L ifestyles /C ulture
Yiddish Actor Allen Lewis Rickman Comes to
Philadelphia Area for ‘Sunshine Boys’
T H EATER
SELAH MAYA ZIGHELBOIM | JE STAFF
YOU MIGHT RECOGNIZE
Allen Lewis Rickman from
Boardwalk Empire, in which he
had a recurring role as George
Baxter, a salesman in Atlantic
City, New Jersey.

Or from the Coen brothers’
A Serious Man, in which he
played the Yiddish-speaking
man in the prologue, alongside
his wife, who played his wife in
the scene. He also translated
the Yiddish dialogue.

The New York-based actor
is now in the Philadelphia
area for a production of Neil
Simon’s The Sunshine Boys at
the Bristol Riverside Theatre,
in which he plays Al Lewis, one
of the two leads. The show runs
until March 31.

The Sunshine Boys follows
two men, Al Lewis and Willie
Clark (played by Carl Wallnau),
who reunite in their 70s, years
after a falling out ended their
career together as a popular
vaudevillian comedy act.

“It’s funny as hell, and it’s
very touching,” Rickman said.

“It’s not heavy-handed. You
never feel like you’re watching
an Ingmar Bergman movie or
something, but there are some
very deep themes underneath it.

It’s about ... making your peace
with the end of your active life.

It’s about, ultimately, at what
point can you say, ‘Well, I’ve
done everything that I’m going
to do in the world.’”
Wallnau recommended
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Rickman for the role of Al
Lewis when the director,
Keith Baker, told him he could
have input in the casting of
that character. Wallnau and
Rickman have a rapport work-
ing together and a similar
comedic sense, Wallnau said.

“Right away, I said, ‘Well,
the person who comes right to
mind, who I think would really
be good, [is] Allen,’ and we did
a tape in New York and sent it
in,” Wallnau said. “The rest, as
they say, is history.”
Rickman has had a long
career in theater, television
and film, having been in pro-
ductions such as Relatively
Speaking on Broadway and
The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, in
which he played real-life come-
dian Red Skelton.

He also portrayed Hitler for
Michael Moore’s old television
show The Awful Truth, in a
bit satirizing the Swiss banks’
refusal to release Holocaust
victims’ assets to their descen-
dants, a hot-button issue in
1999 when the piece aired. For
the episode, Rickman went to
Zurich, where he walked into
banks dressed as Hitler and
asked if he could make a with-
drawal from accounts he had
opened there 50 years before.

“This was basically to pro-
voke the Swiss, who had done
terrible things, not with guns
and gas chambers, but with
paperwork, and basically
embarrass the Swiss for what
they had done,” Rickman said.

“I’m not a huge fan of Michael
Moore in a lot of respects, but
he was very nice to me per-
sonally, and this was certainly
something worth doing.”
Rickman also has done a
significant amount of work in
Yiddish theater.

He recently came off a pro-
duction of an original Yiddish-
language show called Tevye
Served Raw, an adaptation of
Sholem Aleichem’s stories.

JEWISH EXPONENT
From left: Allen Lewis Rickman as Al Lewis and Carl Wallnau as Willie
Clark Mark Garvin
Rickman learned Yiddish
by listening to his parents. His
father was a Holocaust sur-
vivor, his mother the child of
immigrants and Yiddish was
their first language. By the
time he was about 10, he had
started speaking it, he said.

Judaism, in general, was a
big part of Rickman’s upbring-
ing, as he attended a modern
Orthodox yeshiva.

He started in theater
because it was either that or
get a job, he quipped. He fell
into Yiddish theater because
he already knew the language.

He also writes translations of
original Yiddish shows.

There is a part of him, he
said, that wants to make sure
the language stays alive for his
parents. But he also just enjoys
speaking it because of how fun
and expressive the language is.

“The defining difference
between Yiddish theater and
non-Yiddish theater is the lan-
guage,” Rickman explained.

“People ... think it’s a style of
acting. It isn’t. Yiddish is a mil-
lion different things, always was
a million different things. Every
possible style of theater was
done in a Yiddish, and every
possible style of theater was
done successfully in Yiddish.

“When you do something
with Yiddish now, the language
is the musical soundtrack to
the show. When you see it done
well — like, for example, the
Yiddish Godot that was done
in New York a couple of years
ago — it lends a flavor to the
material that it wouldn’t other-
wise have. It’s like it has some
music playing underneath it,
and of course, the feeling of
authenticity. There’s something
about it. It’s like it becomes the
set or a costume. It’s what the
actors are wrapped in; it’s the
air they’re walking around in.”
Though he is probably best
known for his Yiddish theater,
his biggest passion is comedy,
he said, so The Sunshine Boys is
a great opportunity.

“It’s always interesting to
do charactery stuff,” Rickman
said. “A lot of acting is basically
putting yourself in this situa-
tion or that situation with vari-
ations: What if I were myself
but slightly more this kind of
person or that kind of per-
son? Whereas heavy charac-
ter work, where you become
somebody completely different
— how you look, how you talk,
how you walk — that’s more
interesting and more fun.” l
szighelboim@jewishexponent.com; 215-832-0729
JEWISHEXPONENT.COM