Performers, performed

September marks a whole new season of the arts, and of course the start of the Jewish New Year.

In reading about Rosh Hashanah, I happened to come across “The Late Year,” a poem by Marge Piercy. Now 89, she is a prolific writer who was born in Michigan, was raised by her Jewish mother and Orthodox Jewish maternal grandmother, and earned her Master’s degree from Northwestern University.

I found this line of hers particularly lovely: “I like Rosh Hashanah late, when the leaves are half burnt umber and scarlet, when sunset marks the horizon with slow fire, and the black silhouettes of migrating birds perch on the wires davening.”

Now, onward and upward with several performances to catch this month.

On a Skokie stage, “The First Lady of Television”

Opening the 50th Anniversary season of Northlight Theatre is the world premiere of The First Lady of Television, a play by James Sherman that captures a period in the life of Gertrude Berg.

Berg was born Tillie Edelstein in the East Harlem neighborhood of New York in 1899, and married Lewis Berg in 1918. A broadcasting pioneer, she began in radio, creating and playing the character of Molly Goldberg, the matriarch of a first-generation Jewish immigrant family struggling good-naturedly to adapt to American life. It should be noted that Berg wrote all her scripts in pencil, and from 1929 until 1949 she performed more than 5,000 episodes, each 15 minutes in length.

Then Berg’s long-running hit enabled her to convince CBS to let her bring the Goldberg characters to television. But in 1951, just as she earned an Emmy Award for Lead Actress in Television, that the McCarthy Era took hold. Her co-star-Philip Loeb, who played Molly’s husband-was named in “Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television,” and was blacklisted by General Foods, the show’s primary sponsor, which demanded he be fired.

The show remained in production until 1956; it became credited as the first TV sitcom, with Gertrude described as “The First Lady of TV Sitcoms.”

Playing Gertrude Berg will be Cindy Gold, the Chicago-based actress who has worked in theater throughout the U.S. for decades, appeared on television, and in films and industrial works. Gold is now an Emeritus Professor at Northwestern University, having taught in its Theater Department for more than 20 years.

This Northlight Theatre show runs Sept. 4 – Oct. 5 at the North Shore Center for the Performing Arts, 9501 Skokie Blvd. in Skokie. For tickets, visit northlight.org or call 847-673-6300.

Hershey Felder celebrates Rachmaninoff

Hershey Felder was born in Montreal, Quebec in 1968, the son of Yiddish-speaking immigrant parents from Eastern Europe. The pianist, actor, playwright, and producer has traveled and performed throughout the U.S. for decades. But for some years now he has made Florence, Italy his home, and he now serves as artistic director of both the Teatro dello Signoria and Teatro Niccolini-two historic theaters in that city.

Felder still comes back to theaters in the U.S. And this time around he is bringing his production of Rachmaninoff and the Tsar, now in its world-premiere season, to the Writers Theatre in Glencoe.

Doing so, he is breaking his usual performance of a solo show- in which he has portrayed, and played, Chopin, Gershwin, Bernstein, Tchaikovsky, Debussy and Irving Berlin. This time, he adds actor Jonathan Silvester in the role of Tsar Nicholas II, a nostalgic reminder of Russia for Rachmaninoff, who fled Russia during its Revolution. While he eventually settled in the United States for the remainder of his life, he was homesick, and composed very little until his death in 1943.

Throughout the show Felder plays Rachmaninoff’s works, including the “Prelude in C# Minor,” the “Second Piano Concerto,” the “Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini,” and even the composer’s arrangement of “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

The show will run through Sept. 21 at Writers Theatre, 325 Tudor Court in Glencoe. For tickets, visit writerstheatre.org or call 847-242-6000.

Also worth noting

*Justin Hurwitz, the American Jewish film composer and television writer, composed much of the jazz-influenced score for the award-winning 2014 film Whiplash. On Sept. 13, he will conduct the Chicago Philharmonic playing the score, as the film is projected, at the Auditorium Theatre.

For tickets, visit auditoriumtheatre.org or call 312-341-2300.

*On Sept. 12, the rock band Haim-comprised of three Jewish sisters, Danielle, Alana, and Este Haim, whose last name means “life” in Hebrew-will perform at the United Center. They will draw on their fourth album, I Quit, released in June.

For tickets, visit gotickets.com.

Hedy Weiss, a longtime Chicago arts critic, was the Theater and Dance Critic for the Chicago Sun-Times from 1984 to 2018. She currently writes for WTTW-TV’s website and contributes to the Chicago Tonight program.