This is part of an ongoing series featuring hometown sons and daughters as they make their way in the world. We invite our readers to notify us of other interesting stories for future issues.
It’s no secret that Milwaukee’s Jewish community has produced much more than its share of success stories in the world of the performing arts and entertainment.
Looking again at this phenomenon, (see the Nov. 30, 2007, Chronicle for a story on Milwaukeeans pursuing careers in New York City radio and theater), The Chronicle recently caught up with Shorewood native William Hinden and former Bayside resident, Nancy Pittelman.
Hindin, 53, has worked in many aspects of musical arranging and directing for live theater for some 25 years and operates his own artist management company.
Pittelman, 28, is employed as a stage manager. This week, she left for Osaka, Japan, with a new show from the creators of the Blue Man Group.
Both former Milwaukeeans talked of their love for their work and the challenges of living “on the road,” as well as their hometown roots. They both feel that the world of theater chose them, rather than the other way around.
‘The fourth wall’
Hindin has recently been involved, as musical director, in the off-Broadway musical comedy hit “Spaghetti & Matzo Balls!” starring Rena Strober.
In the show, subtitled “The Jewish Songbird Finds Her Inner Italian,” Strober sings about her real-life experiences as a Jewish singer in an Italian restaurant in her hometown of Middletown, N.Y.
The show had a 5-week rerun on Broadway last fall and will be run as a one-nighter several times this spring, Hindin said.
In addition to arranging, directing and musical directing, Hindin represents variety and theatrical performers through his company William Hindin Artist Management (“WHAM”).
In a telephone interview with The Chronicle, Hindin said that he especially enjoys cabaret singing where he can “break the fourth wall,” or speak directly to the audience.
Hindin once conducted for Rosemary Clooney and in the 1980s, he “did a lot of theater and dinner theater,” working as an arranger, director, musical director and performer.
For eight years he worked on cruise ships, first becoming a musical director for Princess Cruise Line, playing, conducting, singing and directing.
There he did a different show every night, he said. He performed humor, magic, and vocal music and got good at figuring out what to do in front of a live audience and at speaking directly to them.
In the late 1990s Hindin started a four-year stint with T.V. star John Davidson (host of “That’s Incredible and “Hollywood Squares”), as his musical director and arranger, as well as his orchestra conductor.
Hindin enjoyed working with Davidson. “We were VIPs. We traveled in a limousine and could spend a week somewhere and just do one show,” Hindin said.
In addition, they met amazing people, including Hal Linden, Lesley Gore and native Milwaukeean Al Jarreau, he said. But, “you can get pretty weary of life on the road,” he said and now, he is more particular what work he chooses.
Raised at Congregation Emanu-El B’ne Jeshurun, Hinden said he used to go to synagogue services just twice a year. Though he said he has always identified with Jewish culture, he is now becoming a little more religious. He has explored several streams of Judaism from humanistic to Reconstructionist, and Conservative, but has found he is not attracted to what he refers to as “Judaism-lite.”
Rather, he prefers the more traditional rituals and is now spending time at an Orthodox shul where he says he experiences “a sense of family even though I don’t always get the Hebrew.”
His interest in music and theater was nurtured while he was growing up in Milwaukee by Cantor Roy Garber, who involved him in musicals in Washington Park.
And, he said, he and many other Milwaukee youth were inspired to pursue theatrical careers by working with local drama maven Tybie Taglin and Barbara Gensler, longtime theater director at Shorewood High School.
“The North Shore [of Milwaukee] is loaded with talent,” he said and “I absolutely wouldn’t trade growing up in Milwaukee — in the Midwest — for anything.”
After a year at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Hindin completed his undergraduate degree at Northwestern University in 1977.
Hindin’s parents, Allan and Jeanne still live in Milwaukee, as does his sister Barbara Kalina.
Being found
When we spoke, Pittelman was in her Manhattan apartment, packing for her three-month gig in Japan. Packing has become a regular part of her life.
Though she has lived in New York on and off for about three years, she said, “I don’t really have a home, to be honest.” She has moved across the country four times in the last two years, she said. “I can’t have a lot of stuff.”
For six months last year, Pittelman lived and worked in Las Vegas, where she was one of several stage managers for “Le Reve,” (“The Dream”) — “one of the largest shows in the world,” she said.
Like Cirque du Soleil’s “O,” “Le Reve” is a water show. Performed in the round, it includes “synchronized swimming, a lot of circus-type acts and tons of aerial work,” Pittelman said.
She loved working with its international cast of 78 performers from 35 countries, and that experience helped her strengthen her cross-cultural communication skills. She was sorry to leave the show, she said.
But she had to return to New York last fall because of a seasonal position with Radio City Music Hall. “And they promoted me,” she said.
Radio City’s largest show of the year is its Christmas show, which has run for 32 years. The 2007 Christmas show was Pittelman’s third as one of the nine stage managers who produce 32 weekly shows with the Rockettes, Pittelman said.
And it’s exciting for Pittelman. “Every day that we do a show, we are making history.”
As a stage manager, Pittelman is charged with facilitating all of the communication between performers, directors and designers. Since the project she is working on now is a new show, there are a lot of changes every day that need to be shared with a large number of designers and others.
Though it might seem that a seasonal position would leave gaps in one’s income, Pittelman said she has been lucky since she left college. “I have found work and work has found me.”
After the Radio City Christmas show ended, Pittelman was hired for a new show created by the team that produced the Blue Man Group.
That show, titled “Trip of Love,” has a 1960s theme and has been 10 years in the making.
Calling the show “revolutionary,” Pittelman said she has enjoyed learning about Japanese culture and communication in the four weeks she’s been with “Trip of Love.”
At the end of her junior year at Nicolet High School, Pittelman traveled to Japan as part of a four-week exchange trip to Chiba, Milwaukee’s sister city. While there, she lived with a family and went to high school. She said she has always been interested in going back.
When she was applying to colleges, she said, “I was torn between East Asian Studies and stage management. I ended up going to the University of Miami, in Florida, and majoring in stage management.”
In Miami, Pittelman found “a really great professor, who is still a mentor to me…. He gave me a pretty realistic view of the profession.”
“But nothing could have prepared me for the moving.… I could stay in one city and take whatever work I could get there,” she said. But at this point of her life, she’s choosing to seek the biggest and best opportunities, wherever they may take her.
Born in Madison, Pittelman’s Milwaukee-born father, Joel and Chicago-born mother, Susan, moved the family to Milwaukee in 1987.
Though she said she hasn’t thought about how her Milwaukee upbringing has affected her life, Pittelman paused and reflected before talking about her strong Jewish identity.
Growing up at Congregation Shalom, attending the now-named Steve and Shari Sadek Family Camp Interlaken JCC and participating in B’nai B’rith Youth Organization all contributed to her strong connection to Judaism and the Jewish people, she said.
“I’m glad I have that,” Pittelman said. “Regardless of what city I’m in, I find the Jewish community. I went to three different synagogues for High Holy Day services this year,” she said. And during the five years she lived in Louisville, she worshiped with seven congregations.
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