Jewish hero, 8 nights' worth of creative goblins
Eric Kimmel's children's book Hershel and the Hanukkah Goblins is a story that, aside from being engaging, is also gently subversive and proudly ethnic.
Jewish hero, 8 nights' worth of creative goblins
By Wendy Rosenfield
For the Inquirer
Eric Kimmel's children's book Hershel and the Hanukkah Goblins is a story that, aside from being engaging, is also gently subversive and proudly ethnic.
In Gas & Electric Arts' staged adaptation, Jacqueline Pardue Goldfinger adds live music, puppetry, and another layer of engagement with an Alice in Wonderland backstory that connects the book's wandering Jewish hero with a present-day audience of youngsters.
Jewish history is, of course, filled with some pretty rough stuff, and Hershel of Ostropol (David Blatt) is a shtetl superman, come to vanquish the beasties that torment this village - and, in Goldfinger's version, others like it - year-round. But on Hanukkah, it's the worst; occupying the synagogue, the goblins refuse to allow anyone to light a menorah.
It's sort of pogrom-lite, which, thankfully, isn't the easiest concept for American kids to grasp. So, Goldfinger adds 12-year-old Rachel (Mary Tuomanen, whose furrowed brow and no-nonsense mien always seem to anchor a show), a modern-day girl who recently lost her father and can't bear to light the candles without him. Her beloved Uncle Heshy (Blatt, again) disappeared after the funeral, and somehow, in this mirror world, the two of them unite to fight their own demons along with those threatening the village.
In a weaker production, this addition might overwhelm the story's core. While Goldfinger's dialogue isn't always as sharp as it ought to be, and Lisa Jo Epstein's direction occasionally takes too much time enjoying its own company, Kimmel's center holds. It helps that there's no shame in Hershel's game; Blatt, in a big, winning performance, has perhaps the most momentous nose on the Philly stage, and here, bearded, with tzitzit (prayer shawl fringes) hanging from his vest, he's no one's assimilationist fantasy. As a Jewish parent, it sure feels nice to take my own kids to a show where the guy who looks like that is the good guy, and the goblins are the ones hoarding gold and paying the price for their greed.
The villagers - Leila Ghaznavi, John Greenbaum, and Lorna Howley - along with a klezmer band featuring ubiquitous accordionist Rosie Langabeer, offer fine support. But Martina Plag's versatile set - three-wheeled, somber-gray constructions with nooks at every angle - literally keeps things moving, and her eight-nights' worth of creatively imagined goblins almost steal the show. Some of the creatures are fluffy and Muppet-like, others are more complex, requiring a team of three to operate their various discrete parts. But, much like this show, when those parts come together, they're a delight to watch.
Hershel and the Hanukkah Goblins
Through Dec. 31 at Painted Bride Art Center, 230 Vine St. Tickets: $16
to $25. Information: 215-925-9914
or www.GasandElectricArts.org.
Follow Wendy Rosenfield
at #philastage on Twitter.
Read her reviews at www.philly.com/phillystage.
Toby Zinman's night job since 2006 is theater critic for the Inquirer. She also is a contributing writer for Variety and American Theatre magazine. Her day job: Prize-winning prof at UArts, author of four books about four playwrights (Rabe, McNally, Miller, Albee), and doer of scholarly deeds (winner of five NEH grants, Fulbright lecturer at Tel Aviv University, visiting professor in China). Her 'weekend' job as a travel writer provides adventure: dogsledding in the Yukon, ziplining in Belize, walking coast-to-coast across England, and cowboying in the Australian Outback.
Wendy Rosenfield has written freelance features and theater reviews for The Inquirer since 2006. She was theater critic for the Philadelphia Weekly from 1995 to 2001, after which she enjoyed a five-year baby-raising sabbatical. She serves on the board of the American Theatre Critics Association, was a participant in the Bennington Writer's Workshop, a 2008 NEA/USC Fellow in Theater and Musical Theater, and twice was guest critic for the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival's Region II National Critics Institute. She received her B.A. from Bennington College and her M.L.A. from the University of Pennsylvania. She also is a fiction writer, was proofreader to a swami, publications editor for the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, and spends all her free time working out and driving people places. Follow her on Twitter @WendyRosenfield.
Jim Rutter has reviewed theater for The Inquirer since September, 2011. Since 2006, he covered dance, theater and opera for the Broad Street Review, and has also written for many suburban newspapers, including The Main Line Times. In 2009, the National Endowment for the Arts awarded him a Fellowship in Arts Journalism. Thames & Hudson released his updated and revised version of Ballet and Modern Dance in June, 2012. From 1998 to 2005, he taught philosophy and logic at Drexel, and then Widener University. He also coaches Olympic Weightlifting for Liberty Barbell, and has competed at the national level in that sport since 2001.
Merilyn Jackson regularly writes on dance for The Inquirer and other publications. She specializes in the arts, literature, food, travel, and Eastern European culture and politics. In 2001, she was dance critic in residence at the Festival of Contemporary Dance in Bytom, Poland; in 2005, she received an NEA Critics’ Fellowship to Duke University’s Institute for Dance Criticism. She likes to say that dance was her first love but that when she discovered writing she began to cheat on dance. Now that she writes about dance, she’s made an honest woman of herself, although she also writes poetry.
