Once a staple of the popular Yiddish stage, Isaac Zolotarevsky's legendary 1910 melodrama Gelt, Libe, Un Shande will be presented on Monday, February 6th at 7 PM at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in a new English translation by writer/director Allen Lewis Rickman under the title MONEY, LOVE, AND SHAME!
This one-night-only event will feature two-time Drama Desk Award winner Everett Quinton (The Mystery of Irma Vep, Camille, Natural Born Killers, Rodgers + Hammerstein's Cinderella), Samantha Maurice (Much Ado About Nothing, The Grasshopper Way, The Winter's Tale), Allen Lewis Rickman ("Boardwalk Empire," "You Don't Know Jack," A Serious Man, Relatively Speaking), Yelena Shmulenson ("Boardwalk Empire," "Orange is the New Black," "The Knick"), Kevin Sebastian ("Blue Bloods," "Bull," Goyband), Jacqueline Sydney (Filmic Achievement, The Prom Queen, Confess), and Kraig Swartz (A Picture of Autumn, Donogoo, So Help Me God!) MONEY, LOVE, AND SHAME! will be directed by Allen Lewis Rickman, with piano accompaniment by Steve Sterner (25 years as house pianist at Film Forum, where he accompanies classic silent movies with his own scores).
Not for the weak of heart, MONEY, LOVE, AND SHAME! is a wild ride with a group of dysfunctional Jewish immigrants. Though considered "shund" or "trash" by critics, it was one of the most popular and most often produced plays on the Yiddish stage.
On the night before she is to take her widower father to Denver to cure his Galloping Tuberculosis, young immigrant Sonia Eydlman is 'ruined' by drunken lawyer Albert Liebhartz. Albert promises to marry her, but he is forced instead to marry slumlord Barney Bender's nymphomaniac daughter Cecilia. Bender plans to get Albert appointed as a judge so that Albert can help him kick the "chiselers" out of his tenements. And while innocent Sonia finds a new life as an alcoholic prostitute, Harry, Cecilia's lovesick chauffeur boytoy, makes his own plans...
Adapter/director Allen Lewis Rickman adapted, directed and wrote supertitle translations for three plays in Yiddish for the Folksbiene (including the Drama Desk-nominated Yiddish Pirates of Penzance) and three for New Yiddish Rep. He directed Dancing on Nails Off-Broadway and his own musical Christmas at the Small
EMPIRE for Centenary Stage. He is also an internationally produced playwright, and his work has been presented in six languages. Allen's co-written farce Off the Hook was published in French in L'Avant-Scene Theatre. His revue The Essence: A Yiddish Theater Dim Sum has toured widely and was published in an anthology co-edited by the late Harvey Pekar.
YIVO's collections are the primary source of the documentary history of East European Jewry and the surviving record of millions of lives of Jewish victims of the Holocaust. The Library of the YIVO Institute is proud to possess one of the world's largest collections of Yiddish theater works from 1850 to 1950, the period that coincided with the flourishing of Jewish theater in Europe and the United States.
Admission to MONEY, LOVE, AND SHAME! is $15 ($10 for YIVO members & students) and tickets are available at
www.yivo.org/Money-Love-and-Shame. The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research is located at 15 West 16 Street (between Fifth & Sixth Aves.)
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