“The most important hour of my week is my piano lesson … I always dress up for my piano lesson … I have to look divine.”
And with that, a fourteen-year-old girl who dreams someday of her concert debut at Vienna’s famed Musikverein Concert Hall sits down at the Steinway to play her favorite piece, Grieg’s Piano Concerto in A Minor, Op. 16, fingers flying effortlessly across the keys. Only it is not really 1938 and this is not actually the young teen Lisa Jura who, after escaping Nazi Germany, will someday actually become a concert pianist. Who we see before us is Lisa’s someday daughter, Mona Golabek – herself a Grammy Award winning concert pianist – who on the TheatreWorks Silicon Valley stage becomes her mother in order to tell in words and music a most remarkably inspiring and uplifting story about the darkest period of modern history, the Holocaust.
After taking venues like New York, Washington, D.C., and London by storm (including two sold-out runs at Berkeley Repertory Theatre in 2013 and 2015), Hershey Felder’s The Pianist of Willesden Lane arrives at TheatreWorks Silicon Valley as Mona Golabek helps celebrate both the triumph of her mother’s remarkable life and the fiftieth year of this 2019 Tony-Award-winning company. From the opening night’s thunderous and extended standing ovation at the end of the ninety-minute concert/play, clearly the next few weeks are once again going to be nothing short of a must-see for Silicon Valley (and beyond) audiences.
Please proceed to Talkin’ Broadway for my complete review of this “must-see” production: http://theatreworks.org.
The Pianist of Willesden Lane continues through February 16, 2020 in production by TheatreWorks Silicon Valley at the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts, 500 Castro Street, Mountain View. Tickets are available online at http://www.theatreworks.org/box-office/ or by calling 650-463-1960, Monday – Friday 11 a.m. – 6 p.m. and Saturday – Sunday, Noon – 6 p.m.
Photo Credits: Hershey Felder Presents
