Leopoldstadt

Yeah.

We have Leopoldstadt-

Yeah

... coming at the end of the season-

Yeah.

I know I read that you had done Leopoldstadt, of course, on Broadway, which I saw.

I've reached

the old Jewish man phase of my career, which is dovetailing very nicely with my becoming an old Jewish man.

Yeah.

And I think it

sometimes works against me because although I did ultimately get to join the cast of Stoppard's play Leopoldstadt, I took over David Krumholz, who was wonderful originally as playing Hermann.

I tried to get in originally for the show, and I think it's possible they didn't know I was Jewish because, or I don't know what the reason is, but my dad's best friend is brilliant Jewish.

That's a good question and not an uncomplicated one.

I actually struggled to fully understand it until I saw Tom Stoppard's play Leopoldstadt, which I highly recommend, which follows a family in Vienna in 1900 up until the Second War.

And you see the difficulties they have as a Jewish family and that Dick was trying to assimilate and integrate into Austrian culture.

And there's parts of my family story that never quite made sense to me.

And then finally, the last chapter looks at theater that was happening in around 2022, '23, which focused on Jewish themes or Jewish topics.

We started with a broader array of shows, but in the end, wound up writing about two, which were both on Broadway at that time, Parade and Leopoldstadt.

So that's just a very brief, and probably not so brief, overview of the book, and I'm gonna pass it on to Laura now.

Thank you, Sharon, and, and thank you, everybody.

As it says on page one fifteen, quote, "Exhibiting a range of relationships toward religious and cultural Judaism, the audience at Aroeste's event included Jews who prayed regularly at synagogue, Jews who thought of their Jewishness in primarily cultural terms, but nevertheless actualized those connections in synagogue spaces, and Jews who were simply drawn to a program highlighting Sephardi songs and foods that happened to be infused with religious resonances.

It would have been impossible to classify these audience members in terms that distinguished between Jewish culture and Jewish religiosity, just as the event itself belied this dichotomy." And again, talking to me, or speaking as I was reading it to me, about the, uh, richness of the inability and s- the intentional mixing of categories such that they cannot be separated.

I also looked at the theater chapter, uh, in which, uh, the authors looked at two particular presentations, uh, Tom Stoppard's Leopoldstadt and Alfred Uhry and Jason Robert Brown's musical Parade.

In both of these cases, they looked at, uh, theater from the perspective of history, from the perspective of, uh, the people who they, uh, contacted and spoke with, their ideas of both enlightenment, things that they didn't know, their discomfort, things that they felt they should have known or that they now felt differently about now that they had experienced it through a stage performance, and the question of their own judgment, whether or not, uh, either of these shows or both of these shows treated the topics in a way that the observers, in a way that these audience members felt was either true to the topic or true to history.

They gave out 41 awards among 209 nominees.

And as you said, Writers' Theatre won five awards for Leopoldstadt, its production of the Tom Stoppard play, including Best Production of a Play for a Large Theatre.

and the Ensemble Award, which is highly coveted among Chicago actors.

Raven Theatre won five awards, four of them for Octet, its first foray into a musical, which also won a production, musical, and an ensemble award.