THE GOLEM is playing in Pittsburgh:
The Golem' adds black magic to Jewish music festival
Thursday, June 02, 2011
By Andrew Druckenbrod, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Pittsburgh has a thing for zombies, but the living dead might be spooked by the Pittsburgh Jewish Music Festival's offering this summer. The annual concert series will open with a screening of "The Golem," the 1920 silent film about how a rabbi invokes black magic to create a fearsome creature out of clay to defend the Jews of Prague in the Middle Ages. It's part of three concerts for the festival that seeks to both celebrate Jewish culture and connect it to the greater Pittsburgh community.
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And there's more:
Festival turns to non-corporeal horror in "Jacob and Rachel" and "The Dybbuk."
The former is a suite for instruments and actors from a seminal production of "Jacob and Rachael" that the "Ohel Theater" premiered in Tel Aviv in 1928. This company was founded by Russian Jew Moshe Halevi "determined to prove, through theater, the right of the Jews to live in their Holy Land," says Sam Zerin, who has translated the Hebrew play archived at the Jewish Theological Seminary. The Jewish biblical drama is a re-enactment of God's promise to Jacob that his descendants would receive Israel. The composer, Solomon Rosowsky, arranged the texts to weave in and out of the movements in an artistic fashion, using the actors as an extension of the musicians," says Mr. Zelkowicz.
"The Dybbuk" is also presented as a suite, with music from the original musical by composer Joel Engel from 1922. Russian-Jewish playwright An-ski adapted his play from the Hassidic fable of a bride who becomes possessed on her wedding night by the tortured soul, or dybbuk, of another man.
For numerous past Golem posts, see
here and links. And there's more on the
dybbuk legend
here.