New York's Smash Hit Tevye Served Raw to Be Performed at Centenary Stage Company, Oct. 22 - 25
TEVYE SERVED RAW WHEN: Thursday at 7:30 pm, Friday & Saturday at 8 pm, and Sunday at 2 pm
WHERE: Sitnik Theatre at the Lackland Performing Arts Center, 715 Grand Avenue in Hackettstown, NJ.
TICKETS: range from $22.50 to $27.50 for adults with discounts available for seniors, students and children under 12. Thursday evening is a Buy One Get One rush ticket special when purchased at the box office beginning at 5:30 PM.
Tickets and more information are available online at centenarystageco.org or by calling the box office at (908) 979-0900.
Find out what happens to the beloved characters in Fiddler
on the Roof after the musical ends. TEVYE SERVED RAW is
an evening of Sholem Aleichem material, with adaptations of his Tevye stories
(“What, Me Worthy?” and “Get Thee Gone!”), scenes from his own long-unseen
Yiddish stage version, and three of his purely comedic stories, newly adapted
(“Strange Jews on a Train,” “The Yiddish Sisyphus” and “A Stepmother’s
Trash-Talk”).
TEVYE SERVED RAW will
feature the original New York cast: Allen Lewis Rickman and Yelena Shmulenson
(the Yiddish-speaking couple from the Coen brothers’ A Serious Man)
and Shane Baker (“the best-loved Episcopalian on the Yiddish stage today”). The
production is performed in English and Yiddish with English supertitles. Unlike
several recent Yiddish-language productions, the cast of TEVYE
SERVED RAW are all authentic speakers of the language.
"We have tremendous fun doing the comic stuff, but the
'Tevye' material is something else entirely," said Rickman, who is also
the show's director. "It's a revelation to people who only know Fiddler
on the Roof. Fiddler is a superb musical – one of the best ever –
but they had to dilute the material to make it acceptable to a mainstream
audience in 1964. And look, Bock and Harnick and Stein are brilliant musical
theater guys, but they grew up in America, which is a very different place from
Tsarist Russia.
What we did is go back to the source. What's in our show is what
Sholem Aleichem, who was there in the shtetl and saw it all himself, actually
wrote. It's his words, his observations, unfiltered, ‘raw’. We're doing
adaptations of his original stories plus scenes from his own stage version of Tevye.
A few of the plot points are also in Fiddler, but we do them as Sholem
Aleichem wrote them, without the compromises they had to make for Broadway.
It's a question of authenticity. If people want to get a sense of
where most American Jews actually came from, this is the real deal. The
characters in our show are the people that were there, not exaggerations from
musical comedy."
TEVYE SERVED RAW has been in
development for over four years and has been performed in New York City, Los
Angeles; Kiev, Ukraine; Toronto; and Massachusetts, among other places. In
2018, the production played to ecstatic acclaim in Romania, where it was
presented with Romanian supertitles at the State Jewish Theater in Bucharest.
Allen Lewis Rickman is an actor, writer and
director. He played Velvel in A Serious Man and also
translated the Coens’ dialogue into Yiddish. Other film work includes John
Turturro’s Fading Gigolo (with Woody Allen) and The Jesus Rolls (with
Bobby Cannavale & Susan Sarandon), Chinese Puzzle (with
Audrey Tautou) and The Cobbler (with Dustin Hoffman). TV:
Barry Levinson’s Emmy-winning “You Don’t Know Jack” (with Al Pacino & John
Goodman), recurring roles on “Boardwalk Empire” and Steven Spielberg’s “Public
Morals,” “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” (as Red Skelton), Michael Moore’s “The
Awful Truth,” Buck Henry’s “Are We On?,” etc. Broadway: Relatively
Speaking (with Marlo Thomas). Off-Broadway: Mack and Mabel at
Encores!, So Help Me God! (with Kristen Johnston), Schnitzler’s Far
and Wide (Mint), Theda Bara and the Frontier Rabbi (JRT
& York), etc. Regional: Cleveland Play House, Paper Mill, Two River,
etc. Rickman has directed Off-Broadway and regionally, including the Drama
Desk-nominated Yiddish Pirates of Penzance. He is an
internationally produced playwright whose work has been presented in six
languages. His new subtitle translation for the classic film Tevye,
starring Maurice Schwartz, will be released by Kino Lorber on November 24th.
Yelena Shmulenson was born in Belarus, raised
in Ukraine and emigrated to the US in 1993. She’s perhaps best known as the
icepick-wielding Dora in the Coen brothers’ Oscar-nominated Best Picture A
Serious Man. Other film & TV credits include “Orange is the New Black,”
“Blue Bloods,” “Madame Secretary,” “The Knick,” “Boardwalk Empire” (as Mrs.
Manny Horvitz), “Chicago Med,” The Good Shepherd, Romeo & Juliet in
Yiddish, and Chinese Puzzle. Stage credits include The
Golem of Havana (Miami New Drama), The Essence: A Yiddish
Theater Dim Sum (Fringe/tour), two seasons at the Ellis Island
Theatre, Covers (New York/St. Petersburg/Moscow/Montreal),
etc. She won three Earphones Awards for her recorded books and is fluent in
five languages.
Shane Baker appeared Off-Broadway in Sholem
Asch’s God of Vengeance, in his solo show The Big
Bupkis! A Complete Gentile’s Guide to Yiddish Vaudeville (co-written
and directed by Allen Lewis Rickman), The Adventures of Hershele Ostropolyer
(with Mike Burstyn), The Megile of Itzik Manger, Everett
Quinton’s staging of Charles Ludlam’s Conquest of the Universe or When
Queens Collide, and in his own Yiddish translation of Beckett’s Waiting
for Godot for the play’s Yiddish world premiere, and tours to
Enniskillen, Ireland and Paris, France. The New York Times called
his translation “even more depressing than Beckett’s original.” In 2016 he
toured the world with programs commemorating the 100th anniversary of the death
of Sholem Aleichem, sharing stages with Itzhak Perlman and Chava Alberstein.
Shane spent several seasons with Jeff Weiss in his serial And That’s
How the Rent Gets Paid / Hot Keys / Come Clean and assisted director
Doug Hughes in his Obie-award winning direction of The Grey Zone.
One of the most beloved writers of Yiddish literature, Sholem
Aleichem’s work inspired the hit musical Fiddler on the Roof.
Sholem Aleichem (Solomon Rabinowitz) was born in Pereyaslav, Ukraine, and
moved as a child with his family to Voronkov, a neighboring small town which
later served as the model for the fictitious town of Kasrilevke described in
his works. One of his first stories appeared in a Yiddish paper under the
pseudonym “Sholem Aleichem” which in Hebrew means "Peace be unto
you." From this time on, this became his pen name. He wrote stories,
sketches, critical reviews, plays, and poems in both verse and prose. His
immense popularity did not decline after his death in 1916 but rather increased
beyond the Yiddish-speaking public. His works have also been translated into
most European languages, as well as Russian and English. His plays and dramatic
versions of his stories have been performed by the top Yiddish and Hebrew
theatrical companies in America, Israel, Russia, Poland, and many other countries.
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