Overheard at The Segal Centre

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June 1, 2012

Overheard at The Segal Centre
“So, are you going to be in On Twenty-Second Avenue?”

Citeeze, May 31, 2012
By Dan Laxer

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The play in question is actually called On Second Avenue. But it’s been produced so many times by the Dora Wasserman Yiddish Theatre that, while audiences and actors alike are looking forward to it, internally it’s become a bit of a joke. It’s a crowd favourite.

On Second Avenue traces Yiddish theatre in Montreal to its very beginnings on Second Avenue in New York City in the first couple of decades of the last century. Some of the same performers who made names for themselves in NYC also graced the stage at the Monument National here in Montreal in the 1920s and 1930s.

It’s a musical comprised of wonderful songs, and great corny jokes. The actors portray the performers who peopled the Yiddish Theatre stage back in the day, actors like Aaron Lebedeff and Molly Picon. Some of the audience members are old enough to remember seeing these actors here in Montreal. They know all the songs, and it’s not unusual for them to join in and sing along. On Second Avenue is in English and Yiddish, and is actually part of a trilogy that includes the plays Golden Land and Those Were The Days. But On Second Avenue is by far the most popular.

Leading up to that, however, in Hebrew, is Goren Agmon’s Mother In Love, an Israeli play that pits a son against his mother when he disapproves of the man she’s fallen in love with. The Montreal cast are Hebrew speakers, and the play, presented along with Montreal’s Jewish Public Library, was a big hit in Tel Aviv. There will be subtitles for non-Hebrew speakers.

And being presented in English is Timothy Findley’s Governor General Award-winning play Elizabeth Rex. Findley was one of Canada’s best writers. Elizabeth Rex was one of the last things he’d written, and couldn’t have come at a better time. The play was published in the same year as Findley’s last novel, Spadework, and was a big hit at the Stratford Festival, redeeming Findley for what was a dismal end to a great novel-writing career.

The play brings William Shakespeare, Queen Elizabeth, and Ned Lowenscroft, one of The Bard’s actors, together. The title of the play means “King Elizabeth,” and the meeting with Lowenscroft highlights what Findley speculates must have eaten Elizabeth up inside: just as Lowenscroft had had to act women’s roles, since at the time women couldn’t be actors, Elizabeth had to govern like a man. She and Lowenscroft mirror one another on the eve of her supposed lover’s execution for treason.

This is just some of what is on offer at The Segal Centre this summer.

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