arts & life

theater

Our
Town

Urinetown comes to

Ann Arbor's Penny

Seats Theatre.

Richard Alder in a self-portrait
taken in the pit of a production

of The Addams Family

The Penny Seats
Theatre Company will
be performing The
Complete Works of William
Shakespeare (Abridged)
through July 25 and
Urinetown: The Musical
July 30-Aug. 15 at West
Park, 215 Chapin St. Ann
Arbor. $10. (734) 926-
5346; pennyseats.org .

I

Suzanne Chessler
Contributing Writer

R

ichard Alder sparked his
son's interest in a music
career, and Jason Alder
sparked his dad's interest in a heri-
tage search that resulted in learning
about Jewish forebears.
Richard, music director for
Urinetown: The Musical to be pre-
sented outdoors by the Penny Seats
Theatre Company in Ann Arbor,
lives a long distance from his son,
a clarinet player building a career
in Europe.
Jason's probe into family his-
tory began during his travels and
led the way to discovering that his
paternal great-grandmother was
Jewish. He is bringing that connec-
tion forward by some of the music
he plays and his engagement to a
Jewish woman.
"This is my start with Penny
Seats:' says Richard, who will be
at the keyboard during the show's
run, July 30-Aug. 15, at the West
Park Band Shell. He will be joined
by a reed player, trombone player,
bass player and percussionist.
"The show is very satiric and
funny, and the score is light-heart-

Celebrity Jews

Nate Bloom
Special to the
Jewish News

AT THE MOVIES

Opening this week: Paper Towns, a
coming-of-age story
(with comedy and
drama), is based on the
bestselling novel by
John Green (The Fault
in Our Stars) of the
same name. Green says
the lead characters
are "probably Jewish,"
Wolff

46 July 23 • 2015

JN

The cast of Urinetown (rehearsing) inclu e Brenda Kelly, Roy S= ton, Da

Sarah Leahy, Paige Martin, Cathy McDon d Christi McKim, Je a Pitt

Jeff Stringer, M • Van Oosterbout and

ed with different kinds of music,
including rap. The finale of Act
I follows great operatic tradition
with a lot of different parts layered
on top of each other.
"There's a very simple love song
shared by the two main characters,
and there's a song called 'Run,
Freedom, Run!: which sounds like
a choir singing on a concert stage:'
The 2001 Tony Award-winning
musical is set in a dystopian future,
when people must pay to use any
bathroom. It lampoons corporate
bureaucracy, unplanned revolu-
tion and musical theater itself. The
show, written by Mark Hollmann
and Greg Kotis, is directed by
Lauren London, Penny Seats presi-
dent.
In its fifth season, this is Penny
Seats first summer with two shows
in repertory. Urinetown will follow

The Complete Works of William
Shakespeare (Abridged), which runs
through July 25. Anne Levy directs
the comedy by Adam Long, Daniel
Singer and Jess Winfield. In it,
three actors (Matt Cameron, Artun
Kircali and Leanne Young ) bring
together every Shakespearean work
in 90 minutes.
Though not involved with the
Shakespeare production, he did

but that's not mentioned in the text.
It centers on Quentin Jacobsen (Nat
Wolff, 20) a high-school student who
harbors an almost-lifelong unrequited
love for the girl-next-door, Margo Roth
Speigelman. The action takes off when
Margo (Cara Delevingne) mysteriously
disappears and Quentin follows clues
that Margo may have left as to her
whereabouts. Halston Sage, 22, and
Austin Abrams, 18, have big supporting
roles as friends who help Quentin in his
search.
Southpaw, which opens the same day,
stars Jake Gyllenhaal, 34, as Billy Hope,
a boxer who, as the film begins, is on
top of the world: He's made it up from
the streets to the championship; he has

Woit

, Jcihn

a Rabin

icz.

see some of the auditions. "I heard
people read and thought it was all
very funny:' Richard says.
Retired from full-time work
teaching music, he has been
involved with musical performance
since high school.
"I was a clarinet player in my
high-school band and played clari-
net in a school production of The
Sound of Music:' recalls Richard,
64. "By junior year, I was the stu-
dent assistant musical director.
"My town in New Jersey started
an opera association, and I got to
play with that group. When I fm-
ished the University of Michigan as
a clarinet major, I was a conductor
at schools where I was teaching and
got involved in community theater
groups.
"Over the past 50 years, I've been
involved with about 370 produc-
tions for schools, community-
theater groups and professional
organizations7
Richard, who has worked for
the Purple Rose Theatre Company
in Chelsea, recently performed
with the University of Michigan
Gilbert & Sullivan Society and the
Southgate Community Players.
While Jason is building a career
as soloist and performer with

a beautiful wife (Rachel McAdams) and a
lovely young daughter (Oona Laurence).
But this all comes to an end when his
wife is murdered. He declines into a per-
sonal tailspin, and family services take
away his daughter. A principled, small-
time boxing trainer (Forest Whitaker)
takes Billy on and helps him clean up
his act and fight again — with the aim
of redemption and the return of his
daughter. In preparation for the role,
Gyllenhaal bulked up to being almost
unrecognizable.

NOTABLE PASSINGS

Burt Shavitz, the co-founder of the
famous Burt's Bees cosmetics company,
died on July 6, age 80. Born in New

chamber and larger groups, he has
become a member of the psyche-
delic-klezmer-jazz quartet Payazen!
and performed in Israel.
"After a year of being in Europe,
Jason tried to see if he could get
information that would make it
easier for him to move from coun-
try to countr y; ' Richard says.
"He knew that his paternal great-
grandmother was from Lithuania,
and he thought if he could find
proof, he might get some kind of
visa that would make travel easier:'
Richard and his wife found
the manifest from the ship that
brought the woman to America
and uncovered the connection
to Judaism. They believe that the
woman never mentioned her roots
out of fear she might be returned to
the country of her birth.
Never practicing Judaism,
Richard has gained knowledge of
the religion by helping to celebrate
the bat mitzvah of a niece whose
mother is Jewish. He might gain
more: In September, Richard will
visit England, when he will attend
his son's wedding and perhaps
experience a Jewish ceremony.

❑

York, he served in the
army and then became
a prominent photo-
journalist. He started
with a Jewish paper
and was doing work for
Time and Life by the
mid-1960s. In the '70s,
Shavitz
he settled in Maine
and began beekeep-
ing. By chance, he met a young woman,
Roxanne Quimby, and they started sell-
ing beeswax candles and, later, cosmet-
ics. He sold his half of the company to
Quimby in 1984. In 2014, a documentary
about his life, Burt's Buzz, was released
(available streaming/on DVD). A Maine
paper noted that "Burt's rabbi" had to

