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A Most Mysterious Yinglish Mikado, from The Poconos to Hollywood, with Eve Sicular
Lecture #62 in Joshua Horowitz’s series, The Promiscuous World of Jewish Music
A Most Mysterious Yinglish Mikado, from The Poconos to Hollywood, with Eve Sicular
Monday, October 25, 11am California / 2pm New York / 7pm London / 8pm Paris / 9pm Tel Aviv. Please confirm local time.
Length: 1 – 2 hours
Zoom Meeting ID: 967 8901 9038
Password: 156230
Although there is a Zoom limit of 100 participants, there’s always plenty of room. You do not need to register; simply use the sign-in info above.
Donations to Josh Horowitz are accepted and appreciated, but not required.
The Summer of 1939 brought an unprecedented Saturday night entertainment to Camp Tamiment, the cosmopolitan Jewish socialist singles resort in bucolic Pennsylvania. Famous for its high quality original live shows and parodies, Tamiment featured a talent pool of rising stars that year including both Danny Kaye [ne David Daniel Kaminski] and Jerome [Rabinowitz] Robbins, both of whom crafted their showbiz names during their stints in the mountains where they polished material that also largely left their ethnic roots behind. Their seemingly unlikely hit emerged in response to recent feuding African-American-cast productions of The Swing Mikado and The Hot Mikado on Broadway, as well as The Red Mikado staged across their shared Poconos lake by earnest International Ladies Garment Workers theatricals. Nu? The culturally assimilated Tamiment satirists took Gilbert & Sullivan into a highly topical realm of fluent, politically charged and hilarious mameloshn. Just a few years later, this legendary “too Jewish” take-off was reprised in semi-private performance with all-new Yiddish in-jokes for a wartime after-hours audience sprinkled with screenwriters and movie moguls.