Apricot Sky Productions will mount the two new shows Hanky Panky and Still Jewish...After All These Years on the newly renovated Grove Street Theatre, Montclair.
International and PBS-TV star Avi Hoffman stars in these two Jewish-themed new comedies with music.
Avi Hoffman won a plethora of awards when he debuted his one person show Too Jewish a decade ago in Florida and Off-Broadway in New York.
Hoffman’s new show Still Jewish…After All These Years, will again feature the venerable comedian’s talents at story-telling, impersonations and song.
Playing in repertory with Still Jewish will be a new comedy with music entitled Hanky Panky, also featuring Hoffman as a quasi narrator and relative of the other lead characters in the funny and heart-warming tale of a Jewish woman’s emergence in 1950s Brooklyn.
The playwriting team of Charles Gruber of Livingston, and Charles Goldman of Westchester, New York, workshopped Hanky Panky for many years before showing it before a live audience in a staged reading last year starring Hoffman and Tovah Feldshuh.
Now, Hanky Panky will be given a professional production with accompaniment led by Broadway conductor Michael Larsen.
Hanky Panky is the story of an immigrant Jewish couple who maintain their Yiddish home traditions until their children become very Americanized and the wife wants to learn English to speak at her son’s wedding. The result is a combination of hilarity and pathos as Hanky Panky winds its way through the conflicting lives of the Zuckerman family and their former Second Avenue Yiddish theater star-turned-waiter played by Avi Hoffman.
Still Jewish and Hanky Panky will play in repertory on the Apricot Sky stage from April 17 through May 6.
For reservations and more information visit the Apricot Sky website www.apricotskyproductions.com.
