Several racial slurs are uttered or sung, including antisemitic ones.ĭuring rehearsals, the actors have mostly censored the words or used substitutes, she said. A 15-year-old rising 10th-grader at Ruth Asawa San Francisco School of the Arts, Keith said the show addresses some “pretty heavy” topics, including bigotry and poverty. Ruth Keith shares with Sydney the role of a young Jewish girl from Latvia, known only as “Little Girl” in the script. The original 1998 Broadway production won four Tony Awards, including best book by Terrence McNally, best score and best performance by a featured actress (Audra McDonald). Doctorow, the show interweaves the stories of three families - white, African American and Eastern European Jewish - as they struggle to navigate U.S. (The show was originally slated to open in April 2020 but was postponed after only a week of rehearsals as the Bay Area went into pandemic lockdown.)īased on the bestselling 1975 novel by E.L. ![]() “I have been working on Hebrew recently for my bat mitzvah,” she told J., “so the pronunciation wasn’t an issue.”įreeman is one of three young, local Jewish actors who scored roles in a TheatreWorks Silicon Valley production of “Ragtime,” which opens today at the Mountain View Center for Performing Arts and runs through June 26. ![]() Yet the rising eighth-grader at Cesar Chavez Middle School in Union City said she had no problem learning the song. Early in the musical “Ragtime,” actors playing Jewish, Italian and Haitian immigrants sing “A Shtetl Iz Amereke” upon arriving at Ellis Island.Īs the title of the song suggests, some of the lyrics are in Yiddish - a language that 12-year-old actor Sydney Walker Freeman does not speak.
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