Person Place Thing with Randy Cohen

Their play Here There Are Blueberries is built around an actual photo album assembled at Auschwitz of the ordinary daily life of the perpetrators. Following a run at the McCarter Theatre, the play is now touring nationally (if youre reading this early in 2025, not in, oh, 2026 in exile on the Martian penal colony).

This historian, in CCNY’s Black Studies Department, says, “If I want to have a good writing day, I take the train an hour and fifteen minutes to somewhere I love, the quietest place in New York.” Silence and thought. Music: Birsa Chatterjee, saxophone; Raul Reyes, bass; Victor Gould, piano. (Not silent, much appreciated.)

After fifty years as a mezzo-soprano, she still embraces this advice from her first teacher: “Sing as though it comes from the bottom of your heart, because that’s what it’s about.” Her most recent recording is And Crimson Roses Once Again Be Fair. She says it is her last. I hope not.

The new president of Hunter College is a champion of “social infrastructure,” describing it as “A public good. Everybody uses it, nobody owns it.” Libraries, schools, parks, or, in a decent society, healthcare. That’s nostalgia! Or hope. Music: Ryan Keberle, Chris Swan, Christopher Panchame, Yuka Kameda.

“Isaac Bashevis Singer called my mother the Sherlock Holmes of Yiddish songs,” says Zalmen. His family heritage and Steven’s splendid singing were big factors in the triumph of Fiddler on the Roof in Yiddish. Presented by the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene and the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.