A bit of Broadway on the bima
How do you measure a year in a life?
That question, implicit in our High Holy Days of prayer, repentance, and retrospection, was made explicit in the song “Seasons of Love,” written by Jewish playwright Jonathan Larson for the hit musical “Rent.”
Last week, Park Avenue Synagogue brought that bit of Broadway wisdom to the bima, as a cohort of Broadway performers sang the song on the bimah during Thursday’s Rosh Hashana services.
It was the first time Park Avenue Synagogue hosted Broadway performers on the bimah during High Holy Days. Cantor Azi Schwartz said that he wanted to tell the congregation that “Broadway can be your home, the sanctuary at Park Avenue can be your home, and Judaism is your home — and they all exist together.”
“Our year has been filled with sorrow and strife. How can we celebrate? How can we kvetch, knowing the pain of the hour? Our response, authentically, is by way of love, seasons of the love,” the congregation’s senior rabbi, Elliot Cosgrove, said, introducing the performers as they began singing from the back of the room, making their way to the bimah.
The performers included Julie Benko, who broke out in 2022 as a standby for the role of Fanny Brice in “Funny Girl” and more recently played a Jewish radical in Barry Manilow’s Nazi-era musical “Harmony”; Talia Suskauer, who was recently cast as the wife of Jewish lynching victim Leo Frank in the national tour of “Parade,” and Etai Benson, who starred in a revival of Stephen Sondheim’s “Company.” The other performers were Nathan Salstone, Bob McDonald, Jesse Nager, Jenny Rose Baker, Danny Kornfeld, Lindsay Lavin and Zachary Piser.
Schwartz worked with Broadway producers Amanda Lipitz — a synagogue member — and Henry Tisch for several months to put together the arrangement of the popular song, written for the hit 1996 Broadway musical that chronicled the lives of bohemian East Villagers in the 1980s who were living beneath the shadow of the AIDS crisis.
The song’s lyrics count up the total minutes of a year — 525,600 minutes, to be exact — or “in daylights, in sunsets, in midnights, in cups of coffee,” before concluding that the most effective way is to “measure in love.”
NY Jewish Week
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