A red-hot company transports audiences to Jewish Hollywood for some welcome glitz and glamour
As the band in this bustling Highgate venue strikes up 'Hava Nagila' and the packed audience claps to the insistent beat, you know Jewish Hollywood has found its ideal home. It’s a perfect entrance number for the terrific four-strong company, who sing and dance up a storm, more than succeeding in filling the long, narrow stage, thanks to director Cressida Carré’s elegant choreography.
All four are ridiculously talented triple threats – they sing, they dance, they act their glitzy socks off. Matching two wonderfully experienced performers – huge-voiced Sue Kelvin and golden-voiced Howard Samuels – with two recent arrivals onstage pays dividends. In an impressively long CV Jack Reitman includes winning Best Actor in a Musical in the Off-West End Awards and it’s immediately evident why. MacKenzie Mellen is making her professional debut, but you’ll be hearing a lot more about this extraordinarily talented, charismatic whirlwind.
They are backed by a quartet of outstanding musicians led by MD Amir Shoenfeld on keys: depending on dates, Hannah Fry or Lucinda Dunne on reeds; Max Randall or Doug Grannell on bass; and Nick Anderson or Ben Burton on drums and percussion, play Andy Collyer’s richly textured arrangements.
Writer Chris Burgess (and husband of Kelvin) has form delving into showbiz history to discover and nimbly script the story of the Jewish contribution. Jewish Hollywood is the latest in this series of shows produced by Katy Lipson for Aria Entertainment, following The Jewish Legends, That’s Jewish Entertainment and The Great Jewish American Songbook.
The company share Burgess's narration that takes us through some well-known and rather lesser-known territory. The arrival Stateside and the trek onward to the uncertain terrain of the West Coast made by plucky refugees from the pogroms of Europe is a shared history most of the audience will be familiar with. The success stories of fame and fortune, of big names like Fred Astaire (born Frederick Austerlitz) and Louis B Mayer, who joined with Marcus Loew and Sam Goldwyn in 1924 to form Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, are well known. But early struggles to succeed despite "no Jews" policies may be less familiar. Jews aspiring to carve out their place in Hollywood were faced with the choice of standing up for their beliefs or hiding their Jewish identity. Some chose to face antisemitism, often playing up their Jewishness, while others subsumed it.
Via the fun of the Yiddishe Cowboy of 1909 and a hilarious canter through that milestone first talkie The Jazz Singer (1927), with Al Jolson as the cantor turned eponymous singer of ‘Mammy’, Burgess provides both cast and audience with an homage to the Marx Brothers. Sue Kelvin, meanwhile, gets to enchant with her full-blooded reincarnation of Sophie Tucker, truly "the last of the Red Hot Mammas".
Of course Burgess has his own idiosyncratic take on Exodus, that adaptation of Leon Uris’ novel charting the creation of Israel, with its iconic theme song, along with both Fiddler on the Roof and Funny Girl. But don’t take my word for it, go and enjoy the tonic of this delicious show for yourselves.
By Judi Herman
Photos by Louis Burgess
Jewish Hollywood runs until Sunday 17 April. 7.30pm (Mon-Sat), 3pm (3, 7 & 14 Apr), 4pm (Sun only). £22-£24, £20-£22 concs. Upstairs at the Gatehouse, N6 4BD. https://upstairsatthegatehouse.ticketsolve.com