Corrected by his mother, the boy replaces it with the Bethlehem star. The children decorate the tree and the guests laugh as one child tops off the tree with a Star of David. The play opens on Christmas Eve 1899, as the intermarried and interfaith Merz and Jakobovicz families celebrate the Christian holiday. (Multiple child actors play each child’s role, per child labor laws.)įaye Castelow as Gretl and David Krumholtz as Hermann. There are many fine performances among the 29 characters, played by 38 actors. Marber manages the large cast brilliantly. The scenic design by Richard Hudson is gradually reduced to a virtually bare stage by the final scene. It’s a large, luxurious home, near the Ring Strasse, Vienna’s grand boulevard, with many servants in 1899 it changes, as its occupants do, as the war approaches and then recedes. The play is set in the same apartment in all four scenes. The play, which premiered in London in January 2020, and then was shut down by the pandemic, has finally opened in New York in a dark and stunning Broadway production directed by Patrick Marber It’s a thrilling, heartbreaking story of how these two families, one of them partially Christianized, live and deal with the external society, antisemitism, and ultimately Nazism, in four time periods: 1899, 1924, 19. (Stoppard was born Tomas Straussler in Czechoslovakia and became an English boy through his mother’s second husband.) And probably like other family histories (including my own), the Jewish part was ignored, denied or hidden for generations–until it wasn’t. Most of all, Leopoldstadt seems to be playwright Tom Stoppard’s method of dealing with his own family history. It’s also an imagined history of how two intermarried Jewish families lived (or didn’t live) through six decades of the 20th century, as war and fascism overtook Europe. Leopoldstadt is a place, a Jewish section of old Vienna.
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