In conversation: Jenni Lea-Jones

Jenni Lea-Jones talks to JR about her role in The Merchant in Venice at Venice Ghetto 500

Sian Trenberth Photography

In the next of our chats with members of the cast and creative team of the very first production of The Merchant of Venice to be staged in the Venice Ghetto itself, Judi Herman talks to Welsh actress Jenni Lea-Jones, who has relocated to Venice and is perhaps the most unusual of the five performers sharing the role of Shylock in the show they are calling The Merchant in Venice. Apologies for the quality of the line at the start of this conversation, which happily soon improves. www.themerchantinvenice.org

In conversation: Jeff Ingber

Table tennis champ Jeff Ingber talks about travelling the world playing the beautiful game

Jeff Ingber, table tennis champion for decades from the mid-20th century and one of Howard Jacobsons heroes, met up with JR’s arts editor Judi Herman at the exhibition Chess in Shorts that accompanies the production of the Mighty Walzer at Manchester’s Royal Exchange Theatre. Ingber told Judi about playing the other beautiful game in Manchester and how it was his passport to travel the world, from Israel to China.

Chess in Shorts, an exhibition by Howard Jacobson and Manchester Jewish Museum, runs until Saturday 30 July, FREE, at the Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester, M2 7DH. www.royalexchange.co.uk

The Mighty Walzer runs until Saturday 30 July, 7.30pm & 2.30pm, £8-£16, at Royal Exchange Theatre.

Read our review of The Mighty Walzer and our interview with the show’s playwright and actor, Simon Bent and Elliot Levey. [link to blog]

In conversation: Davina Moss

In light of Venice Ghetto 500, Davina Moss talks to JR about her role in the production they’re calling The Merchant in Venice

As the celebrations to mark the 500th anniversary of the Venice Ghetto continue, excitement mounts over the first ever performances of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice in the Ghetto itself (26-31 July). In the next of a series of interviews with members of the cast and creative team, JR’s arts editor Judi Herman talks to Londoner Davina Moss, currently studying dramaturgy at university in New York, to find out more about her role as assistant dramaturg on this unique production.

Visit www.themerchantinvenice.org for more info.

In conversation: Michelle Uranowitz

In light of Venice Ghetto 500, actor Michelle Uranowitz talks to JR about playing Shylock’s daughter as part of the anniversary celebrations

As the celebrations to mark the 500th anniversary of the Venice Ghetto kick off, excitement mounts over the first ever performances of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice in the Ghetto itself (26-31 July). JR’s arts editor Judi Herman will be talking to various members of the cast and creative team in the coming weeks, but first spoke to American actor Michelle Uranowitz about playing Shylock’s rebellious daughter Jessica in Venice.

Visit www.themerchantinvenice.org for more info.

In conversation: Diane Samuels

Diane Samuels talks to Judi Herman about her play Poppy + George and her new oratorio Song of Dina

©Richard Lakos

Liverpudlian playwright Diane Samuels talks to Judi Herman about identity and change from London’s East End 1919 to now. These themes feature in her play Poppy + George, about Northerner Poppy Wright, who is taken on at a tailoring workshop by the proprietor Smith, a Russian Jew with a Chinese past. It’s here that Poppy also meets Tommy the music hall artist and George the chauffeur, both changed by serving in the trenches. Diane also discusses her new project (at 21:49), Song of Dina, a multimedia oratorio with music by composer Maurice Chernick, based on the story of the Patriarch Jacob’s only daughter.

Poppy + George runs to Saturday 27 February, 7.30pm & 2.30pm, £12-£22.50, at Watford Palace Theatre, 20 Clarendon Rd, WD17 1JZ; 01923 225671. www.watfordpalacetheatre.co.uk

Song of Dina plays on Wednesday 6 April, 7.45pm, FREE, at JW3, 341-351 Finchley Rd, NW3 6ET; 020 7433 8989. www.jw3.org.uk

Read JR’s four-star review of Poppy + George [link to blog]

In conversation: Scott Frankel, Michael Korie and Doug Wright

Judi Herman speaks to the brains behind the musical retelling of the real-life riches to rags story, Grey Gardens

Courtesy of Scott Rylander

In the mid-1970s Albert and David Maysles – first-generation sons of Jewish immigrants to the US from Eastern Europe – made Grey Gardens, one of their most famous films. The documentary told the story of a mother and daughter from the highest echelons of US Society, Edith and Edie Bouvier Beale, who were the aunt and cousin of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. The two Bouvier Beale women were discovered living as reclusive social outcasts in Grey Gardens, a dilapidated mansion overrun by cats that was so squalid the Health Department deemed it “unfit for human habitation”. Now another creative Jewish pair, composer Scott Frankel and lyricist Michael Korie, together with book writer Doug Wright, have brought their multi-award-winning musical based on the film to London. JR’s arts editor Judi Herman, who saw Thom Southerland’s European production starring Sheila Hancock and Jenna Russell, was enchanted by this riches to rags story, as you’ll hear in her interview with the three writers.

Grey Gardens runs until Saturday 6 February, 7.30pm & 3pm, £25, £20 concs, at Southwark Playhouse, 77-85 Newington Causeway, SE1 6BD; 020 7407 0234. www.southwarkplayhouse.co.uk

Book by Doug Wright, Music by Scott Frankel, Lyrics by Michael Korie Based on the film Grey Gardens by David Maysles, Albert Maysles, Ellen Hovde, Muffie Mayer and Susan Froemke, Grey Gardens tells the spectacular real life rise and fall of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis's aunt and cousin, Edith and Edie Bouvier Beale.

Here, you can watch a clip of Jenna Russell singing Another Winter in a Summer Town from the musical.

In conversation: Larry Mollin

Larry Mollin talks to Judi Herman about his new play ‘The Screenwriter’s Daughter’

Larry Mollin talks to JR’s arts editor Judi Herman about his new play, The Screenwriter’s Daughter, charting the tempestuous relationship between Hollywood screenwriter Ben Hecht and his free-spirited daughter Jenny, who joins the radical New York Living Theatre in the 1960s against Hecht’s will. This rich and powerful Jewish writer was blacklisted in the UK in the 1940s and ’50s for his political activism, but he has also been recognised for his human rights efforts in creating public awareness of the Holocaust and furthering the cause of Jews around the world. His 120 screenplays include Gone with the Wind and Scarface, which won the first Oscar for Original Screenplay in 1927, and for Alfred Hitchcock he wrote a number of his best psycho-dramas, receiving his final Academy Award nomination for Notorious. His stage writing includes The Front Page, the sharp and witty comedy set in a newspaper office he co-wrote with Charles MacArthur (also filmed several times, including with Jack Lemmon and Walther Matthau).

The Screenwriter’s Daughter runs until Sunday 29 November. 7pm & 2pm, £15-£19.50, Leicester Square Theatre, 6 Leicester Place, WC2H 7BX; 020 7734 2222. www.leicestersquaretheatre.com

In conversation: Alon Nashman

Canadian actor Alon Nashman brings the world-famous Jewish writer – and his father – to vivid life in this acclaimed one-man play, as part of JW3’s Kafka Festival

© Cylla von Tiedeman

At age 36 Franz Kafka was still living at home, a petty bureaucrat, a failed artist, a timid Jewish son. Ruling and ruining his life was his overbearing father, Hermann. Kafka wrote a letter to his father in which he reveals deep connections between his life and his fiction. As he confesses, "All my writing was about you". Adapted from this monumental (and undelivered) letter, Kafka and Son is a blistering, often hilarious, dissection of domestic authority, starring Canadian actor Alon Nashman. Kafka and Son has toured Europe and now it returns to the UK as part of JW3’s Kafka Festival, 24 to 25 October. Judi Herman caught up with Alon Nashman when he performed his acclaimed one-man play in The Hague and after the performance he spoke to her for JR OutLoud.

Alon Nashman performs Kafka and Son on Saturday 24 October. 8pm. £10-£15. JW3, 341-351 Finchley Rd, NW3 6ET; 020 7433 8988. www.jw3.org.uk

Read Alon Nashman on his Kafka - along with writer/director/performer Steven Berkoff and novelist and critic Gabriel Josipovici - in the October 2015 issue of Jewish Renaissance.

In conversation: Julia Pascal

Julia Pascal talks about Crossing Jerusalem and her reasons for writing and reviving it

© Mia Hawk

Hear writer/director Julia Pascal speaking to JR's arts editor Judi Herman about her play and her reasons for writing it – and for reviving it now. (NB: Thanks to the tube strike this interview was recorded via Skype and is not of the finest quality, but hopefully rewards the patient and persistent listener!)

Crossing Jerusalem runs until Saturday 29 August. 7.45pm & 3.15pm. £12.50-£18. Park Theatre, Clifton Terrace, N4 3JP; 020 7870 6876. parktheatre.co.uk

Read Judi Herman's review on the JR blog

In conversation: Danny Braverman

Danny Braverman, the man behind Wot? No Fish!! tells JR about his great-uncle's packet paintings

© Malwina Comoloveo

In 1926, shoemaker Ab Solomons drew a doodle on the wage-packet he gave to his wife Celie. Over the next 50-odd years Ab drew over 3,000. This extraordinary chronicle of East London Jewish life was originally brought to life by Ab's great-nephew and storyteller Danny Braverman in 2013 and continues to run successfully throughout theatres today.

Wot? No Fish!! runs Wednesday 5-Sunday 9 August & Wednesday 12-Sunday 16 August. 7.30pm. £17. Queen Elizabeth Hall, Southbank Centre, SE18XX; 020 7960 4200. southbankcentre.co.uk