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The Golden Land
by Zalmen Mlotek and Moishe Rosenfeld

1982-1983 Season

Central Synagogue Auditorium
122 East 55th Street
New York, NY

 

"The Golden Land" was performed three times during a single weekend.

A review for this production was written by Richard F. Shepard, and it appeared in the New York Times on October 20, 1982.

Here it is:

The immigrant lives in a half-world, with his feet planted, unfirmly, in the old country and in the new. These two unsteady feet have been made to stand, quite steadily, in "The Golden Land," a musical show that ran last weekend at the Folksbiene Playhouse.

"The Golden Land," sponsored by the Workmen's Circle, has a quartet of sympathetic and talented performers doing more than sixty songs in Yiddish and in English, and sometimes blending the two idioms. They take you from the greenhorn on the boat to the worker in the shop, from the hits of the Second Avenue Yiddish stage to life as fully enrolled Americans.

There is much humor and liveliness as well as wistfulness and anger in these songs, starting right from an early song about "The Golden Land" to the finale, "The Jewish People Live." Along the way we hear "Hurrah for Red, White and Blue," "The Peddler's Letter," "Union Maid," "I Want to Go Back Home," "Long Live Columbus," "I'm a Boarder By My Wife," "Lady, It'll Iron Itself Out." There are songs that are unfamiliar, half-familiar and quite familiar; it makes no difference, they all catch the ear and mind. The staging is simple, yet imaginative, to make it all much more than a sing-song.

In between songs, there are little skits, jokes played out onstage about name-staging and other features of American Jewish life. It is an amiable show that leaves you feeling retrospective and introspective.

The cast consisted of Phyllis Berk, Avi Hoffman, Eleanor Reissa and Moishe Rosenfeld. Mr. Rosenfeld and Zalmen Mlotek, who handled all the music beautifully on piano, were co-directors and compiled and wrote "The Golden Land." It is a good opportunity for one to look back in the most happy manner, and one hopes that we can look forward to further performances of "The Golden Land."

 

Phyllis Berk, Avi Hoffman and Neva Small in "The Golden Land".

 

Joanne Borts, Bruce Adler, Phyllis Berk, Marc Krause,
Neva Small and Avi Hoffman in "The Golden Land".

 


Photos courtesy of the Museum of the City of New York.

 

 





 

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