On this Worldwide Holocaust Remembrance Day – designated by the United Nations each January twenty seventh, as a result of that was the date in 1945 when Soviet troopers liberated the 6,000 remaining prisoners at Auschwitz, the Nazis’ largest demise camp – it’s price pointing to the persevering with position of theater in retaining the general public conscious and the teachings of the Holocaust alive.
The Holocaust Theater Catalog, a mission of the College of Miami’s Nationwide Jewish Theater Foundatio, lists greater than 950 theater works from world wide since 1933 referring to the Holocaust. And that doesn’t embrace the present play on Broadway, “Leopoldstadt” by Tom Stoppard, nor the current solo present on the Beneath the Radar Competition, “Otto Frank,” though it does embrace many of the different performs on the topic with productions final 12 months — Keep in mind This: The Lesson of Jan Karski; Concord; Witness; Prayer for the French Republic and The Backyard of the Finzi-Continis — and different notable performs which were on Broadway beforehand, together with Arthur Miller’s Incident at Vichy, and Paula Vogel’s Indecent
In a video on the Catalog’s homepage, scholar Michael Berenbaum talks concerning the impression specifically of Frances Goodrich and Albert Hacket’s stage adaptation of “The Diary of Anne Frank,” which debuted on Broadway in 1955 starring Susan Strasburg, and was revived in 1997 starring Natalie Portman, however has been carried out world wide. Touring a dozen years in the past with Miep Gies, the girl who helped cover the Frank household and who was included as a personality within the play, Berenbaum discovered it exceptional “what number of ladies from the ages of 15 to 70 got here as much as Miep Gies and hugged her, presumed that they knew her, as a result of they’d performed her, they usually have been her.”
The goal of the Nazis was to dehumanize Jews with a purpose to make it simpler to kill them. The goal of theater, Berenbaum says, is to “rehumanize” them — “to offer them a reputation, a voice, a story, a narrative.”
The next related performs are at present accessible digitally on BroadwayHD:
Incident at Vichy by Arthur Miller
Indecent by Paula Vogel
Rose by Maureen Lipman
If I Neglect by Steven Levenson
The Sound of Music Stay
Performs for Center College and Excessive College, from A Trainer’s Information to the Holocaust
Pictures above:
Left column: Leopoldstadt (2), Otto Frank, Concord, Keep in mind This: The Lesson of Jan Karski
Center column: Prayer for the French Republic, Incident at Vichy, Witness
Proper column: The Diary of Anne Frank 1997, The Backyard of the Finzi-Continis, Indecent, 2017
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