arts & life

Editor's Picks

continued from page 37

Goodnight Moon

Lynne Konstantin
Arts & Life Editor

BUNNY TALES

Head to Detroit's
Music Hall Center
for the Performing Arts for a double-bill of
sweet bunnies: Goodnight Moon and The
Runaway Bunny, both based on the 1940s
classic children's books by Margaret Wise
Brown and illustrated by Clement Hurd,
are brought to the stage by the Mermaid
Theatre of Nova Scotia with playful pup-
petry, enchanting glow-in-the-dark seg-
ments and other stunning scenic effects
and evocative music. 4 p.m. Sunday, Jan. 3.
$10-$20. (313) 887-8500; musichall.org .

WISH UPON A STAR

Steve McQueen may have been writer/
director Steven Spielberg's first choice
for his star in 1977's award-winning Close
Encounters of the Third Kind, but Richard
Dreyfuss helped make it the classic it is.
With special effects that still hold up today,

Bob Margolin

Close Encounters

an iconic five-tone score by John Williams,
a cast that includes Teri Garr, Bob Balaban
and Francois Truffaut — how can you go
wrong? Better yet, see it on the big screen
at the historic Redford Theatre, Friday-
Saturday, Jan. 8-9. $5. (313) 537-2560;
redfordtheatre.com .

is releasing a new album, My Road, in
January. See Margolin 7 p.m. Saturday, Jan.
9, as part of the 22nd annual Anti-Freeze
Blues Festival (Eddy Clearwater headlines
Friday, Jan. 8) to benefit the Detroit Blues
Society. Magic Bag, Ferndale. $20.
(248) 544-1991; themagicbag.com .

CHICAGO BLUES

THE SLEEPING BEAUTY

Playing in Muddy Waters' band for seven
years, guitarist and vocalist Steady Rollin'
Bob Margolin is carrying on the Chicago
Blues style while creating his own origi-
nal sound. During his time touring and
recording with the blues legend, Margolin
recorded five albums with Waters, played
alongside him in Martin Scorsese's film The
Last Waltz and played on Johnny Winter's
Nothin' But the Blues — with four of those
albums picking up Grammy Awards along
the way. Touring full-time with various flex-
ible groups of blues musicians, Margolin

Bring the whole family to experience
the enchanting fairy tale of good versus
evil — plus your daily dose of romance:
The Moscow Festival Ballet's production
of The Sleeping Beauty, under the artis-
tic direction of legendary dancer Sergei
Radchenko, brings a company of 50 spec-
tacular dancers to perform the full-length
ballet, considered one of Tchaikovsky's
finest. 3 p.m. Saturday, Jan. 9, at the
Macomb Center for the Performing Arts,
Clinton Township. $15-$40. (586) 286-2222;
macombcenter.com . *

Celebrity Jews

Nate Bloom
Special to the Jewish News

THE MUSIC ISSUE:
HAPPY NEW YEAR!

New Year's Eve is a time for music, so here are
some musical notes spanning many genres.
Let's start with Tony Bennett's new album,
Silver Lining: The Songs of Jerome Kern. Kern
(1885-1945), along with Irving Berlin, was
a founding father of the Great American
Songbook Era, when so many classic tunes,
often performed on New Year's, were writ-
ten. While Bennett doesn't cover Kern's most
famous song, "Old Man River,"the CD does
include such Kern classics as"The Way You
Look Tonight" (with lyrics by Dorothy Field
[1905-1974], oft called the best female lyricist
of all time). By the way, Bennett's daughter
Antonia, 41, also a singer, and a convert to
Judaism, is expecting her first child with her
Israeli husband. They belong to a Los Angeles
Orthodox shul.
Perhaps performing on New Year's is Gogi
Grant, 91. She's best known for one song:
"The Wayward Wind," a pop-country monster
crossover hit (written by two Jewish guys)
that knocked Elvis out of the No. 1 spot in
1956.0n a hunch, I recently checked and
found out that Grant, born Myrtle Airensberg,
is Jewish and was long-married to a promi-

40

1 TO KNOW THERE IS A GOO.

"[Rand] has effectively revolutionized
the way the rest of us view Jewish art,
heretofore an endangered species," wrote
Menachem Wecker in The Jewish Week.
Rand won a Guggenheim fellowship
and chaired Columbia University's visual
arts program; his work is in the collec-
tions of the Metropolitan Museum of Art,
the Getty, the Art Institute of Chicago and
the Victoria and Albert Museum. But, he
points out, not on their walls.
He has never sniffed the stardom of,
say, Julian Schnabel, a family friend from
Brooklyn. Rand's current art is too unbri-
dled for most Orthodox Jews, too Jewish
for some other Jews and still oddly unsung
by art tastemakers.
"His take is very important," said
Samantha Baskind, author of Jewish
Artists and the Bible in Twentieth Century
America, who will curate a show of Rand's
Bible series at Cleveland State University
in September 2016.
"But much of the market doesn't under-
stand or feel comfortable with Jewish sub-
ject matter," she added. "Disheartening as
it is, if he used his formidable talents on a
different topic, he could be way bigger"
Perhaps The 613 will change that. It
pairs mitzvahs with appropriated images
from Mad magazine, pulp and 20th-cen-
tury illustration. Sometimes the connec-
tions are obvious, sometimes intriguingly
oblique. It is outrageous and inviting, in-
your-face and mysterious, making Rand's
case 613 times over.
Not everyone will buy it. But Rand
believes in the power of good intent.
"There are Chasidic stories of children
who whistle in synagogue because they
don't know how to pray," he writes, " ... or
soldiers who can only recite the alphabet,
knowing that heaven will arrange their
spoken letters into prayers. The 613 is one
of those whistles." *

-

Kern

Kurstin

nent Jewish attorney. The most recent web
reference about her is a 2013 Palm Springs
concert, where she sang her big hit.
Greg Kurstin, 46, a top producer and
songwriter, must be smiling at the enormous
success of Adele's comeback CD, 25. The sing-
er suffered from severe writer's block from
early 2013, when she began work on her
third studio album, until she finally sought
the help of Kurstin early in 2015. Kurstin, a
multi-Grammy nominee, has produced and
co-written tunes with many top acts, includ-
ing Beck and Kelly Clarkson. When he was
12, he wrote the b-side of classmate Zweezil
Zappa's"My Mother is a Space Cadet"and
was nominated for a Grammy, with Sia and
Will Gluck, for"Opportunity"from the film
Annie. He and Adele clicked and together
they wrote the CD's big hit single, "Hello" 25
is the biggest-selling CD of 2015 and Adele's
upcoming North American tour is already
sold out.
Charlie Puth, 24, also had a good year.
Here's an excerpt from a recent EW profile:
"A year ago, Charlie Puth didn't even have

a record deal. But since then, he signed the
dotted line with Atlantic in January, has
been nominated for three Grammys, broke
Billboard Hot 100 records with 'See You
Again, his Furious 7 collaboration with Wiz
Khalifa and toured with 'Marvin Gaye' partner
Meghan Trainor. He can now add one more
accolade to his name: Golden Globe nomi-
nee.'See You Again' was nominated for Best
Original Song at the Globes ...[Puth told EW]
'I always told myself when I was younger if I
ever got nominated for a Grammy, I'd call my
mother and tell her first and I did that. She's
my Jewish mother, so she was like,'I'm not
surprised. You worked hard for this!' (Puth's
father isn't Jewish.)
The ABC musical comedy series, Galavant,
returns for a second, 10-episode season on
Jan. 3, 8-9 p.m. (Two back-to-back episodes
run each Sunday for five weeks.) The songs
are by Oscar-winner Alan Menken, 66,
(Beauty and the Beast, The Little Mermaid,
Aladdin) and Tony-nominee Glenn Slater, 47,
(Little Mermaid -- theater version). *