Brooklyn College MFA Student Documents Yiddish Theater Concert

"I’m Jewish and love music," explains Wendy Goodman, a second-year M.F.A. student who is working toward a master’s degree in TV production. "So I decided to combine those good things about me and do a documentary on Jewish music."

Born in Evanston, Illinois, Goodman was raised in Austin from the age of 6. There she earned a degree in radio, TV and film from the University of Texas.

Now a New York City resident, the 27-year-old Goodman lives in Clinton Hill and works at a Manhattan marketing firm while attending Brooklyn College. "TV production satisfies the practical math-oriented side of me and my creative side," she says.

Goodman’s documentary will serve as her M.F.A. production in support of her degree. It also will appear as a 30-minute program on CUNY TV early in the new year. "By then it may even be two 30-minute programs," she notes.

Part of Goodman’s documentary will be devoted to a Yiddish-language concert, Gekumen Iz Di Tsayt, which was staged by the National Yiddish Theatre—Folksbiene at Whitman Hall on the afternoon of October 23.

The name of the show is taken from the title of an old song "The Time Has Come." It was written by Russian-born Jewish poet and playwright Avrom Goldfaden. Author of some 40 plays and numerous songs and poems, he is regarded as "the father of Yiddish theater," according to Zalmen Mlotek, artistic director of the National Yiddish Theatre—Folksbiene.

The last word in the company’s name means "people’s stage" in Yiddish, Mlotek notes. "We’re the largest, in fact, the only Yiddish theater in the country," he explains. "Right now we’re in our ninety-fourth season."

In Gekumen Iz Di Tsayt, a retrospective of Goldfaden’s body of work that features a broad selection of his songs, Mlotek doubles as the pianist/narrator. In a performance that resembles a radio show from the 1930s, Mlotek and his fellow musicians occupy the left side of the stage, a handful of actors/soloists sit on the right and in between are the backup singers who make up the New Yiddish Chorale. The soloists, clad in bits of costume or props to suggest their characters, jump up and go to a microphone at the front of the stage to perform their songs.

Behind them, visible above the heads of the performers, is a screen that displays supertitles in both Russian and English to translate the words of the songs for audience members. Roughly half of the theater’s 2,400 seats were filled by a mostly elderly Jewish audience.

"It’s a small world," laughs Goodman. "Someone at my day job in Manhattan knew somebody at the National Yiddish Theatre. I happened to see that they were putting on a concert here at Brooklyn College. So I went to Professor MacLelland, my mentor, and asked if we could tape it."

"I was very pleased with Wendy’s selection of the Yiddish theater production," Stuart MacLelland says. "It required her, as producer/director, to transform a stage concert into a television program. The challenge was that the production was a one-take live performance. Wendy did not have the luxury of calling ‘Cut, let’s do a second take.’ "

Taping the 80-minute live stage production demanded that Goodman, who supervised a crew of 27 from the M.F.A. program’s first and second years, pre-position five cameras inside the theater, then settle into a temporary control room set up in the theater lobby, where she had to give camera directions and instructions to cut from camera to camera as the action demanded throughout the performance.

"I’ve never done anything of this magnitude before," she said afterward. "But it’s been really good and I’ve had a lot of fun."

Associate Professor Irene Sosa, of the Television and Radio Department, was on hand during the production as an advisor. Sosa is an award-winning filmmaker who was honored for her short documentary "Shopping to Belong." It was shown in September at the Long Island International Latino Film Festival in Stony Brook.

Also on hand was Tracy Lovett, a senior college lab tech with the Television Center who was responsible for the equipment.

MacLelland said that he had screened Goodman’s footage. "My take is that she has created an interesting high production value program that will entertain and inform tens of thousands of New York City viewers."