Marx Brothers classic Animal Crackers, in which Groucho sings, “Hooray for Captain Spaulding//The African explorer//Did somebody call me schnorrer?” Baker asked his father what ...

Midway through Brighton Beach Memoirs, the first play of Neil Simon’s autobiographical trilogy, the playwright has his fictional stand-in make a confession directly to the audience. “How am I going to become a writer,” asks Eugene Morris Jerome, just shy of 15 and already full of artistic yearning, “if I don’t know how to suffer?”
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The current rage for killing Nazis on screen—as exemplified by the Ed Zwick feature Defiance, and last month’s Inglourious Basterds—has made its way to the stage with The Retributionists, an off-Broadway play that opened in New York Monday. This time, the action unfolds after the war is over, when a band of former partisan fighters ...

This year’s New York International Fringe Festival, which opened Friday and runs through the end of the month, offers several explicitly Jewish-themed offerings. Among them are a one-woman show about a Viennese modern dancer who fled the Nazis, a musical about the Baal Shem Tov, a comedy about college friends spending their junior year abroad in Israel, and a satire about leftist Jewish academics. (We missed Jesus Ride, a one man-show about a secular Jewish dude who takes a job designing a motion simulation ride about Jesus’ life and, in preparation, sees 33 movies about Mr. Christ.) Here are Tablet Magazine’s brief reviews.

Fiddler on the Roof, the Bock-Harnick musical based on Sholom Aleichem’s stories of life in the Russian shtetl, opened on Broadway in September, 1964, with Zero Mostel in the central role of Tevye the Milkman. But the Israeli actor Chaim Topol—usually billed mononymically, as Topol—has become perhaps even more associated with the character. Topol, then 31 years old, starred in Fiddler’s 1967 West End debut; he starred in Norman Jewison’s 1971 film version; and he’s played the character around the world—by his account, more than 2,500 times. Now 73, he’s yeidel-deideling his way up the West Coast of the United States, part of a two-year Fiddler tour that’s being billed as Topol’s farewell. He spoke to Tablet Magazine from the rooftop restaurant at the Peninsula Hotel in Beverly Hills, where he stayed during a recent, sold-out run at L.A.’s Pantages Theater, about Tevye, Israel, and whether this is really his last hurrah.