INTERVIEW: Tovah Feldshuh can’t wait to sing again, this time at the Axelrod
Photo: Tovah Feldshuh stars in the new musical A Monkey and Me at the Axelrod Performing Arts Center in Deal Park, New Jersey. Photo courtesy of John Posada / Provided by Axelrod with permission.
The Axelrod Performing Arts Center in Deal Park, New Jersey, is continually adding to its impressive lineup of Broadway stars who grace its stage. The Jersey Shore venue recently produced an acclaimed revival of The Bridges of Madison County starring Kate Baldwin and Aaron Lazar, and now the celebrated performer Tovah Feldshuh, best known for Pippin, Golda’s Balcony and Irena’s Vow, will appear for four performances in the new musical A Monkey and Me: Stories I Never Told My Mother.
The comedic show, which plays June 24-26, is the passion project of writer-composer Jonathan Brielle Holtzman, known professionally as Jonathan Brielle, according to press notes. Brielle appears with Feldshuh in the show — with Brielle playing himself, and Feldshuh playing his real-life mother. Tony nominee Veanne Cox is also set to star in the production. The story that’s brought to life at the Axelrod is highly personal for Brielle; it’s about his coming of age in the surrounding communities of Deal and Brielle, New Jersey.
“My manager called me and said, ‘There’s a writer-composer named Jonathan Brielle who made his way in industrials and commercials who has written a musical, and he’d like you to play his mom.’ And I said, ‘I love to sing,'” Feldshuh said in a recent phone interview. “It was an offer that was made to me, and I liked it. He’s a very good songwriter, and I grabbed it because I love to sing. I love it. Very often I’m thought of, you know, Tovah Feldshush, she could play King Lear, so it’s wonderful for me to be in musicals. I was in musicals a lot at the beginning of my career.”
That career is quite the storied one. From Yentl to Lend Me a Tenor to Becoming Dr. Ruth, the shows are quite numerous on Feldshuh’s biography. There’s also her time on TV’s The Walking Dead, Law & Order and Salvation, plus her film work in Kissing Jessica Stein and A Walk on the Moon. One of her proudest accomplishments is the publication of her recent memoir, Lilyville: Mother, Daughter, Other Roles I’ve Played.
For A Monkey and Me, the process has been lightning quick, which means Feldshuh needs to rely on the expertise she learned from her days in summer stock.
“This is the kind of thing where if you don’t work on your part when you’re not in rehearsal, at least for me, you’ll be sunk,” she said. “You need to study. You’re not going to get enough rehearsal time in the room. … For me, I studied my songs and my text every day. … Then I’d come in, and I’m prepared for rehearsal to perform really because it’s not a process where you’re going to have five to six weeks to work this out in the rehearsal room. You have two weeks. Of course, God created the world in seven days, so anything is possible.”
Feldshuh said the new musical is screaming out of the guts, psyche and intellect of Brielle, and centers on some unfinished business that the composer has with his childhood and family life.
“So this is about Jonathan’s journey about learning to love himself in order to find love, and how do you do that with parenting where you’re not told verbally that your parents love you,” Feldshuh said. “It doesn’t mean they don’t love you; it just means it was never spoken. That’s a pretty big burden to shoulder for any child. As a matter of fact, I bring up that burden in my memoir, Lilyville: Mother, Daughter and Other Roles I’ve Played. I think that Jonathan and I came from the same room, so to speak. My parents were the children of immigrants. They were, of course, American. My father from a German and Austrian family … and my mother from an English-Russian family, and they were poor, rich, poor, rich, poor, rich. They had quite a rollercoaster financial ride with my wonderful grandfather who was a designer of men’s clothing, and the words ‘I love you’ were not spoken to me until I asked my mother whether she loved me when I was 18. And then it was right out of Fiddler: ‘Do you love me? Do I what? Who takes you to your piano lessons, your voice lessons? Who takes you to Saks Fifth Avenue for your clothes and only Alexander’s for your underwear? Who makes sure you get the best of life?’ These mothers were tough-love deed-doers, at least my mother really was.”
She added: “It’s also wonderful for Jonathan and bittersweet for him to come home to collaborate at the Axelrod theater to launch a world premiere two blocks from where his mother and father lived for so many years. That’s fabulous.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
A Monkey and Me: Stories I Never Told My Mother, featuring Tovah Feldshuh, will play June 24-26 at the Axelrod Performing Arts Center in Deal Park, New Jersey. Click here for more information and tickets.
