LETTER FROM THE EDITOR: THE LONGEST NIGHT  

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Jazmin Gorsline in "The Sorceress," a production of the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene now playing at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in Battery Park City. (Photo: © Terese Loeb Kreuzer 2019)

On a stage of modest size at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in Battery Park City, the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene is currently performing a Yiddish operetta called "The Sorceress" that is so inventive that it looks like it was created by witchcraft. A high-spirited party that opens the show is the least of it. Over the next 80 minutes, among other things, an open-air market appears, a boat laden with people sails across the sea, the captive heroine of the story ends up in a Turkish opium den with a juggler, dancers and prostituted women and a building burns down.

Apprentice witches and Bobe Yakhne, their teacher in all things evil.

The title character of the musical is a wicked sorceress, so of course the props include a large crystal ball and a cauldron emitting steam. The cook pot is under the supervision of three apprentice witches who dance wildly as they shriek and cackle. Their work in life is to torment anyone who crosses their path.

"The Sorceress" by Avrom Goldfaden dates from 1878 and was the first Yiddish musical to be produced in the United States. In August 1882, 14-year-old Boris Thomashefsky, later to be known as a renowned actor, produced "The Sorceress" at Turn Hall on East 4th Street, where the LaMama Theatre stands today. The Eastern European Jewish community of the Lower East Side lapped it up, laying the foundation for what came to be known a few decades later as the Yiddish Rialto. Night after night, theaters along Second Avenue were filled to capacity with audiences eager to see the great Yiddish actors in the best loved, and also the newest, Yiddish plays.

The National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene, now in its 105th season and the longest continually producing Yiddish theater company in the world, has launched what it calls its Global Restoration Initiative to identify and present the Yiddish theater's essential operettas, musicals and plays. For the last several years, members of NYTF have been scouring archives and libraries around the world, searching for librettos, scores and orchestrations. The musical material has been digitized, note by note, and the librettos transliterated and translated for use by contemporary artists and scholars. The work is then being adapted for today's audiences.

Mikhl Yashinsky as Bobe Yakhne, the sorceress.

"The Sorceress" is the first fully restored work of this initiative. It is a story of deliberate evil and human-devised suffering cloaked as a fairy tale with many of the usual stock characters: an innocent, young woman whose beloved mother suddenly dies; a wicked witch and an equally wicked stepmother who connive to kidnap the maiden; a loving but naive and docile father; a prince, here depicted as the young woman's fiancé, who travels the world looking for his beloved, and so on.But behind the fairy tale is gut-wrenching reality. The operetta, written during the Russo-Turkish War of 1877, depicts family separation, libelous accusations, false imprisonment, human trafficking and forced servitude as tools of oppression. And for post-Holocaust audiences, the story presages much of what happened during World War II when Hitler and other Nazis persecuted Jews and attempted to exterminate them.

Josh Kohane as Mirele's fiancé and Rachel Botchan as the maiden's conniving stepmother.

The NYTF's production of "The Sorceress" is a brilliantly executed tour de force. In the 19-member cast, Jazmin Gorsline as the maiden Mirele distinguishes herself with her crystalline singing. Mikhl Yashinsky is fearsome as the hulking witch, Bobe Yakhne, and Rachel Botchan as Basye is the conniving stepmother from hell. Steve Sterner provides comic relief as the unscrupulous peddler Hotsmakh. But top honors have to go to director Motl Didner, music director Zalmen Mlotek, choreographer Merete Muenter, scenic designer Dara Wishingrad, costume designer Izzy Fields and a host of other behind-the-scenes talents who turned "The Sorceress" from an old chestnut into a luminous gem of color, action and ultimately of the message that in the long run, evil doesn't triumph or as Martin Luther King, Jr. once said, "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice."

- Terese Loeb Kreuzer

"The Sorceress," in Yiddish with English and Russian super-titles, will be playing at the Museum of Jewish Heritage through Dec. 29, 2019. For more information and to buy tickets, click here.

(Photos: © Terese Loeb Kreuzer 2019)

The South Street Seaport Museum reports that its 1885 schooner Pioneer is now in the Scarano Boat Building yard in Albany, New York. Pioneer left Manhattan on Dec. 17 alongside a scow pushed by tug Frances. She arrived in Albany around 24 hours later. Building on the baseline of reconstruction done by Gladding-Hearn in the late 1960s, Pioneer will undergo further restoration this winter. She will be sandblasted and her hull framing and shell plating will be repaired. Her masts will be removed and inspected and her engine will be replaced with a cleaner, more reliable "tier-3" diesel engine, supplied by John Deere. This engine will power Pioneer for the next decade and more. (Photo: Terese Loeb Kreuzer)

 

"Brooklynites drowning in helicopter noise since Uber Copter, Blade launch," New York Post, 12/7/19. "An influx of on-demand chopper services like Uber Copter and Blade offering airportgoers an alternative to Manhattan gridlock for as little as $95 are flooding the skies over brownstone Brooklyn and lower Manhattan - and assaulting residents' eardrums," the New York Post reports. "Park Slope residents say the Thanksgiving-week heli traffic has drowned their peaceful neighborhood in a roar so loud it made windows rattle, dogs growl and outdoor conversations inaudible. Jerry, a resident of Lincoln Place who declined to provide his last name, said that on Nov. 15 he recorded 30 helicopters flying over his home between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m." For the complete article, click here.

 

"Artists Space Re-emerges as an Enduring Downtown Alternative," New York Times, 12/12/19. "In the mid-1970s, the pioneering art historian and activist Douglas Crimp identified a new tendency in the work of young artists like Sherrie Levine and Robert Longo: They were turning away from the abstract and conceptual work then in vogue, and appropriating images from movies and advertising to distort the aims of mass media," The New York Times recalls. "Mr. Crimp, who died this year at 74, brought these artists together in a landmark show called 'Pictures' at a small alternative gallery called Artists Space - which endures as a turning point in art history, and a classic of downtown New York. Downtown has changed beyond recognition, its cold-water lofts overtaken by shoe boutiques and tourist-trap restaurants. But Artists Space, now 47 years old, remains a noncommercial site of experimentation. ... The institution has had to play cat-and-mouse with New York's landlords, and to stay afloat it has roved among half a dozen locations in SoHo and TriBeCa. In 2016, a penthouse construction project pushed Artists Space out of its last home on Greene Street. Now it arrives, after three years in temporary digs and with a sweet 20-year-lease ... in a cast-iron building at 11 Cortlandt Alley, just off Canal Street, where artists can have the run of a high-ceilinged ground floor and perform in a spacious basement." For the complete article, click here. 

   

"Completion Expected Next Year For 125 Greenwich Street, In Financial District," New York YIMBY, 12/18/19. "Work is almost entirely complete on the reflective curtain wall of 125 Greenwich Street," one of the tallest projects under construction in New York City, according to New York YIMBY. "The only sections awaiting façade work are the podium and the portion where the exterior hoist is still mounted. Designed by Rafael Vinoly and developed by Bizzi & Partners and Vector Group, the slender 88-story residential skyscraper stands 912 feet tall over the Financial District. The 273 residential units are being marketed by Douglas Elliman, while the interiors are designed by March & White." For the complete article, click here.