Where do Klezmer and Cuba intersect? Miami, of course–home to Cuban ex-pats and a robust Jewish community. Roberto Rodriguez and the Cuban Jewish All Stars is the product of one man’s expansive musical imagination and unique upbringing. Bring your dancing shoes on May 14 at the DCJCC.
Posted on September 12, 2011 by Lili Kalish Gersch
Sometimes a song has the fortune to meet the zeitgeist perfectly. When that happens, a perfectly good song becomes an anthem for an age.
For me, Five for Fighting’s Superman (It’s Not Easy) is that song. Their soulful ballad, written well before 9/11, start with the words “I can’t stand to fly,” and, hitting ever more resonant cultural notes, insists that “even heroes have the right to bleed.” In constant rotation in the weeks and months after 9/11, it still sends me reeling back to those uncertain days. What’s your 9/12 song?
Stephen Sondheim, Arthur Laurents, Harold Prince, Robert E. Griffith, Leonard Bernstein, and Jerome Robbins in 1957.
This week, Leonard Bernstein would’ve turned 93.
West Side Story, for which Bernstein composed the famous music, showcased the early collaboration of three nice Jewish boys – with Stephen Sondheim doing the lyrics, and Arthur Laurents writing the script.
See if you can imagine the show as originally conceived, as East Side Story: the conflicted love story between a Jewish girl from a family of Holocaust survivors and an Italian boy from a Catholic family on the Lower East Side.