Postcard courtesy: National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene
Kids and Yiddish originated as a concert sponsored by the Workmen’s Circle that I conceived of with Adrienne Cooper (z’l), Michael Fox and Joanne Borts. From that concert, Joanne, Michael, and I developed it into a show that premiered at the Folksbiene the next year. The material consisted of ways to introduce words and concepts in Yiddish to a non-Yiddish speaking audience of parents and children. Modeled after Sesame Street and Saturday Night Live, we developed skits in English that would lead into pop tunes with English lyrics about Yiddish. Michael Fox wrote many beautiful original songs as well; in particular a song called A Regnboygn (A Rainbow) which was inspired after Sept 11, 2001. We expanded the cast in subsequent years with my three children—Avram, Elisha, and Sarah, as well as my niece Marrisa. The cast over the years also included Rebecca Levy, Rachel Yucht, Lisa Mayer, Sruli Dresdner, Evan and Zach Mayer, Nessa Norich, Neva Small, Lisa Fishman, Josh Dolgin, Jeff Warschauer, and Jenny Romaine—who designed many of the sets and costumes for the shows. We produced a CD, Kids and Yiddish, and still years later many audience members come up to me and retell how they either grew up listening to the CD, or brought their kids to those shows or had attended themselves.
Zalmen Mlotek (Yiddish: זלמן נתן מלאטעק), born June 15, 1951 in the Bronx, NY), is an American conductor, pianist, musical arranger, accompanist, composer, and the Artistic Director of the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene (NYTF), the longest continuous running Yiddish theatre in the world. He is an internationally recognized authority on Yiddish folk and theater music and a leading figure in the Jewish theatre and concert worlds. As the Artistic Director of the NYTF for the past twenty years, Mlotek helped revive Yiddish classics, instituted bi-lingual simultaneous English and Russian supertitles at all performances and brought leading creative artists of television, theatre and film, such as Itzhak Perlman, Mandy Patinkin, Sheldon Harnick, Theo Bikel, Ron Rifkin, Mandy Patinkin and Joel Grey, to the Yiddish stage. His vision has propelled classics including NYTF productions of the world premiere of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Yentl in Yiddish (1998), Di Yam Gazlonim (The Yiddish Pirates of Penzance, 2006) and the 1923 Rumshinky operetta, The Golden Bride (2016), which was nominated for a Drama Desk Award and listed as a New York Times Critics Pick. During his tenure at the NYTF, the theatre company has been nominated for over ten Drama Desk Awards, four Lucille Lortel Awards, and has been nominated for three Tony Awards. In 2015, he was listed as one of the Forward 50 by The Forward, which features American Jews who have had a profound impact on the American Jewish community. (Wikipedia)
