Rachel Zatcoff

Mozart’s Don Giovanni: A Rock Opera

July 3, 2025

Ambition, that perilous double-edged sword, can elevate a work of art to soaring heights—or leave it flailing in the rafters, reaching desperately for resonance it cannot quite grasp. Such is the case with "Mozart’s Don Giovanni: A Rock Opera," Adam B. Levowitz’s audacious and heartfelt, if uneven, adaptation of Mozart’s canonical masterpiece. This leaner, louder take on "Don Giovanni," recognizing the latent synergy between operatic grandeur and rock bravado, now playing at The Cutting Room through August 26, replaces the classical orchestra with a ten-piece rock band and pares down the original three-hour-plus opera to a taut two hours and ten minutes. If only its dramatic momentum had received the same rigorous attention as its runtime. [more]

Amid Falling Walls (Tsvishn Falndike Vent)

November 27, 2023

Director Matthew “Motl” Didner manages to make what might have been just a well-staged concert of moving songs into a dramatic whole with a deep feeling for the ebb and flow of emotions from happiness to hopelessness. "Amid Falling Walls"—an apt title, unfortunately, still consequential in 2023—does come during a spike in anti-Semitism. Though an entertainment, the show provides ample historical evidence of blind prejudice. If only the message could register. [more]

Fiddler on the Roof in Yiddish

February 23, 2019

The property is now more than a half-century old. But this production makes it seem as though the 1964 iteration were merely an English-language version of a classic from even longer ago. There’s a greater feeling of immediacy than perhaps ever before. Hearing the characters speak and sing in the tongue that their real-life 1905 contemporaries would have used is deeply moving. What a shame that so many speakers of Yiddish from decades past never got the chance to experience the musical in this guise. [more]

Fiddler on the Roof (The National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene)

July 28, 2018

Steven Skybell’s Tevye warms up from a salt-of-the-earth, everyday philosopher to the much put-upon tragic existential hero upon whom God—to whom he speaks frequently—has heaped much tsouris. By the time he has lost a third daughter Khavele, this time to a Russian Christian, his interpretations of the songs and his line readings are heart-breaking. [more]