What an amazing year!
This past January, my new theatrical cabaret, KLEYNKUNST! premiered at
Kabarett Fete, the first ever European cabaret festival in New York City. I tell you, the enthusiasm in that sold-out house was palpable! Because I am passionate about this new work, I was thrilled and affirmed by its reception.
The piece ran four additional times last spring, including an evening at the 92nd Street Y's Manifest Festival at Makor. These performances received great press (see the links to press on the KLEYNKUNST! page of this site). Then, lo and behold, the Folksbiene National Yiddish Theater offered me a fully-produced run and so... KLEYNKUNST! is going Off-Broadway!
With the offer of a run in hand, I spent the month of July holed up at a writer's colony, Wellspring House, creating a "new and improved" script for the thirty-show run at the Folksbiene, which begins in November (see www.folksbiene.org).
And that's not all! I recently signed with a fantastic artists' manager,
Judith Z. Miller of ZAMO! (www.zamo-zamo.com) and a renowned agent,
Moishe Rosenfeld (www.goldenland.com) for exclusive booking of KLEYNKUNST! With these dedicated professionals at my side, I feel all the more inspired to create and perform gorgeous new works of theater and cabaret.
What new projects am I giving birth to? One is the show "New Jew Cabaret." It will feature the best of international 20's and 30's cabaret music and sketch material as it was dreamed up, written, and performed by Jews in the bustling urban centers of Tel Aviv, Vienna, Berlin, Moscow, Madrid, Warsaw, and Paris.
The second is a lecture project: in conjunction with the Folksbiene run, I will be speaking at a variety of academic and non-profit settings. I will address a range of topics including "Kleynkunst as a Jewish Art Form" and "The Cabarets of Yiddish Warsaw."
And lastly, together with two other Cantors, I am co-founding a trio called GINGI -- three fantastic performers, all of us red-headed cantors, singing everything from Gershwin to Gerowitch, with lots of Ladino, Andrew Sisters, and Yiddish in between. Not your father's cantors, that's for sure!
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