325 E. 6th Street
New York, NY 10003
917 670-1631
Downtown's Upstart Yiddish Theater
|
325 E. 6th Street New York, NY 10003 917 670-1631 Downtown's Upstart Yiddish Theater |
| David Mandelbaum
Founder/Artistic Director Amy Coleman Founder/Producing Director Allen Lewis Rickman Executive Director Shane Baker Moshe Yassur Producing Directors Board Rabbi Meir Berger Leyzer Burko Sylvain Cappell Carol Friedman Rokhl Kafrissen Herb Latner Ken Paskar Miriam-Khaye Seigel Yitzhak Schoenfeld Jeff Schneider Nahma Sandrow |
Shane Baker boasts over 30 years of experience as an actor,
magician and puppeteer, and has worked on shows and presented programs
across the U.S., Canada and Europe. As a director and assistant
director, he has worked on stages from regional theaters to Off (and
Off-Off) Broadway, including Seattle Rep and the Manhattan Class
Company. He is especially proud of his work on the plays of Henry
Fielding, including stagings of/appearances in “The Life and Death of
Tom Thumb the Great”, “The Historical Register for the Year 1736”,
“Eurydice”, and “Eurydice Hissed”. As an actor, Shane played the Torah Scribe in the infamous
1999 ShowWorld production of “God of Vengeance”, Charles Ludlam in Ethyl
Eichelberger’s “Fiasco”, and roles too numerous to mention in Jeff
Weiss’s “Hot Keys” and “Come Clean” at PS 122. He studied and worked
with Everett Quinton at the Ridiculous Theatrical Company, where he
played Carla the Gypsy Wildcat in “Turds in Hell”, and with the
anarchist puppet troupe Great Small Works in ”The Rapture Project”, a
Sicilian-style marionette show.He studied acting and recitation in Yiddish with the late Luba Kadison-Buloff, a founding member of the Vilna Troupe, and has appeared at the Jewish Library of Montreal, the Paris Yiddish Center, and the Folksbiene, et al. His recitations from Yiddish literature have been favorably compared with those of Joseph Buloff, Hertz Grosbard, and Sidi Tal. Shane developed an early interest in magic, having been called up at the age of 4 to place his hand (the clean one) on Blackstone’s vanishing birdcage. While still in high school Shane was voted Magician of the Year for the International Brotherhood of Magicians’ Ring 129, and he performed regularly at fairs, fundraisers and Renaissance Festivals.  Amy Coleman's recent credits include
touring Italy with the Italian blues band Texaco Jive, where she sang in
out door festivals and blues clubs. Amy recently directed Yosl
Rokover Speaks to God
at the Actors' Temple Theater and directed and
performed in a benefit production of The Vagina Monologues (along
with Valerie Smaldone, Ally Sheedy, Kathryn Erbe, and a host of
others). Ms. Coleman played the Octorator in Captain Gravy’s Wavy
Navy
at the New York Musical Theater Festival. Coleman and writing
partner Valerie Smaldone’s play with music, Spit It Out! was seen
at the Midtown International Theater Festival. Ms. Coleman is frequently
heard around town singing with her band, The Amy Coleman Band, at
venues like The Cutting Room, Birdland, and Tagine dinning Gallery. She
co-produced and performed in a salute to Stephen Schwartz (accompanied
by Mr. Schwartz himself). Coleman sang with Peter Frampton in the
British Rock Symphony and originated the role of Vickie in the acclaimed
musical The Last Session, both in New York and Los Angeles. She
played Janis Joplin in the original production of Beehive.
Regional theater credits include, The Voice of the Plant in Little
Shop of Horrors
, the Gypsy Queen in Tommy and Mary Magdalene
in Jesus Christ Super Star. Film credits include: Split
and Habit. On TV, she has appeared on MSNBC America’s Talking,
The Hollywood Easter Parade and the series: Here. She has recorded four
cd’s; Flame on, Soul Kiss, Only Sleep Brings Dreams and the cast
recording of The Last Session. She is currently working on a one woman
show entitled How Billie Saved my life- a Performance Memoir of Music
and Madness. She is also performance and voice coach. For more info
visit her website: www.amy-coleman.com 
David Mandelbaum. Hi folks. That's me and my buddy Sammy Katz. I founded this company with my wife, Amy Coleman, and I'm the artistic director. I've worked in non-profit theater for 40
years, as an actor, writer, producer, and director. I guess that's why I'm so broke. New Yiddish Rep is a
labor of love, and its a privilege to work with such talented and
dedicated collaborators. Allen Lewis
Rickman
adapted, directed, and wrote supertitle translations for The
Lady Next Door and A Novel Romance for the Folksbiene, and co-adapted,
directed, and wrote translations for the Yiddish version of The Pirates
of Penzance, which was nominated for a Drama Desk award. His co-written farce Off The Hook was produced in Paris, Copenhagen, and Madrid, has been optioned for further European productions, and has had three regional productions stateside; his co-written-and-directed video “The Führer’s Funnyman” was broadcast nationally three times and singled out by the NY Times in their Broadcast Highlights. He has acted in dozens of regional theaters around the U.S. (Paper Mill, Cleveland Playhouse, Virginia Stage, et al) and in numerous shows Off-Broadway (the Mint, the York, etc.) and in Yiddish theatre; has written and performed in industrials for Pentax, TV Guide, Swatch, et al, and on television for “Quick Wits” with Wayne Brady, “Are We On?” with Buck Henry, and Michael Moore’s “The Awful Truth”; and has directed for E.S.T., the Hasselfree competition at Lincoln Center, Pulse, the Duplex, et cetera. Most recently he wrote, directed, and performed in NYR’s acclaimed production of “The Essence: A Yiddish Theater Dim Sum”, featuring Steve Sterner and Yelena Shmulenson. With his writing partner Karl Tiedemann he recently completed his first commissioned screenplay about, of all things, NASCAR.  Yelena Shmulenson started singing and
studying piano in her native Ukraine at the age of six; she emigrated to
the U.S. with her family in 1993. Her credits include four seasons with
the National Yiddish Theatre/Folksbiene, two seasons at the Ellis Island
Theatre, “Bronx Express” and “The Unlucky Man In A Yellow Cap” (both
Fringe NYC), Frank (‘Klezmatics’) London’s musical of “A Night In the
Old Marketplace”, the tour of “Lady of Copper”, and Off-Off Broadway
productions of “Flowers For Algernon”, “The Lilac Minyan”, etc. Film:
Robert DeNiro’s “The Good Shepherd” and the upcoming Coen Brothers
project. Yiddish is her fifth language. Steve Sterner is a native New Yorker who has appeared on Broadway in “Oh, Brother!”, “Yiddle With A Fiddle”, and “The Sheik of Avenue B”; Off-Broadway in “That’s Life!”, “The Grand Tour”, “Kuni-Leml”, “Vagabond Stars”, and many others. For years his voice was heard as the Singing Fire Hydrant on ABC-TV, and he succeeded Julius LaRosa as the star of “The Spectacular Days of Radio” at Trump Plaza in Atlantic City. At the Folksbiene Yiddish Theater Steve performed in “Double Identity”, “An American Family”, “Yentl”, “A Novel Romance”, and as ‘The Pirate King’ in “Di Yam Gazlonim”, the Yiddish version of “The Pirates of Penzance”. As a pianist Steve conducted and played keyboard for “A Yiddish Vaudeville” starring Bruce Adler and “1040”, a new musical with Mike Burstyn. He has accompanied Robert Merrill, Jerry Vale, Joan Collins, Joanne Woodward, and many others. As a composer, Steve wrote the scores for the musicals “Lovers” and “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf”, which have been performed in the U.S. and all over the world. He has composed music for and accompanied over three hundred silent films at Film Forum in New York (where he is the house pianist) as well as at Lincoln Center, the Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of the Moving Image, and BAM Rose Cinemas at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. As a cruciverbalist, Steve has constructed crossword and acrostic puzzles for the New York Times and other national publications.  Since studying in Paris with the legendary
Jean-Marie Serreau (where he worked as an assistant on some of Ionesco’s
first plays) and in New York with Lee Strasberg and Harold Clurman,
Moshe Yassur has directed theater in Romania, Israel, Germany,
The Republic Of Moldova, and the U.S. His production of “What The
Butler Saw” is one of the major hits of current Romanian theater; his
production of Mario Diament’s “The Book of Ruth”, a memory play about
escaping the Holocaust, opened there in 2002 and is still being
performed by the State Jewish Theater of Bucharest. Another play he
directed by Diament, “Lost Tango”, starred Maia Morgenstern just after
she finished playing ‘Mary’ in Mel Gibson’s notorious “Passion of the
Christ”. A native of Romania, Yassur was invited by Harry Eliad, Artistic Director of SJTB, to direct part of their Yiddish repertoire. (The theater, the sole survivor of the state-sponsored Yiddish theaters that once flourished in Eastern Europe, also produces plays in Romanian.) Apart from his directorial bona fides, Yassur had the perfect background for Yiddish theater: born in Iasi, Romania, where Abraham Goldfadn founded the modern Yiddish theater, Yassur had acted as a boy on the very stage where Goldfadn worked, and with actors who had been trained by Goldfadn himself. |
