Music Review by Myra Chanin . . . .
Tovah Feldshuh is not just a superb performing artist. She’s an unbelievably versatile theatrical life force. The internet claims she’s 75, but she looks and moves like she’s in her late fifties. She’s a star of stage, screen, TV and what have you. Her Wikipedia bio devotes five entire pages to roles she’s played between 1978 and the present on all of the above.
She sings! She dances. She recites. She makes you smile. She touches your heart. She’s perpetually scat-acting from one interesting character to another, from Yentl (the original Broadway “they”) to Golda Meir to Gypsy Rose Lee’s Mama Rose to Fannie Brice’s Mother Rose to Ruth Bader Ginsburg to—would you believe!— Grandmother Bertha on the flying trapeze in a recent revival of Pippin. I’d like to see Helen Mirren, who’s only two years older, soar live and in person from stage left to stage right for eight performances a week!
And when our Tovah, née Terrie Sue, finds no roles that please her, not to worry: she sits down and writes a play or two for herself to star in, like Tallulah! Hallelujah! She’s our Cleopatra. Age cannot wither her, nor can Zombiehood bury her. After two seasons as Deanna Monroe among the “Walking Dead” (AMC TV) she was immediately resurrected as Naomi Burch, the recurring image-conscious and hypercritical mother of the show’s main character in “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend.”
One might well ask, then, what is she doing in Florida? What do you think? She is performing her prizewinning cabaret act to sellout theaters. I saw her latest version of Aging is Optional this evening at the packed Delray Beach Playhouse. How sold out was it. I practically had to fling my body across the last illegal parking spot so my “plus one” could hold on to it.
Tovah made her cabaret debut at the Algonquin Hotel Oak Room with Tovah: Crossover from Broadway to Cabaret, which was followed by Tovah: Out of her Mind, which she took on the road to Philadelphia, Dallas, Houston, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Hong Kong and Sydney.
In February of 2015, she performed her first one-woman show, called Aging is Optional at 54 Below. I saw it there. It knocked me out. Good news. You can buy a copy of it from her merch table at the end of this show, and she will autograph it for you. Her current Aging is Optional contains variations on the original, and the variations are very timely.
She opens with a story about how she became the trapeze artist in Pippin and follows it with a song about a girl who always felt like she was a boy, and how when she remained a girl she lost some of her boldness, followed by the feelings of a boy who felt like a girl, and when he remained a boy he lost some of his kindness.
She talked at length about her mother, Lilly, who died at the age of 103. I met her mother when I was invited to speak to Tovah’s Mother’s Hadassah Chapter at their house about my newly published memoir. I thought she was a lovely woman, but I wasn’t her daughter. She always evaluated Tovah not by how she played her role, but by how she looked. For instance, she told Tovah when she played Dolly she was a ten, but when she played Golda Meir she was a zero. Her mother may have had ambition but she gave all that up when she married to become a perfect housekeeper, mother, and cook. Tovah knew from the get-go that her mother’s life was not the life she wanted for herself. When she told her mother that she wanted to be an actress, her mother told her to go into the kitchen and bring her Challah knife back with her and . . . stab Mom in the heart. What was wrong with being a mother? Nothing. Tovah became the mother of two children. She talks about her husband and how he proposed. Also about her children, who are both well and happily married. They’ve both made Tovah a happy grandmother. As for Tovah’s mother, she lost a daughter but found a star.
The performance is interesting, touching, and funny. A segment called Kaddish and Coffee, a call-in radio show with a depressed host, is just as funny as it was when I first heard it.
Tovah Feldshuh – Aging is Optional. Upcoming performances on January 9 and 10 (2 PM and 7.30 PM) at Delray Beach Playhouse (950 NW 9th St, Delray Beach, FL). Tickets: (561) 272-1281 or www.delraybeachplayhouse.com
Additional upcoming performances January 11-12 at the Pompano Beach Cultural Center, (50 West Atlantic Avenue, Pompano Beach, FL). www.pompanobeachculturalcenter.com or (954) 545-7800
