‘Salute to Song and Spirit’ will celebrate Broadway and cantors’ friendship
The Oct. 6 performance here of “Cantors’ Cabaret: A Salute to Song and Spirit” won’t only be a tribute to the Jewish composers of Broadway musicals. It will also be in part a celebration of the friendship of two of the show’s performers.
Cantors David Barash of Milwaukee Congregation Emanu-El B’ne Jeshurun and Perry Fine of Congregation Beth El in South Orange, N.J., met in Israel when they were both first-year cantorial students at the Jewish Theological Seminary in the late 1980s.
“We struck up a great friendship which has carried us through this concert and hopefully far beyond,” said Fine in a recent telephone interview.
Indeed, it carried Fine all the way to Buenos Aires, where he sang at Barash’s wedding in the early 1990s. Barash returned the favor this past July at Fine’s wedding in South Orange.
Moreover, Barash brought Fine and Fine’s “Cantors’ Cabaret” partners — Cantor Nancy Ginsberg of Har Sinai Temple in Baltimore and New York pianist, actor and cantorial student Kenneth Gould — to Barash’s previous synagogue in Kansas City about eight years ago; and the Barash-Fine friendship became “part of the shtick” even then, according to Barash.
As they did in Kansas City, Barash and Fine will sing together the song “Together Wherever We Go” from “Gypsy.” But this, said Fine, is just one way that the show has personal meaning for him and the other performers.
“We try to tell the story” not just of the shows the songs came from, but also of “how our lives are intertwined” with the songs, Fine said. All the songs “speak about us as individuals” and “reflect something of what we’ve gone through personally.”
In fact, the songs take Fine back to some of his musical roots, as “I was in musical theater for most of my teen years.” He said he got to know Ginsberg “on the cantorial circuit”; and she knew Gould because she had done some cabaret singing as well as opera and cantorial singing and he had worked as a cabaret pianist.
So one day in 1999, they were talking and the idea came up, “Wouldn’t it be fun” to do a cabaret-style show around the Jewish composers of Broadway. They tried it out first in Fine’s synagogue in May 1999, and have taken the show to Baltimore and Detroit as well as Kansas City.
“Who doesn’t love the music of the Broadway stage?” Fine said. “We have a good time and the audience does as well.”
The Milwaukee performance will take place at Vogel Hall of the Marcus Center for the Performing Arts on Sunday, Oct. 6, 7 p.m. General admission is $25, special seating is available for those who wish to be sponsors.
Moreover, Barash said he intends this concert to be the first in “a series that I want to develop here … on some regular basis.”
The concert is chaired by Sara Cherny and Deb Kravit. For more information and tickets, call Barbara Stys at the synagogue, 414-228-7545. Tickets can also be obtained from the Marcus Center box office, 414-273-7206, and Ticketmaster, 414-276-4545 or www.ticketmaster.com.
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