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The genesis of creating Those Were the Days was a phone call in from Moe Septee, legendary producer in Philadelphia of the Philly Pops and many other concerts and theatrical presentations. He asked me and my collaborating partner Moishe Rosenfeld (The Golden Land, On Second Avenue) to conceive of an evening using the ‘chestnuts’ of the Yiddish repertory, and build a theatrical evening using them.
We asked Eleanor Reissa to direct the piece and she helped us shape the evening.
We did performances in Philadelphia, South Florida, and Los Angeles. We came back to New York, and brought it to Broadway at the Edison Theater. The original cast was Bruce Adler, Mina Bern, Norman Atkins, Eleanor Reissa and Lori Wilner. Joanne Borts and Bob Abelson joined the cast.
For the Broadway production, Moe enlisted the support and backing of Emanuel (Manny) Azenberg, and Victor Potamkin to produce our show.
Those Were the Days on Broadway (November, 1990) was nominated for two Tony nominations: Best Director of a Musical—Eleanor Reissa, and Best Featured Actor in a Musical—Bruce Adler.
For the opening night Playbill full credits click here.
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)