Who: Drama critic and author Alisa Solomon
What: Theatre for a New Audience’s Open Books Series 2015
Where: Polonsky Shakespeare Center, 262 Ashland Pl. between Fulton St. & Lafayette Ave., 212-229-2819
When: Monday, March 23, free with advance RSVP, 7:00
Why: Theatre for a New Audience’s Open Books series continues with Alisa Solomon presenting her book Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof (Picador, September 2014), an engaging analysis of one of Broadway’s most popular musicals ever, which was adapted into an Oscar-nominated film. “As the first work of American popular culture to recall life in a shtetl — the Eastern European market towns with large Jewish populations — Fiddler felt tender, elegiac, even holy,” Solomon writes in the introduction. “It arrived just ahead of (and helped to instigate) the American roots movement. It was added to multicultural curricula and studied by students across the country in Jewish history units, as if Fiddler were an artifact unearthed from a destroyed world rather than a big-story musical assembled by showbiz professionals.” The free evening will include a conversation between Solomon and moderator Jonathan Kalb, an audience Q&A, a book signing, complimentary food and drink, and a meet-and-greet with Solomon.
No, with Seymour: An Introduction, Ethan Hawke hasn’t managed the nearly impossible, filming an adaptation of the J. D. Salinger story about a young man who commits suicide. Instead, Hawke uses the title for his beautifully touching, life-affirming portrait of octogenarian composer and musician Seymour Bernstein. An extraordinary pianist, the Newark-born Bernstein started playing when he was three, began giving lessons when he was fifteen, and, when he turned fifty, decided to stop performing recitals despite great critical success, in order to concentrate on teaching and composing and to avoid his stage fright and the negative aspects of commercial fame. After meeting at a dinner party, Hawke and Bernstein hit it off and agreed to collaborate on the project, which was filmed over the course of two years. Hawke, in his first documentary and third feature as director (following Chelsea Walls and The Hottest State), shows Bernstein holding master classes in auditoriums, teaching in his cramped New York City apartment, talking in a café with former student and current New York Times architecture critic Michael Kimmelman, and selecting just the right piano for a recital Hawke convinces him to give at the Steinway & Sons showroom on West Fifty-Seventh St.; in addition, Hawke speaks with such other Bernstein friends as writer and scholar Andrew Harvey, pianist and lecturer Joseph Smith, and musician and songwriter Kimball Gallagher. 
