Tag Archives: Marlene Meyerson JCC Manhattan

FINDING LIGHT IN THE DARKNESS: FOR THE LIVING AT THE JCC

Holocaust survivor Marcel Zielinski revisits Auschwitz with his granddaughter, Chen, in For the Living

FOR THE LIVING (Marc Bennett & Tim Roper, 2024)
Marlene Meyerson JCC Manhattan
334 Amsterdam Ave. at West Seventy-Sixth St.
Thursday, April 24, $19.95, 7:00
www.jccmanhattan.org
www.forthelivingmovie.com

“When considering the question, What makes us human?, we must also ask, What might render us less than human? And more importantly, What makes us inhumane?” narrator Tim Roper says at the beginning of For the Living, a powerful and important documentary he codirected with Marc Bennett.

Near the end of the film, Yale professor and On Tyranny author Timothy Snyder points out, “Recognizing that someone else is a human being is a really demandingly high threshold. If you can get to that, then a lot of other problems will solve themselves.”

In the documentary, which is having a special screening April 24 at the Marlene Meyerson JCC Manhattan on the Upper West Side, Roper and Bennett use the 2019 Ride for the Living as the centerpiece of their exploration of dehumanization and genocide and the need for empathy and compassion.

In 2014, software developer and long-range cyclist Robert Desmond traced the liberation path, a twenty-five-day, 1,350-mile bike ride from London to Auschwitz, stopping off at historic locations related to WWII and, more specifically, the Holocaust. The next year, Desmond, a British Jew, established the Ride for the Living, in which groups of bikers travel from Auschwitz to Krakow, following the rode that ten-year-old Marcel Zielinski and many others walked after being freed from the concentration camp in 1945. Zielinski became a regular rider at the annual event, establishing a close relationship with Desmond; despite their age gap of more than fifty years, they consider themselves brothers.

The film cuts between the preparation for the 2019 Ride for the Living, archival Holocaust footage, and brief explorations of twentieth-century genocides in Turkey, Cambodia, Bosnia, and Rwanda as well as the treatment of Indigenous peoples in what would become America and African slavery.

Zielinski returns to his childhood home and visits Auschwitz with his granddaughter, Chen, sharing terrifying details of what he experienced. Bernard Offen, who survived five camps as a child and lost fifty-nine members of his family in the Holocaust, emphasizes how important it is to tell the story, a critical theme through the film.

Rabbi Michael Paley notes, “We shouldn’t come as tourists just to see [Auschwitz]; we should come as witnesses, we should bear witness.” Nuremberg prosecutor Ben Ferencz demands, “Crimes against humanity should not be tolerated.”

Krakow Jewish Community Center CEO and ride participant Jonathan Ornstein explains, “The most important message is not being a bystander, they say. There will always be good people, and there will always be bad people, and I think the way the world goes is largely dependent on the ones in the middle.”

Roper and Bennett also speak with Zimbabwe genocide survivor and international human rights lawyer Gugulethu Moyo, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum founding project director Rabbi Michael Berenbaum, USC Shoah Foundation executive director emeritus Stephen Smith, Emory psychology professor emeritus Frans de Waal, University of Illinois at Chicago social emotional learning chair Kimberly Schonert-Reichl, and Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt.

In the latter part of the 117-minute film, the focus turns to dehumanization and antisemitism, as practiced by the Nazis and even world leaders today, referencing how Hitler was influenced by America’s belief in manifest destiny, a concept that is now being practiced by Vladimir Putin in Russia and the current US administration.

“I grew up thinking that we learned the lessons of the Holocaust, and I’ll say living here, in the heart of Europe for eighteen years, that I don’t think those lessons were learned,” Ornstein says. “With antisemitism on the rise, with Holocaust denial on the rise, I’m shocked by things that happen all around Europe; I’m shocked by things that happen in the United States.”

University of New England philosophy professor David Livingstone Smith explains, “There are great advantages to be reaped by doing bad things to others, by exterminating them,” adding that in certain “circumstances, with the psychology we have, very many of us would yield to that way of thinking.”

And astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson posits, “It’s pretty clear when you look at the history of atrocities, it’s not just simply hatred; it’s like a psychological delusion that has to be put into place so that you can carry this out on a large scale.”

The film — which opens with Talking Heads’ “Road to Nowhere” and concludes with Joan Osborne’s version of Bruce Springsteen’s more hopeful “Further On Up the Road” — was made prior to the current administration, but it’s hard not to think about what is happening right now in the United States involving illegal immigrants, deportation, and antisemitism. Words such as dehumanization and empathy are again being discussed every day.

“It’s bigger than a Jewish thing; this is a human tragedy,” Desmond says.

And it’s far from over.

Roper, Bennett, and producer Lisa Effress will participate in a Q&A following the 7:00 screening at the JCC. The film is also being shown April 23 at 6:30 at Iona University in New Rochelle before traveling to festivals in Dubuque, Boulder, Flint, Detroit, and the Berkshires. The next Ride for the Living is scheduled for June 25–29; registration is now open.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

THREE MINUTES — A LENGTHENING

Three minutes of footage tell a remarkable story in documentary

THREE MINUTES: A LENGTHENING (Bianca Stigter, 2021)
Quad Cinema
34 West 13th St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
August 18-25
212-255-2243
quadcinema.com
www.threeminutesfilm.com

“For the Jewish inhabitants of Nasielsk in Poland, nothing remains,” narrator Helena Bonham Carter says in Bianca Stigter’s astounding documentary, Three Minutes — A Lengthening. “The only thing left is an absence.”

In 1938, David and Liza Kurtz, Polish immigrants who had come to New York in the 1890s and found success, took a trip to Europe, where they visited Holland, Belgium, Switzerland, France, and England, on the cusp of the Holocaust. In an unusual move for Americans making a Grand Tour, they visited David’s hometown of Nasielsk in Eastern Europe that August. There, David used his brand-new movie camera to shoot footage in 16mm Kodachrome and black-and-white of the men, women, and children of the village, smiling, goofing around, and preening, of course unaware of what was to come in a very short time.

In 2009, David and Liza’s grandson Glenn Kurtz donated the three minutes of footage to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, for preservation and research. The museum posted it online, hoping that perhaps some of the people in the film could be identified. Glenn further researched the excerpt for four years, detailing his journey in the 2014 book Three Minutes in Poland: Discovering a Lost World in a 1938 Family Film.

“Nasielsk was not an important town, unless you lived there. It was just a town,” Kurtz explains in the documentary. “But of all the Polish towns destroyed in the Holocaust, Nasielsk is among the very few that exists in moving pictures, among just a handful preserved in color.”

In 2015, Dutch historian and cultural critic Stigter made a short work-in-progress film based on the footage (Three Minutes Thirteen Minutes Thirty Minutes), and now she has expanded it into her feature-length debut, Three Minutes — A Lengthening, opening August 18 at the Quad. It’s a haunting investigation of time and memory that focuses exclusively on the 180+ seconds of David Kurtz’s Nasielsk footage; there are no other images in the seventy-minute film. Stigter and editor Katharina Wartena perform a kind of forensic analysis of each moment, zooming in on specific individuals or locations, trying to figure out the name of a grocery store, even determining what kind of trees lined the cobblestone square, understanding that anything could provide critical information.

The style of the film is reminiscent of what filmmaker Peter Greenaway did with Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper, Rembrandt’s The Night Watch, and Veronese’s Wedding at Cana, fantastically close examinations of every face and detail on the canvases, but the subjects of Three Minutes are all too real.

“These three minutes of life were taken out of the flow of time,” Bonham Carter says. That becomes particularly apparent when thirteen-year-old Maurice Chandler, born Mozek Tuchendler, is recognized by a family member, and Stigter visits him in Detroit; we hear him as he watches the footage, remembering some of the other residents and telling a charming story of some trouble he and a friend got into one day.

The only misstep, and a minor one at that, is a section in which Stigter slowly fills the screen with thumbnails of every face in the footage; while the point is to give each individual their own moment of identity, proof of their existence, it takes away from the overall flow of the film and its compelling detective-procedural-style pacing. However, stick around to the end of the credits for a little bonus.

Although Stigter, who previously served as an associate producer on Widows and Twelve Years a Slave, both directed by her husband, Steve McQueen, who is a co-producer on Three Minutes, speaks with Kurtz, Chandler, survivor Andrzej Lubieniecki, historian Zdzisław Suwiński, translator Katarzyna Kacprzak, and two of Chandler’s relatives, they are never shown; this film is about the three thousand people who lived in Nasielsk in 1938, fewer than a hundred of whom survived the Nazi invasion. It’s also about all such Eastern European Jewish towns that were decimated in the Holocaust.

“By defining the loss of that world, we might succeed in keeping the memory alive,” Kurtz says. In addition, it’s about the power of the medium of film, how it can capture the past and preserve culture and history that might have otherwise disappeared forever. Stigter has noted that there were other surprising elements that she could have pursued, some of which are included in Kurtz’s book, but she wanted to concentrate solely on what could be discovered and interpreted from the celluloid itself.

Last year, Ruth Katcher, a colleague of mine, found 8mm footage of her family holding a Passover seder in Philadelphia in April 1932, led by her great-grandfather, who, with his wife and children in 1906, had fled Donetsk in what is now Eastern Ukraine. It is a remarkable three-and-a-half-minute scene, which she discusses in an article in the Forward. “The film has special resonance, showing nearly the last seder with the family intact,” Katcher writes.

After experiencing Three Minutes, don’t be surprised if you find yourself going through closets and basements, looking for recorded remnants of your family’s past.

Stigter and Kurtz will participate in a series of Q&As following screenings on August 18, 19, 20 (all at 7:00) and 21 (2:00), moderated by Dr. Ori Z. Soltes, Aviva Slesin, or Annette Insdorf. The film will also be presented September 8 and 12 at the Marlene Meyerson JCC Manhattan.

ReelAbilities FILM FESTIVAL: NEW YORK 2022

Who: ReelAbilities Film Festival: New York
What: Annual festival of films celebrating stories of people with disabilities
Where: Marlene Meyerson JCC Manhattan and other venues as well as online
When: April 7-13, free – $15
Why: Since 2007, the ReelAbilities Film Festival has been showcasing shorts, features, and animated works from around the world to continue its mission “dedicated to promoting awareness and appreciation of the lives, stories, and artistic expressions of people with disabilities.” The fourteenth annual event takes place at the host venue, the Marlene Meyerson JCC Manhattan, as well as Lincoln Center, the IAC Building, the Museum of the Moving Image, the Maysles Documentary Center, the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum, and online. The opening-night selection is Olivier Nakache and Éric Toledano’s The Specials, about caregivers of autistic youths in underprivileged areas, starring Vincent Cassel, Reda Kateb, and Hélène Vincent; Victor Calise, former commissioner of the New York City Mayor’s Office for People with Disabilities, will be the guest honoree. The closing-night film is Brian Malone and Regan Linton’s imperfect, about a theater group staging Chicago; the screening will be followed by a Q&A with the directors moderated by actor Gregg Mozgala and the presentation of the ReelAbilities Spotlight Award to deaf actress Lauren Ridloff.

Among the other full-length films are Marc Schiller’s deeply personal No Bone: Scars of Survival, Jim Bernfield’s Me to Play, Margaret Byrne’s Any Given Day, Lynn Montgomery’s Amazing Grace, Teemu Nikki’s The Blind Man Who Did Not Want to See Titanic, Linda Niccol’s Poppy, and Jack Youngelson’s Here. Is. Better.; the films deal with such issues as stroke, Parkinson’s disease, mental illness, Acute Flaccid Myelitis, multiple sclerosis, Down syndrome, deafness, ADHD, and PTSD. In addition, there will be workshops on film puppetry and storytelling, an accessibility summit, a solo musical by Anita Hollander, a conversation with Deaf Utopia author Nyle DiMarco, the panel discussion “Just Do It?: The Impact of Perfectionism & Productivity on Mental Health and Disability,” and such shorts programs as “Out of the Box,” “Relationships,” and “Autism.” Many of the screenings will be followed by a Q&A with the filmmakers, actors, documentary subjects, and health experts.

CINEMATTERS: NY SOCIAL JUSTICE FILM FESTIVAL 2022

Emily and Sarah Kunstler’s Who We Are: A Chronicle of Racism in America opens third annual Cinematters: NY Social Justice Film Festival (photo courtesy Off Center Media)

CINEMATTERS: NY SOCIAL JUSTICE FILM FESTIVAL
Marlene Meyerson JCC Manhattan online
Carole Zabar Center for Film
January 13-17, $15 per film, $5 for shorts block, $40 all-access pass
mmjccm.org

From the Covid-19 pandemic to the murder of George Floyd to the January 6 insurrection, the last two years have revealed the ever-growing gap and animosity between the two Americas. The third annual Cinematters: NY Social Justice Film Festival, being held virtually January 13-17 by the Marlene Meyerson JCC Manhattan, consists of five features, four shorts, a weekend of service, and a racial justice workshop that explores what has become of the modern-day United States.

The festival opens with Emily and Sarah Kunstler’s Who We Are: A Chronicle of Racism in America, in which civil rights attorney Jeffery Robinson traces the history of racism from slavery to today. The spotlight selection is Iman K. Zawahry’s Americanish, about an immigrant trying to make her way in Jackson Heights. The festival closes with John Maggio’s A Choice of Weapons: Inspired by Gordon Parks, in which such figures as LaToya Ruby Frazier, Spike Lee, Anderson Cooper, Ava DuVernay, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar discuss the life and legacy of photographer Gordon Parks. Also being shown are Christi Cooper’s Youth v Gov, about young activists taking on the US government, and Jeff Adachi and Chihiro Wimbush’s Ricochet, which tells the story of an undocumented immigrant accused of murder in San Francisco. All screenings will be followed by a live Zoom Q&A with the filmmakers and other participants.

“These films are not just entertainment. Cinematters celebrates the power of film as a vehicle for social change, with some of the most important films of the year,” Carole Zabar Center for Film director Isaac Zablocki said in a statement. “These films shine a light on dark areas and bring action where our society needs movement.”

In addition to the screenings, Repair the World Harlem is sponsoring an MLK Weekend of Service with the East Harlem Tutorial Program on January 16-17, and there will be an allyship workshop on Monday at 3:30.

MELTDOWN IN DIXIE (Emily Harrold, 2021)
January 13-17, $5
Live Zoom Q&A January 17, 2:00
www.meltdownindixie.com

When Tommy and Debbie Daras first bought avowed racist Maurice Bessinger’s popular barbecue restaurant in Orangeburg, South Carolina, transforming it into Edisto River Creamery & Kitchen — home of the Double Dog Dare — the couple was not alarmed by the Confederate flag that flew on the tiny far corner of the parking lot, accompanied by a stone monument honoring soldiers who fought for the South in the Civil War. Tommy saw it as part of the area’s history, even as he did not believe in what it stands for.

After the June 2015 mass shooting that killed nine Blacks attending a Bible study class at Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston, the Sons of Confederate Veterans put up a much bigger flag, as if in support of the murders, leading Tommy to change his mind; he wanted the memorial gone. But as director and producer Emily Harrold shows in the forty-minute documentary Meltdown in Dixie, racism and fear are alive and well in Orangeburg, a city where more than sixty percent of the residents are people of color and that suffered its own race massacre in 1968 over the integration of a bowling alley. As the Darases and their lawyer, Justin Bamberg, go to the zoning board and the courts to have the flag and memorial removed, they are challenged every step of the way by Sons of Confederate Veterans Camp 842 Lt. Commander Buzz Braxton and their attorney, Lauren Martel.

“White supremacy has its roots everywhere; Orangeburg is no different,” Bamberg points out. Meanwhile, Braxton proclaims that Robert E. Lee was “probably the greatest man to ever walk the face of this Earth,” defends his use of the N-word, says the slave trade was good for African Americans, and participates in Civil War reenactments that portray the southern army as heroes and patriots. Harrold gives equal time to both sides of the argument, letting everyone share their views without judgment.

Documentary follows heated battle over Confederate monument in Orangeburg, South Carolina

Meltdown in Dixie gets to the heart of the controversy over Civil War monuments without making it about Democrats vs. Republicans or even whites against Blacks; in many ways, Tommy represents a significant section of America that is caught in between the current reevaluation of history that is going on in schools and small towns across the country. He admits to having had the image of a Confederate flag on his car when he was a professional racer but also says he is following in the footsteps of his father, who he proudly explains didn’t have a racist bone in his body.

“When I bought the creamery, I saw it was in a beautiful park — I said, what’s not to like. But if I could rewind this whole situation, I would have never came to South Carolina in the first place,” he acknowledges. It’s hard to blame him for thinking that.

Meltdown in Dixie is available in a shorts block with Patrice D. Bowman’s Under the Sun After the Wind, Mark Decena’s Heal Thy Neighbor: Denver, and Melissa Gira Grant and Ingrid Raphael’s They Won’t Call It Murder. In conjunction with MLK Day, there will be a live Zoom Q&A on January 17 with Bowman, Harrold, and others, moderated by arts and culture critic Jo Livingstone.

ISRAEL FILM CENTER: AULCIE

The life and times of Aulcie Perry on and off the court are detailed in Dan Menkin’s latest sports documentary

AULCIE (Dan Menkin, 2019)
Marlene Meyerson JCC Manhattan
334 Amsterdam Ave. at West Seventy-Sixth St.
Tuesday, November 16, $15, 7:00
cinematters.eventive.org

The closing night selection of the 2020 Israel Film Center Festival at the Marlene Meyerson JCC Manhattan, Dani Menkin’s Aulcie is returning November 16 at 7:00 for a special screening, followed by an in-person Q&A with Menkin. Israeli director Menkin followed up his 2016 documentary, On the Map, about Maccabi Elite Tel Aviv’s unlikely victory in the 1976-77 European Champions Cup, with this inside look into the life of one of its stars, Aulcie Perry. After being the last man cut from the New York Knicks in 1976, Newark native Perry was recruited to play for Maccabi in Israel, where the 6’10” black man — an unusual sight in the Land of Milk and Honey — quickly became a superstar, helping the team to championships, falling in love with top model Tami Ben Ami, and hanging out in hot clubs, living the high life. But it all came tumbling down in a haze of drugs, and Menkin traces Perry’s attempt to put it all back together, primarily by finding the daughter he has not seen since she was a baby.

The film is set up as Perry’s confession to that daughter, Cierra Musungay. “I always knew one thing: that I wanted to tell you my story, the way it is, with the good and the bad,” he says at the beginning of the documentary. “So where do I start? People say you start at the beginning. But I wanted to start at the end, or when I thought the end was coming.” He was inspired to track her down after facing a serious health scare. “I think, that only when I almost died, I started to really live. And that’s when I wanted to find you and, maybe in some ways, find myself,” he adds.

Writer, producer, and director Menkin goes back and forth between archival footage, animation by Assaf Zellner, and interviews with Aulcie’s sister Bernadine Lewis, his friends Wayne Tyre and Roy Young, his ex-girlfriend Juanita Jackson, his son Aulcie Perry Jr., and many men from his Maccabi family, including former teammates Earl Williams and Tal Brody, team president Shimon Mizrahi, co-owner Oudi Recanati, coach Zvi Sherf, and manager Shamluk Maharovsky, who was like a father to him. “In Israel, there wasn’t that much prejudice against Black players, and he felt at home here,” NBA commentator Simmy Reguer says. “Aulcie came in like a blessing from the gods,” fellow Jersey native and team captain Brody recalls. And Sports Illustrated writer Alexander Wolff explains, “At Maccabi Tel Aviv, Aulcie Perry was Michael Jordan, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar rolled into one.”

Now seventy-one, Perry is honest and forthright throughout, admitting his failings and wanting to make up for lost time. He offers no excuses for his precipitous fall, and he’s not seeking sympathy. He’s a man who made mistakes and wants a chance to set things right. Aulcie is a cautionary tale of redemption with heart and soul, focusing on the need to be part of a family, no matter how different and unexpected it may be.

THE MAGNIFICENT MEYERSONS

Kate Mulgrew and Barbara Barrie play mother and daughter in NYC-set The Magnificent Meyersons

THE MAGNIFICENT MEYERSONS (Evan Oppenheimer, 2021)
Marlene Meyerson JCC Manhattan
334 Amsterdam Ave. at West Seventy-Sixth St.
On demand: August 20-26, $15
Rooftop screenings with Q&As: August 22 & 24, $15, 8:00
argotpictures.com

The dysfunctional Manhattan family in Evan Oppenheimer’s new drama The Magnificent Meyersons might not be quite as quirky and off the beaten path as the off-the-wall dysfunctional NYC clan in Wes Anderson’s dark-comedy cult favorite The Royal Tenenbaums, but the trials and tribulations of brothers, sisters, and mothers in each are set in motion by a long-absent father.

Available on demand August 20-26 from the Marlene Meyerson JCC in addition to a pair of in-person rooftop screenings on August 22 and 24 featuring Q&As with writer-director Oppenheimer and several of the stars, The Magnificent Meyersons consists of a series of two-character discussions, examining love and loss, responsibility and faith, until the family ultimately comes together to face some hard truths. Oldest daughter Daphne (Jackie Burns) and her husband, Alan (Greg Keller), talk about whether they want more than one child; later, Daphne examines her career with friend and publishing colleague Joelle (Kate MacCluggage). Oldest son Roland (Ian Kahn), a successful businessman, shares his bleak pessimism about the state of the world with his finance pal Percy (T. Slate Gray). Youngest son Daniel (Daniel Eric Gold), who is studying to become a rabbi, delves into the existence of a supreme being first with his friend Lily (Lilli Stein), then with Father Joe (Neal Huff).

Youngest daughter Susie (Shoshannah Stern), a rising real estate agent, meets with her girlfriend, Tammy (Lauren Ridloff), in a cafe. And the siblings’ mother, Dr. Terri Meyerson (Kate Mulgrew), an oncologist, goes for a walk with her mother, the widowed Celeste (Barbara Barrie). Seen in flashbacks is Terri’s husband and the kids’ father, Morty (Richard Kind), who left the family he loves decades ago for a hard-to-explain reason involving his mental well-being. He has been missing from their lives ever since, though his psychological presence hovers over everyone.

Oppenheimer (A Little Game, Alchemy) avoids making heroes or villains, culprits or victims out of any of his characters; they are all complex individuals who, above all else, have ordinary problems over the course of an ordinary day. One of the concepts that is central to the narrative is that no one is special and that nothing is extraordinary; in fact, a major event, breaking news that pings across the city (and the world), does not create the impact one would expect. It’s just another thing in people’s lives.

Several of the subplots go nowhere, including one involving Roland’s wife, Ilaria (Melissa Errico), and their daughter, Stefania (Talia Oppenheimer, Evan’s daughter), or are unfulfilling. Most of the action takes place in and around Union Square Park, City Hall Park, and other familiar outdoor locations, with repetitive drone shots introducing new scenes. Oppenheimer seems to go out of his way to make sure nothing of too much consequence ever happens; even when Dr. Meyerson tells a couple that their young child has only three months to live, the father refuses to accept it, and Terri can only watch, offering nothing further. Don’t expect fireworks, because you’re not going to get them. Even when confrontation appears to be inevitable, when the finale tosses yet one more twist at us, Oppenheimer does not even try to close it all up neatly. It’s just another average day for an average family in a grand city.

“Why would a reviewer make the point of saying someone’s not a genius? Do you especially think I’m not a genius?” Eli Cash (Owen Wilson) says over the phone in The Royal Tenenbaums, which is a work of genius. “You didn’t even have to think about it, did you?” The same can be said about the characters in The Magnificent Meyersons.

ON BROADWAY

Sir Ian McKellen waxes poetic about Broadway in Oren Jacoby’s documentary

ON BROADWAY (Oren Jacoby, 2019)
Quad Cinema
34 West 13th St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Opens Friday, August 20
quadcinema.com

As Broadway prepares to reopen in a big way in September following a year and a half of a pandemic lockdown that shuttered all forty-one theaters, Oren Jacoby’s documentary arrives like a love letter to the recent past, present, and future of the Great White Way (so named for its lights and illuminated marquees). “Without the theater, New York somehow would not be itself,” Sir Ian McKellen says near the beginning of On Broadway, which opens August 20 at the Quad and will have a special rooftop screening September 1 outside at the Marlene Meyerson JCC. “Live theater can change your life,” he adds near the end. Both lines appear to apply to how the city is coming back to life even as the Covid-19 Delta variant keeps spreading, but the film is nearly two years old, having made its New York City debut in November 2019 at DOC NYC.

On Broadway is a bit all over the place as it traces the history of Broadway from the near-bankrupt doldrums of 1969-72 to its rebirth in the 1980s and 1990s as a commercial force while also following Richard Bean’s UK import The Nap as it prepares to open September 27 at MTC’s Samuel J. Friedlander Theatre. I was a big fan of The Nap, calling it “a jolly good time . . . a tense and very funny crime thriller” in my review. Jacoby speaks with Bean, director Daniel Sullivan, and star Alexandra Billings, the transgender actor playing transgender character Waxy Bush. The behind-the-scenes look at the play, which was taking a big risk, lacking any big names and set in the world of professional snooker, is the best part of the film and it deserved more time instead of focusing on how such innovators as Stephen Sondheim, Bob Fosse, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Mike Nichols, and Michael Bennett helped turn around Broadway’s misfortunes with such popular shows as Pippin, Chicago, A Chorus Line, Annie, Evita, Cats, Amadeus, and Nicholas Nickleby, ultimately leading to Rent, Angels in America, and Hamilton. But Broadway still found room for August Wilson’s ten-play Pittsburgh Cycle.

The film explores how spectacle, celebrity, and extravaganza began ruling the day, at the expense of new American plays. “This could be a business,” Disney head Michael Eisner remembers thinking; his company bought a theater and produced such hits as Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King, which attracted families paying exorbitant ticket prices and going home with plenty of merch. Jacoby speaks with Sidney Baumgarten and Rebecca Robertson, who were involved in transforming Times Square from a haven for addicts, hookers, and porn shops to a place where parents could bring their kids to see a show. “We’re like Las Vegas now,” Tony-winning director Jack O’Brien laments.

Among the many other theater people sharing their love of Broadway — as well as their concerns — are John Lithgow, George C. Wolfe, Alec Baldwin, Helen Mirren, Tommy Tune, Hal Prince, Cameron Mackintosh, James Corden, Nicholas Hytner, David Henry Hwang, Oskar Eustis, and Hugh Jackman. “In the theater, you have to be present. You have to be present as an artist, and you have to be present as an audience member, for the experience to really happen,” Emmy, Tony, and Obie winner Christine Baranski says, evoking what it feels like as we wait for Broadway to reopen this fall. “And when you see a great performance, it is a spiritual experience.”

Jacoby, whose previous works include Shadowman, Master Thief: Art of the Heist, and My Italian Secret: The Forgotten Heroes, will be at the Quad for Q&As at the 7:00 screenings on August 20 and 21. But it’s Sardi’s maître d’ Gianni Felidi who gets to the heart of it all. “This is what Broadway’s about,” he says. “Great theater is a mirror to the human condition, to us, to people, and how we’re really all the same despite our differences, our perceived differences; be it if we’re from a different race, a different gender, a different sexual orientation, we’re really all the same. And that’s what theater shows us.”