Yentl

Yentl is a play by Leah Napolin and Isaac Bashevis Singer.

Based on Singer's short story "Yentl the Yeshiva Boy," it centers on a young girl who defies tradition by discussing and debating Jewish law and theology with her rabbi father. When he dies, she cuts her hair, dresses as a man, and sets out to find a yeshiva where she can continue to study Talmud and live secretly as a male named Anshel. When her study partner Avigdor discovers the truth, Yentl's assertions that she is "neither one sex nor the other" and has "the soul of a man in the body of a woman" suggest the character is undergoing a gender identity crisis, especially when she opts to remain living as Anshel for the rest of her life.

After eleven previews, the Broadway production, directed by Robert Kalfin, opened on October 23, 1975 at the Eugene O'Neill Theatre, where it ran for 223 performances. The cast included Tovah Feldshuh, John Shea, and Lynn Ann Leveridge.

Screen adaptation

As early as 1968, Barbra Streisand had expressed interest in a film adaptation of Singer's short story. Using the Napolin/Singer play as her source material, she wrote a detailed forty-two page treatment, the first to conceive of the movie version as a musical. The resulting 1983 production veered dramatically from the original short story and play by allowing Yentl to reveal her true feelings for Avigdor and having her return to her female self and sail for the United States at the end.

Barbra Streisand

Barbra Joan Streisand (/ˈstraɪsænd/; born April 24, 1942) is an American singer, songwriter, actress, and filmmaker. During a career spanning six decades, she has become an icon in multiple fields of entertainment, winning numerous awards, and has earned her recognition as Mother of All Contemporary Pop Divas or Queen of The Divas. She has been recognized with two Academy Awards, ten Grammy Awards including the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award and the Grammy Legend Award, five Emmy Awards including one Daytime Emmy, a Special Tony Award, an American Film Institute award, a Kennedy Center Honors prize, four Peabody Awards,The Presidential Medal Of Freedom and eleven Golden Globes. She is among a small group of entertainers who have been honored with an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony Award, of whom only she and one other have also won a Peabody.

Streisand is one of the best-selling music artists of all time, with more than 72.5 million albums in the United States and with a total of 245 million records sold worldwide, making her the best-selling female artist among the top-selling artists recognized by the Recording Industry Association of America, (The only female in the top ten, and the only artist outside of the rock 'n' roll genre.)

Isaac Bashevis Singer

Isaac Bashevis Singer (Yiddish: יצחק באַשעװיס זינגער‎; November 21, 1902 – July 24, 1991) was a Polish-born Jewish author in Yiddish, awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1978. The Polish form of his birth name was Icek Hersz Zynger. He used his mother's first name in an initial literary pseudonym, Izaak Baszewis, which he later expanded to the form under which he is now known. He was a leading figure in the Yiddish literary movement, writing and publishing only in Yiddish. He also was awarded two U.S. National Book Awards, one in Children's Literature for his memoir A Day Of Pleasure: Stories of a Boy Growing Up in Warsaw (1970) and one in Fiction for his collection, A Crown of Feathers and Other Stories (1974).

Life

Isaac Bashevis Singer was born in 1902 in Leoncin village near Warsaw, Poland, under military partitions by the Russian Empire. A few years later, the family moved to a nearby Polish town of Radzymin, which is often and erroneously given as his birthplace. The exact date of his birth is uncertain, but most probably it was November 21, 1902, a date that Singer gave both to his official biographer Paul Kresh, and his secretary Dvorah Telushkin. It is also consistent with the historical events he and his brother refer to in their childhood memoirs. The often-quoted birth date, July 14, 1904 was made up by the author in his youth, most probably to make himself younger to avoid the draft.

Mandy Patinkin

Mandel Bruce "Mandy" Patinkin (/pəˈtɪŋkᵻn/; born November 30, 1952) is an American actor, tenor, voice artist, and comedian.

Patinkin is well known for his portrayal of Inigo Montoya in the 1987 movie The Princess Bride. His other film credits include Yentl (1983), Alien Nation (1988), Dick Tracy (1990), and Wish I Was Here (2014). He has appeared in major roles in television series such as Chicago Hope, Dead Like Me, and Criminal Minds, and currently plays Saul Berenson in the Showtime series Homeland. Patinkin is also known for his portrayal of the villainous Huxley in The Adventures of Elmo in Grouchland (1999).

He is a noted interpreter of the musical works of Stephen Sondheim and is known for his work in musical theater, originating iconic roles such as Georges Seurat in Sunday in the Park with George and Ché in the original Broadway production of Evita.

Early life

Patinkin was born Mandel Bruce Patinkin in Chicago, Illinois, on November 30, 1952, the son of Doris "Doralee" (née Sinton), a homemaker, and Lester Patinkin, who operated two large Chicago-area metal factories, the People's Iron & Metal Company and the Scrap Corporation of America. His mother wrote Grandma Doralee Patinkin's Jewish Family Cookbook. Patinkin's cousins include Mark Patinkin, an author and nationally syndicated columnist for The Providence Journal; Sheldon Patinkin of Columbia College Chicago's Theater Department, a founder of The Second City; and Bonnie Miller Rubin, a Chicago Tribune reporter.

Amy Irving

Amy Davis Irving (born September 10, 1953) is an American actress. She was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for Yentl (1983) and for the Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Musical or Comedy for Crossing Delancey (1988). She made her Broadway debut in Amadeus in 1980 and went on to receive an Obie Award for the 1988 Off-Broadway production of The Road to Mecca. Her other film appearances include Carrie (1976), The Fury (1978), Micki & Maude (1984), Anastasia: The Mystery of Anna (1986) and Traffic (2000).

Early life

Irving was born in Palo Alto, California. Her father was film and stage director Jules Irving (born Jules Israel) and her mother is actress Priscilla Pointer. Her brother is writer/director David Irving (not the British author of the same name) and her sister is singer/teacher of deaf children Katie Irving. Irving's father was Jewish, as was one of Irving's maternal great-great-grandfathers. Irving was raised in Christian Science, and her family observed no religious traditions.