Ira Siff as Mme.
Vera Galupe-
Borszkh: Opera's
Dame Edna.
ousine on the way to New York's
Lincoln Center. "My roles are always
triple layered — man, woman,
woman. The Daughter of the Regiment
is light and full of fun."
Siff ("My name probably was much
longer when my grandparents arrived
at Ellis Island from Russia," he said)
was raised in a Reform home and had
a bar mitzvah at a Brooklyn syna-
gogue. He began voice lessons at age
19 while a college student at Cooper
Union, a New York arts and architec-
ture school, and performed as a tenor
for 15 years, including singing opera
parodies in cabarets.
"I always regarded opera to be seri-
ous and funny, compelling and hilari-
ous," he explained, "so I took on a
soprano voice in the 1980s and
formed La Gran Scena Opera Co. di
New York, which is a travesty group;
we're gifted falsetto divas (similar to
female impersonators), who spoof
operas with great affection.
"We've performed at opera houses
all over the world and have become
favorites of many opera stars."
Siff took on the name of Mme.
Galupe-Borszkh and even created a
phony, but comical biography for her,
including a fictitious husband who
expired on their honeymoon.
"Mme. Galupe-Borszkh is from the
old school of singing actresses," Siff
muses. "In fact, she may be the only
one still registered at that school."
The Daughter of the Regiment, per-
formed in English, stars Canadian
soprano Tracy Dahl as an orphan whose
love for a peasant boy defies the French
army regiment that adopted her. Of
course, love conquers all at the end. ❑
The Daughter of the Regiment
opens 8 p.m. Saturday, June 4, at
the Detroit Opera House, 1526
Broadway, and continues at 2
p.m. Sunday, June 5; 7:30 p.m.
Wednesday, June 8; 8 p.m.
Friday-Saturday, June 10-11; and
2 p.m. Sunday, June 12. Tickets:
$23-$114. Call (313) 237-SING
or (248) 645-6666 or go to
www.MichiganOpera.org.
Homeward Angel and Our Town play-
wright Thornton Wilder, Jerry Silberman
himself Gene Wilder.
renamed'
Battling The Demon
Hollywood, where he was the only
Jewish student. And there, Wilder
writes, he encountered constant dis-
crimination and bruising physical
assaults by fellow classmates, convinc-
ing his parents that they had made a
wrong decision.
During his teenage years, as his
mother's health problems lingered,
Wilder began thinking of himself as a
comedian, until he saw a riveting per-
formance by Jewish actor Lee J. Cobb
in Death of a Salesman in New York.
The play was a major turning point in
his life. After seeing Death of a Salesman,
I had no more thoughts of being a
Comedian — I wanted to be an actor,"
he recalls. And by pinching from the
character Eugene Gant in Look
"I always regarded
opera to be serious
and funny,
compelling and
hilarious.
Wilder does not dovetail his autobiog-
raphy with a high degree of Jewish
context, which is somewhat disap-
pointing, especially when he reveals a
startling past obsession to pray for for-
giveness called "The Demon."
"The Demon was this horrible com-
pulsion that I had at 18," Wilder
recently explained in a public radio
interview. "It was the first day of
spring and I was at the University of
Iowa, and I had this compulsion to
pray. I didn't know about what, but I
felt guilty about something. I felt this
compulsion to pray, sometimes two,
three, sometimes four hours at a time,
'After a while, I realized that this
was nothing holy; I wasn't concerned
with God. I didn't know what I was
praying for. That's why I call it the
Demon. It should have been called the
devil, because it didn't have anything
to do with God."
It took more than seven years in
therapy to rid himself of "The
Demon," referring to the condition as
a self-manifested conflict of guilty feel-
ings about enjoying his own happiness
while his mother was ill, he writes.
Turning to his movies, Wilder
believes the hands of fate were respon-
sible for him being miscast in a play
with actress Anne Bancroft, who
introduced him to her then-boyfriend
and future husband Mel Brooks. At
the time, Brooks was working on a
script, tentatively tided Springtime for
Hitler, later re-titled The Producers.
Cast as accountant Leo Bloom
opposite Zero Mostel, Wilder would
follow that success with more Brooks
comedies, including Young
Frankenstein and as the Waco Kid in
Blazing Saddles.
From Mel To Gilda
Why Wilder skirts detailing any
Jewish-rooted chemistry between him-
self and Brooks, or about working with
Mostel, Woody Allen and other cele-
brated Jews in the entertainment indus-
try, is one of the book's critical lapses.
Only when mentioning that John
Wayne originally signed to co-star in
1979's The Frisco Kid does Wilder
evaluate work in an ethnic spotlight.
The film about a naive Polish rabbi
who is sent to America in 1850 to
assume a pulpit in San Francisco and
befriends a bank robber — played by
a young, half-Jewish Harrison Ford
who replaced Wayne — was not one
of Wilder's bigger box office hits.
Wilder's characterization of the
rabbi notably emphasized his foremost
objective to always protect his Torah,
as the two encountered several misad-
ventures. Call it Wilder's Fiddler on the
Range, but he insists that his prefer-
ence was for audiences to accept the
film as a Western, rather than a Jewish
movie. Again, keeping his Judaism
closer to the vest, he stays mum about
what the role meant to him.
The actor doesn't dash expecta-
tions, though, when describing his
marriage to Gilda Radner and her
increasing dependence on him while
she battled cancer. It drove him
crazy, and one is struck by Wilder's
blunt honesty about dealing with her
love and loss.
She previously wrote in her 1989
New York Times bestseller Its Always
Something "My moods swung from
here to China, and I had a raging
anger at my situation. I felt irritable
and isolated. ... I can only imagine
Gene's loneliness — a loneliness that
increased through a sense of helpless-
ness in the situation."
At the very end of Kiss Me Like a
Stranger, Wilder discloses that the
book's tide was casually given to him
by Radner three weeks before she died.
"Maybe one day you can use it," she
told him. It's just too bad that his
attempt to document his life in writ-
ing begs for more laughter and less
guessing. ❑
JN
6/ 2
2005
73