Christopher Massimine (born May 1986) [1] [2] is an American former theater producer and the former CEO of the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene. In 2019, he was appointed managing director of the Pioneer Theatre Company at the University of Utah, but he resigned in August 2021, citing mental illness, in response to reports that he fabricated large portions of his résumé. [1] [3]
Massimine was born in New Jersey and grew up in Somerset. [4] He attended New York University, where he received a bachelor's degree, though he falsely claimed to have also received a master's degree from the university. [4]
In 2016, Massimine was appointed chief executive officer of the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene. [4] He was the executive producer of the 2015 KulturfestNYC, an international Jewish performing arts festival. [5] [6] Later that year, he co-produced a tribute concert for Theodore Bikel. [7] During Massimine's tenure at the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene, the theatre was an associate producer of the 2017 Broadway production of Indecent , [8] which was nominated for the Tony Award for Best Play. In 2018, Massimine was executive producer of the theatre's U.S. premiere of Fidler Afn Dakh , a Yiddish-language production of Fiddler on the Roof directed by Joel Grey. [9] [10]
In 2019, Massimine was named managing director of the Pioneer Theatre Company at the University of Utah, succeeding Chris Lino, who had retired. [11]
In May 2021, Massimine went on approved personal leave from the university, pending an investigation, after reports by Fox 13 and The Salt Lake Tribune that he falsified numerous credits on his résumé and claimed to have received a medal from an arts organization which did not actually exist. [4] [12] [13] Additionally, despite claiming to have received Tony Award nominations for his work on American Idiot and Indecent, the Tony Awards confirmed that Massimine was not actually nominated. [13]
In August 2021, shortly before a report by The New York Times was published corroborating the claims against him, he resigned and said he had battled mental illness his entire life. [4] Massimine was diagnosed with a Cluster B personality disorder. [2] The symptoms of this mental illness involve deception, attention-seeking, unpredictable thinking or behavior, a histrionic personality, and a narcissistic personality. [2] [14] In a 2022 column for Newsweek , Massimine said about his mental illness, "As part of my diagnosis, when I am in mental distress, I create fabrications to help build myself up, since that self-esteem by itself doesn't exist. I compensated in the only way I knew how to: I created my own reality, and eventually that spilled into my work." [15]
Tevye the Dairyman, also translated as Tevye the Milkman is the fictional narrator and protagonist of a series of short stories by Sholem Aleichem, and their various adaptations, the most famous being the musical Fiddler on the Roof, which premiered on Broadway in 1964, and its 1971 film adaptation. Tevye is a pious Jewish dairyman living in the Russian Empire, the patriarch of a family including several troublesome daughters. The village of Boyberik, where the stories are set, is based on the town of Boyarka, Ukraine, then part of the Russian Empire. Boyberik is a suburb of Yehupetz, where most of Tevye's customers live.
Fiddler on the Roof is a musical with music by Jerry Bock, lyrics by Sheldon Harnick, and book by Joseph Stein, set in the Pale of Settlement of Imperial Russia in or around 1905. It is based on "Tevye the Dairyman" and other short stories by Sholem Aleichem. The story centers on Tevye, a milkman in the village of Anatevka, who attempts to maintain his Jewish religious and cultural traditions as outside influences encroach upon his family's lives. He must cope with the strong-willed actions of his three older daughters who wish to marry for love; their choices of husbands are successively less palatable for Tevye. An edict of the tsar eventually evicts the Jews from their village.
Theodore Meir Bikel was an Austrian-American actor, singer, musician, composer, unionist, and political activist.
Joel Grey is an American actor, singer, dancer, photographer, and theatre director. He is best known for portraying the Master of Ceremonies in the musical Cabaret on Broadway and in Bob Fosse's 1972 film adaptation. He has won an Academy Award, a BAFTA Award, a Golden Globe Award, and a Tony Award for his performances in the Cabaret stage musical and film. He earned the Lifetime Achievement Tony Award at the 76th Tony Awards in 2023.
Philip "Fyvush" Finkel was an American actor and director known as a star of Yiddish theater and for his role as lawyer Douglas Wambaugh on the television series Picket Fences, for which he earned an Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series in 1994. He is also known for his portrayal of Harvey Lipschultz, a crotchety history teacher, on the television series Boston Public.
The Witch of Botoşani or simply The Witch or The Sorceress was an 1878, or possibly 1877, play by Abraham Goldfaden. Like most of Goldfaden's major works, it included music.
Joseph Stein was an American playwright best known for writing the books for such musicals as Fiddler on the Roof and Zorba.
Ken Davenport is a two-time Tony Award-winning theatre producer, blogger, and writer. He is best known for his production work on Broadway.
The National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene, commonly known as NYTF, is a professional theater company in New York City which produces both Yiddish plays and plays translated into Yiddish, in a theater equipped with simultaneous superscript translation into English. The company's leadership consists of executive director Dominick Balletta and artistic director Zalmen Mlotek. The board is co-chaired by Sandra Cahn and Carol Levin.
Warren Carlyle is a British director and choreographer who was born in Norwich, Norfolk, England. He received Drama Desk Award nominations for Outstanding Choreography and Outstanding Director of a Musical for the 2009 revival of Finian's Rainbow.
The Pioneer Theatre Company (PTC) is one of four professional theatre companies in Utah, and the only fully professional theatre in Salt Lake City, contracting with union members belonging to Actors' Equity Association (AEA), Stage Directors and Choreographers Society (SDC) and United Scenic Artists (USA829). PTC was formed in 1962 and performs at the Simmons Pioneer Memorial Theatre on the University of Utah campus in Salt Lake City. The non-profit company produces seven plays each season, running from September to May, including classics, musicals, dramas, and comedies. The company creates its own productions on site, including costumes and scenery, while sometimes using actors and directors from out-of-state. Among a number of premieres, the company produced the nation's first regional premiere of Les Misérables in 2007, giving 82 sold out performances.
Zalmen Mlotek is an American conductor, pianist, musical arranger, accompanist, composer, and the Artistic Director of the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene (NYTF), the longest continuous running Yiddish theatre in the world. He is an internationally recognized authority on Yiddish folk and theater music and a leading figure in the Jewish theatre and concert worlds. As the Artistic Director of the NYTF for the past twenty years, Mlotek helped revive Yiddish classics, instituted bi-lingual simultaneous English and Russian supertitles at all performances and brought leading creative artists of television, theatre and film, such as Itzhak Perlman, Mandy Patinkin, Sheldon Harnick, Theo Bikel, Ron Rifkin, and Joel Grey, to the Yiddish stage. His vision has propelled classics including NYTF productions of the world premiere of Isaac Bashevis Singer's Yentl in Yiddish (1998), Di Yam Gazlonim and the 1923 Rumshinky operetta, The Golden Bride (2016), which was nominated for a Drama Desk Award and listed as a New York Times Critics Pick. During his tenure at the NYTF, the theatre company has been nominated for over ten Drama Desk Awards, four Lucille Lortel Awards, and has been nominated for three Tony Awards. In 2015, he was listed as one of the Forward 50 by The Forward, which features American Jews who have had a profound impact on the American Jewish community.
Indecent is a 2015 American play by Paula Vogel. It recounts the controversy surrounding the play God of Vengeance by Sholem Asch, which was produced on Broadway in 1923, and for which the producer and cast were arrested and convicted on the grounds of obscenity.
Raquel Nobile is a New York City-based theater and film actor.
Stephanie Lynne Mason is a New York City-based theater actress. She has performed in several theatrical productions including Broadway theatre.
Fidler Afn Dakh is a Yiddish-language adaptation of the musical Fiddler on the Roof translated and adapted by Shraga Friedman. The adaptation revisits the 1894 collection of Yiddish short stories on which Fiddler on the Roof is based, about Tevye the Dairyman. Friedman created the translation for a 1965 Israeli production. It was produced by the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene (NYTF) in New York City in 2018 and transferred off-Broadway to Stage 42 in 2019.
Eleanor Reissa is an American actress, singer, theatre director, playwright, librettist, choreographer, translator, and author based in New York City. She works and performs in English and Yiddish speaking stages, and also interprets and performs Yiddish theatre and songs.
Bruce Sabath is an American actor, known for his work in live-performance theater. He made his Broadway debut playing Larry in the 2006 Tony Award-winning revival of Stephen Sondheim's hit musical Company.
Jana Robbins, née Marsha Eisenberg, is a Tony, Olivier and Drama Desk Award-winning American producer, actress, director, teacher, and speaker. She has produced and won awards for her West End, Broadway and Off-Broadway productions.
Steven Skybell is a theater and television actor. He has performed on Broadway, Off-Broadway, in regional theater productions, on television, and in film.
Earlier today, a NY Times article came out detailing and profiling my lifetime of fabrications. And there's a lot to process.
I made mistakes, it caught attention, and it spread like wildfire all over the web. It's now there forever.