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434Comparative Drama racism.FilewoddeconstructsthenarrativeofDrabinskytoshowhowtransnational capital produces new models of nationhood—global capitalism's takeover of the nationstate (84).Again he provides an enlightening historical precedent for this narrative, the cultural businessmen ofthe 1890s such as Charles Frohman, who also built a theatrical empire by mediated aestheticism and populism. Filewod concludes his monograph with a personal experience—taking his son to see The Lion King in Toronto, and again, he skillfully interrogates the implications ofthis event and the audience's response for a sense ofnationhood as imagined by theater, finally making the disconcerting suggestion that postcolonial imaginary, transnational spectacles like The Lion King may function as a national theater. In 2003, the Association for Canadian Theatre Research awarded the Ann Saddlemyer Prize for best text on Canadian theater to Performing Canada: The Nation Enacted in the Imagined Theatre. Anne Nothof Athabasca University JoelBerkowitz.Shakespeareon theAmerican YiddtehStage.Studies in Theatre History & Culture. Iowa City, University of Iowa Press, 2002. Pp. xviii + 286. $32.95. The Shakespeare market currently reports a brisk trade in derivatives. There was a time when Shakespearean literary scholarship, whether bibliographical, historical, or critical, concerned itself chiefly with canonical texts and largely ignored adaptations and appropriations. Theater historians documenting performances of those texts grudgingly acknowledged that some of them were radically altered in an effort to please the sensibilities of later audiences, but editors treated such alterations as excrescences on the body of the canonical texts and excised them.At present, however, a great many Shakespearean scholars are drawn to radical revisions, sequels, and prequels to adaptations of Shakespearean plots in other media, such as opera, painting, dance, film and to appropriations ofShakespeare in such popular forms as rock music, pornography , detective stories, science fiction, and children's literature. Other scholars note how Shakespearean plays change when performed, often in translations, in other cultures and other theatrical idioms. From this growing body ofscholarship devoted to Shakespearean derivatives, one learns that Shakespeare's approach to the material is by no means the only one, indeed not necessarily the .Reviews435 most interesting one.Moreover,cross-cultural studies ofShakespeare often serve aswindows through whichwe outsiders can glimpse other theatrical traditions. One such tradition is that of the Yiddish theater. It started in the midnineteenth century in Romanian wine cellars but soon flourished in London. Berkowitz focuses on the vibrant Yiddish theater on Second Avenue in New York, home to a large number of the roughly two hundred million Yiddishspeaking Jews who immigrated to the United States between 1881 and 1924. In the struggle to define itself, this theater wrestled with problems of language (stilted Germanized Yiddish vs. colloquial speech), tried both to instruct and to entertain its largely uneducated, boisterous spectators, and developed a style of acting that now would seem excessively histrionic but which Brooks Atkinson of the New York Times praised for a passionate intensity that made uptown actors seem anemic. In lively, often elegant prose, Joel Berkowitz tells the intertwined stories ofwhat Shakespeare did for this theater and what it did with (and to) Shakespeare's plays. He focuses primarily on the two decades between 1890 and 1910,whenYiddish theatrical producers,like their later counterparts in film and television, sought cultural prestige by including occasional Shakespearean productions amidst their regular offerings of formulaic melodramas and operettas, otherwise knows as shund (trash). Using broad but authoritative strokes, Berkowitz sets forth the historical and social background of this vibrant immigrant community and its nascent theatrical tradition in a long introductory chapter. He then devotes a chapter each toAmericanYiddishversionsofsingleplays—Lear,Hamlet,Othello,Romeo and Juliet, and The Merchant of Venice—followed by a conclusion devoted to the general effects of American Yiddish Shakespearean productions on the Yiddish theater. Berkowitz relies heavily on Yiddish memoirs of theater artists and on theatrical criticism from both the Yiddish and English-language press to reconstruct what actually happened onstage, both in relatively straightforward productions and in plays (concisely summarized) that departed significantly from their Shakespearean sources. For example, in a freely adapted Hamlet-derivative called The Yeshiva Boy (1899) by Isadore Zolatarevksy, the usurping uncle (the incompetent successor to his brother as the leader of a Hasidic dynasty) dies of natural causes, sparing his nephew, a...

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