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.
Folksbiene (Yiddish: פֿאָלקסבינע, IPA:[ˈfɔlksˌbɪnə], People's Stage) was founded in 1915, under the auspices of the fraternal and Yiddish cultural organization Workmen's Circle,[1] on New York City’s Lower East Side, as an amateur theatre group with high artistic ideals.[2] It is the oldest consecutively producing theater company in the United States, English or Yiddish, commercial or not.[3] The era when it was founded is considered to be the height of Yiddish theater; at the time there were 15 Yiddish theatre companies in the Yiddish Theater District in New York and many more worldwide. Due to the destruction of European Jewry by the German Nazis, the Folksbiene is one of only five professional Yiddish theatre companies still in operation; also in New York City is the New Yiddish Rep, and the others are in Bucharest, Warsaw and Tel Aviv.[1]
In late 2017, National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene announced that it would stage the American premiere of Fiddler on the Roof in Yiddish, which has not been staged since its world premiere production in Israel more than 50 years ago.[4] It was announced in a March 2018 issue of Forbes Magazine that Academy Award winner-and-Tony Award winner Joel Grey would direct the production.[5] Their production Fidler Afn Dakh had its first preview on July 4, 2018.[6] The opening performance was July 15, 2018.[6] The production won the 2019 Drama Desk Award For Best Musical Revival.
The company's 2006 production of Di Yam Gazlonim, a Yiddish adaptation of The Pirates of Penzance, by Al Grand, was nominated for the 2007 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Musical Revival, and their 2012/13 Off Broadway production of The Golden Land was nominated for the 2013 Drama Desk Award for outstanding Musical Revival. In the summer of 2012, Folksbiene announced their plans to create an international Festival of new works in celebration of their Centennial in 2015. A play contest accompanying the festival was juried by producer Emanuel Azenberg; the Tony Award-winning composer and songwriter Jason Robert Brown ("Parade"), and the playwrights Joe DiPietro (Tony Award for "Memphis"); Obie Award-winning Israel Horovitz, and Pulitzer Prize finalist Jon Marans ("Old Wicked Songs").
A revival of the 1923 operetta The Golden Bride in 2015/16 drew press attention as a New York Times Theatre Critics Pick and garnered Drama Desk awards as well.[7][8] The Folksbiene was a producer on the 2015/16 Broadway play "Indecent."
In the Fall of 2017, the company staged an enhanced production of Abraham Goldfadn's The Sorceress as part of their restoration project – an endeavor that will restore lost or nearly lost Yiddish works to the canon of Yiddish culture.[9] A fully stage production was mounted two years later in December 2019.
In 2022, the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene presented Harmony: A New Musical, the New York debut of the musical by Barry Manilow and his longtime collaborator Bruce Sussman. The musical tells the true story of the Comedian Harmonists, an ensemble of six talented young men in 1920s Germany who took the world by storm. The show ran at the Museum of Jewish Heritage from March 23 to May 8, 2022.[10]
2010: Fyvush Finkel Live!, New Worlds: A Celebration of I. L. Peretz. A Gilgul Fun a Nigun (The Metamorphosis of a Melody), The Adventures of Hershele Ostropolyer
2009: Sholom Aleichem: Laughter Through Tears, Shpiel! Shpiel! Shpiel!]
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 and his Daughters and other tales 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.
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. He earned the Lifetime Achievement Tony Award in 2023.
Yiddish theatre consists of plays written and performed primarily by Jews in Yiddish, the language of the Central European Ashkenazi Jewish community. The range of Yiddish theatre is broad: operetta, musical comedy, and satiric or nostalgic revues; melodrama; naturalist drama; expressionist and modernist plays. At its height, its geographical scope was comparably broad: from the late 19th century until just before World War II, professional Yiddish theatre could be found throughout the heavily Jewish areas of Eastern and East Central Europe, but also in Berlin, London, Paris, Buenos Aires and New York City.
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.
Itzik Manger was a prominent Yiddish poet and playwright, a self-proclaimed folk bard, visionary, and 'master tailor' of the written word. A Jew from Bucovina, Manger lived in Romania, Poland, France, England, the US, Canada (Montreal) and finally Israel.
The New York Drama Critics' Circle is made up of 20 drama critics from daily newspapers, magazines and wire services based in the New York City metropolitan area. The organization is best known for its annual awards for excellence in theater.
On Second Avenue is a Yiddish American musical theatre production which looks back at the heyday of Yiddish Theater, especially in the Yiddish Theater District in Manhattan's East Village on Second Avenue.
Shlemiel the First is a musical adaptation of the "Chelm stories" of Isaac Bashevis Singer about the supposedly wise men of that legendary town, and a fool named Shlemiel. It was conceived and adapted by Robert Brustein, with lyrics by Arnold Weinstein and music based on traditional klezmer music and Yiddish theater songs by Hankus Netsky of the Klezmer Conservatory Band and Zalmen Mlotek, who wrote additional music and arrangements, and served as the musical director of the original production. Singer had written a non-musical theatrical adaptation of the stories, Shlemiel the First, which Brustein produced in 1974 when he was the artistic director of Yale Repertory Theater in New Haven, and this served to provide the basic material for the musical.
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.
Daniella Zeva Rabbani is an American actress, singer and voiceover artist. She has appeared in a number of films and television shows, including Ocean's 8, God Friended Me, The Americans, Appropriate Behavior, Floating Sunflowers, Bridge and Tunnel and Laughs.
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.
The Golden Bride is a 1923, Yiddish language musical, or operetta. It was revived in 2015 and again in 2016 by the Folksbiene National Yiddish Theatre in New York. The production received two Drama Desk nominations, one for Best Revival of a Musical and for Best Director for Bryna Wasserman and Motl Didner.
Amerike – The Golden Land is a musical with book, lyrics, and song by Moishe Rosenfeld and Zalmen Mlotek. The show is in Yiddish and English depicting the journey of Jewish immigrants to the United States.
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 on Broadway as well as in other theatrical productions.
Christopher Massimine 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.
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.
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