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After a Nearly 70-Year Absence, a Jewish Musical Returns for Hanukkah

By Nicole Levy | December 7, 2015 7:58am
 Four of the stars of the Yiddish operetta
Four of the stars of the Yiddish operetta "The Golden Bride" in period costumes.
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National Yiddish Theater Folksbiene

In its first year of residency at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, the National Yiddish Theater Folkbiene is reviving a play not performed in New York City for nearly 70 years.

The 1920s Yiddish-American operetta "The Golden Bride," a romantic comedy, was last staged in the city in 1948 on the Lower East Side.

At 101 years old, the theater troupe is the longest running Yiddish one in the world. It had been in New York City for about 40 years before it found a permanent home at the living memorial to victims of the Holocaust in Battery Park City.

"One of our missions with the National Yiddish Theater is to present as much of the art, as much of the theater, as much of the music that was created amidst all times of struggle and hope," said NYTF artistic director Zalmen Mlotek, who is conducting the operetta.

"We bring the whole spectrum of Jewish literary creativity."

"The Golden Bride" tells the story of a young woman who receives an unexpected inheritance and leaves her Russian shtetl for America to claim her estate.

She searches both for the mother, who abandoned her as a child, and the man she will marry. The musical enjoyed tremendous success in the 1920s, when it ran for months in the 2,000-seat Kessler's Second Avenue Theater on the Lower East Side, but disappeared from the stage after World War II.

"The Golden Bride" resurfaced in 1984 when musicologist Michael Ochs, then working as the head of the music library at Harvard, found a hand-written copy of the vocal score sans dialogue.

It wasn't until 25 years later that Ochs went looking for the rest of the operetta at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York, where he met Chana Mlotek, an expert in Yiddish music and Zalmen's mother.

"I just remember painstakingly going through [the manuscript] and realizing there's a gem here," said Mlotek, who arranged two smaller performances of "The Golden Bride" before launching the current production at the Museum.

In the 1920s, when the operetta first premiered, "the Yiddish theater was the most popular place for Jews to come together, more than the synagogue," Mlotek said.

"And an important need for these immigrants was to have a place where they could relax...and get away from their troubles in America.

"This particular piece is like a musical fairy tale...It had everything in it: it had the celebration of the old country, the excitement of what it meant to come to America... to live the charmed life in America."

The music by composer Joseph Rumshinsky is itself a celebration of America's melting pot: it takes its influence from European operas like "Carmen," Jewish cantorial music, and American ragtime and jazz. 

Yiddish theater started to fade after immigration laws severely restricted the flow of European Jews resettling in America, and as Jews migrated out of the Lower East Side and began assimilating more into American culture, Mlotek said.

Yiddish, the language in which "The Golden Bride" is written, became a "secret" one that older generations kept to themselves, he said.

For the current production, the show's cast of more than 20 actors had a mere three and a half weeks to learn their lines in Yiddish.

They're singing with a 14-piece orchestra in a production that attempts to stay true to the operetta's original incarnations.

In light of those ambitions, the Folkbiene did its best to transform the museum's concert hall into a theater that more closely resembled those of yesteryear on the Lower East Side.

"The Golden Bride" officially opens Dec. 9 and runs through Jan. 3. More information can be found here