YIDDISH
THEATRE GETS BOOST FROM BEN BONUS
by William Glover, AP Drama Writer
The Morning Call, Allentown, PA, 24 Jan 1971
EDITOR’S NOTE – Yiddish theatre has
outgrown its Lower East Side home and can be seen nearly
anywhere nowadays. One of the reasons is Ben Bonus,
producer, singer, director, actor – and Jewish.
New York (AP) – Downtown, uptown and across a couple of
continents, Ben Bonus works at his special theatrical
imperative.
“It’s not particularly for a living,”
he declares, “But because the people need it. I’m doing my
best to keep a valuable tradition alive.”
Bonus is a stocky, grizzled
producer-singer-director-actor of Yiddish dramatics, one of
the few remaining quality craftsmen in that once-flourishing
entertainment zone. At 49, he sternly pooh-poohs the
suggestion that such folk art must join the dodo in
extinction.
Lest anyone think he’s just off on some
fantasy trip, Bonus the businessman offers statistical
support. In New York City $40,000 per week was grossed
recently on a spate of Yiddish shows, and capacity audiences
attend his perennial visitations to 70 American cities.
Latin-American trips testify further in widespread interest
in colloquial wares…. “Yiddish is Yiddish everywhere,” he
says……Bonus admits that during the past few years there has
been a disastrous apparently contradictory, shrinkage of
sustained professional activity on New York’s Lower East
Side, the former shrine of idiomatic stagecraft.
“It’s not a question of deterioration
of ethnic interest among the young that everyone claims,”
Bonus says. “Many of the young are still interested in their
heritage.
“We were driven off Second Avenue
because landlords got greedy and wanted higher rent than we
could pay.” One playhouse became that citadel of rock
culture, Fillmore East. Others were booked for off-Broadway
shows that scaled box offices at higher rates.
“Another thing the Yiddish Theater
didn’t look ahead. Young people should have been coming into
it to perform, but the elders in the profession wouldn’t let
them in. Years ago they threw Danny Kaye out, they didn’t
want competition. And the plays they did—soap opera is art
in comparison, in my opinion.”
Not Art
Bonus feels too that the non-Semitic public has a distorted
notion, based on comic night club exaggeration, of what his
kind of theater really is – “that kind of thing is all right
for the Catskill honeymoon trade, but it’s not Yiddish art.”
The material worth keeping is “that
marvelously rich literature of folk humor and ideals, some
of it hundreds of years old, so adaptable to the stage.”
As part of his campaign to
keep group theater tradition alive “with
decency, so we shouldn’t be ashamed,” Bonus
brought his company to Broadway this season with
“Light, Lively and Yiddish,” a variety showcase
of songs and narrative which already has been
invited to play next spring in Israel, a
performing area Bonus has somehow previously
missed. For his actress-wife, Mina Bern, the
tour would be a homecoming, for she has sung to
frontline troops there.
Bonus has been engrossed in
folk art since shortly after arriving here from
Poland in 1939, a refugee from the Nazi
holocaust, in which his parents, four brothers
and two sisters died.
“I come by my theatrical
interest naturally,” because a cousin, Alexander
Granach, was a confrere of Max Reinhardt and the
main stage rival in Germany of Emil Jannings.
“The trouble was I had a voice,” Bonus
goes on, “and for several years concentrated on folk singing
on the radio.” In 1943 he made his acting debut with Jacob
Ben-Ami, two years later went on for another downtown
luminary, Maurice Schwartz.
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BEN
BONUS is a producer-singer-director-actor of
Yiddish dramatics, one of the few remaining
quality craftsmen in that once flourishing
entertainment zone. Here, in his backstage
dressing room at a New York theater, he wears
beard and mustache make-up and a favorite old
hat, which he says has been through nearly 900
performances with him since he got it in
Argentina 10 years ago. |
Looking ahead, Bonus talks of an annual
20-week Broadway stand with a dramatic repertory – “We have
so much original material, and it should be shown.
“Eventually some might be done in
translation. I’ve got nothing against English, but the
language is such an important part of such work that doing
it in a different tongue poses difficulties. Subtleties,
poetic beauty get lost, a certain flavor that’s
untranslatable.
“Like opera. People sit for hours
listening to opera in Italian or Russian, without
understanding a single word. Why? Because the sheer beauty
comes through anyhow. It is the same with Yiddish theater.”
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