Another Two-for-One: A Memoir by Actress Tovah Feldshuh, & The Stage Actor’s Handbook…
—Reviewed by Cathy Ritchie
Lilyville: Mother, Daughter, and Other Roles I’ve Played
—by Tovah Feldshuh (Hachette Books, 2021)
Years ago, I saw Tovah Feldshuh’s one-woman show Golda’s Balcony. After multiple curtain calls, our star returned to the stage (still in full Meir regalia), leaned against her prop table and exclaimed, “How’s everyone doing?” There followed 20 minutes of delightful chit-chatting between actor and audience. After such a somber piece of solo theatre, this remarkable woman brought us laughter—something truly joyful.
I don’t often use the word “joyful” regarding books, but I do now: Feldshuh’s memoir Lilyville comes to us from a renowned performer embracing her profession with an abundant heart. At age 73, she will soon return to the Broadway boards as Mrs. Brice in Funny Girl. But she also holds close her upbringing and the family that helped her career happen, especially mother Lillian Kaplan Feldshuh. Daughter Feldshuh’s reminiscences of her own eventful life are vivid enough, but this memoir is fortified by a keen portrayal of probably the biggest behind-the-scenes influence in her life, Momma Lily.
Terri Sue “Tovah” Feldshuh, born in 1948, has charmed audiences with her adeptness in so many formats: screen, television, and theatre. She’s played Dolly in Hello, Dolly! and Mama Rose in Gypsy—and spent time on the trapeze as Pippin’s Berthe. Among her early triumphs were the Broadway play Yentl and television’s Holocaust. She’s played roles on Law and Order and The Walking Dead, acted in films including Kissing Jessica Stein and Lady in the Water, and created several one-woman stage shows .
Feldshuh has embodied skill, dedication, and glee throughout her professional life. She relates her own story engrossingly and with constant high humor, while never downplaying her familial roots. Feldshuh vividly depicts two strong parental personalities, father Sidney and especially Lily, whose approach to child-rearing was apparently light on expressions of affection and praise and often heavy on criticism and admonishments. As Feldshuh succinctly summarizes at one point: “My mother’s love and my father’s love seemed like polar opposites. His was unconditional. Hers was corrective.”
Feldshuh married the love of her own life, Andrew Levy, in 1977, and took time away from acting to raise two children. Lily’s take-no-prisoners mindset continued as a backdrop to her daughter’s adult life. Feldshuh comments with her customary wit: “People have asked me if Lily was a typical stage mother. I have to laugh. If anything, she was an off-stage mother—she wanted me off the stage!”
When Feldshuh was 50, her beloved father Sidney died. What shape would Tovah and Lily’s relationship take now, without Sidney’s balance and strength? To Feldshuh’s delight, Lily embraced a new life: always one to enjoy a party, she now became even more socially spirited and eager to enjoy birthday celebrations as she crept ever closer to the centenary mark. As a result, Lily and her only daughter became tightly bonded at last. When Momma died at age 103, Feldshuh’s grief was profound, and lingers still. This book is her tribute to a challenging but amazing woman.
Tovah Feldshuh is one of the great performers of our time, and I envy the audiences who will soon experience her newest reincarnation as Mrs. Brice, Fanny’s saloon-keeping mother. Despite its darker moments, her memoir is anchored in gratitude, love, and so much joy.
The Stage Actor’s Handbook: Traditions, Protocols, and Etiquette for the Working and Aspiring Professional
—by Michael Kostroff & Julie Garnye (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022)
Via her decades on stage, Tovah Feldshuh undoubtedly learned by osmosis everything mentioned in this amazing book. But anyone with even a smidgen of interest in theater will glean much from this compact and impressively comprehensive guide.
The authors are themselves actors, and offer a no-frills treatment of nearly every aspect of creating a production from an actor’s perspective. In bite-sized but substantive chapters, they tackle: the etiquette surrounding rules of rehearsal; backstage protocol; how to behave during the run; the stage actor away from home; interacting with creatives; how an actor should ideally behave both “in public” and “as a theatre patron”; the truth behind stage superstitions, and much more.
If there’s an overarching theme to their advice, it’s the importance of garden-variety common sense, along with the need for constant cooperation and understanding amongst a given cast and crew. Kostroff and Garnye are clearly proponents of the basic good manners and Golden Rule we all learned as children (right?). It’s heartening to see these traditional principles emphasized so prominently.
This book is indeed “no frills,” but finds room for reflections on theatrical etiquette from many of Broadway’s greats, including Sam Waterston, Chita Rivera, Ben Vereen, Alfred Molina, Jason Alexander, Stephanie J. Block, Betty Buckley, John Lithgow, and Joanna Gleason. Their remarks express gratitude for their onstage lives and offer encouragement for those aspiring to their shared profession.
Advises Raul Esparza: “Come to work early to see the theatre the way that audience will later that night….The realization that all of us in that ten-block [Broadway] radius are creating something together that evening at the same time sustains me. And onstage, during that fiftieth tiring matinee, I imagine the kid I once was watching this show today, as I once did, and hurtling into that joy and delirium that sent me into this career in the first place.”
This is a welcoming, wonderful book.
