Gwen Orel

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The Celtic Jewish Connection

By Gwen Orel

You can love Irish songs, and you can love Yiddish songs. Irish chanteuse Susan McKeown and Klezmatics bandleader Lorin Sklamberg encourage you to love them both — at once. Why choose? On their CD “Saints & Tzadiks,” (World Village), out August 11, they sing Yiddish, Irish, and blends of Yiddish and Irish — highlighting the traditions’ similarities as well as the different ways each tradition tells a musical tale.Read More

At a Loss for Words

By Gwen Orel

The thought of losing words is terrifying for a critic like myself, or for any academic, for whom articulate expression of difficult ideas is the foundation of a life’s work. “Night Sky” a play about an astronomy professor suffering from aphasia, or the sudden loss of speech and language, plays out that fear with nightmarish clarity. The late Joseph Chaikin, who founded the Open Theatre and suffered from aphasia following a stroke, inspired the play, commissioned it from playwright Susan Yankowitz and directed its premiere in 1991. The National Aphasia Association, which produces along with Power Productions NY, Inc., has named June National Aphasia Awareness Month.Read More

Looking Backward, Dancing Forward

By Gwen Orel

They slap shoes on the stage with gusto, pirouette around them, share them. They roll balls of yarn, play with them, grow tangled in them. They interact with an onstage singer; they respond to live music that in turn responds to them; they form a counterpoint to the abstract paintings projected behind them. Perhaps most surprisingly for dance purists, they sometimes speak. Dancers in the Carolyn Dorfman Dance Company tell stories — with gesture, song and even words.Read More

Awaiting Rapture

By Gwen Orel

Playwright Deborah Zoe Laufer recently spoke about “End Days,” how it has been received in different religious communities and her own connection to Judaism with Forward contributor Gwen Orel.Read More

Jason Isaacs Draws a Line in the Sand

By Gwen Orel

As Lucius Malfoy in the Harry Potter films, Jason Isaacs shimmers with pale Aryan-looking evil. As Michael Caffee in the Showtime series “Brotherhood,” Isaacs is a violent and mentally unstable gangster. In Vicente Amorim’s new film, “Good,” opening on December 31 and set in 1930s Germany, you might expect Isaacs to play a Nazi. Instead, he plays Maurice, a secular Jewish psychiatrist.Read More


     

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