Michael Wartofsky's NOMTI

To Preview Upcoming Musicals Nov. 15

by Susie Davidson

Advocate Correspondent

CAMBRIDGE - A rare opportunity to catch a glimpse of upcoming musicals will occur next Thursday at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education, 56 Brattle St., when the New Opera and Musical Theatre Initiative (NOMTI) presents “The Birth of a Musical Festival.”

NOMTI, a group of Boston-based composers, lyricists and bookwriters, develops new works for musical theater. Members collaborate at songwriting and storytelling workshops, performance nights, field trips to theater performances, discussion groups, master classes with theater professionals and twice-yearly staged readings which test the coherence and theatrical potential of new songs and scenes. Their mission is broad-based, with a nod to maintaining the longevity of the medium.

“As writers specializing in musical theater,” says NOMTI founder Michael Wartofsky, “we have an investment in keeping musical theater alive for future generations. While we could each focus solely on our own creative output, we have chosen instead to build a community of writers and to encourage and support new works that build on and expand the American tradition of musical theatre and contemporary opera.”

Wartofsky, currently an Assistant Professor at Berklee College of Music, was born in Boston and raised in Chevy Chase, MD, where he was bar-mitvahed in 1982 at Temple Emanuel of Kensington. At Harvard, where he earned an undergraduate degree in Music and French, he was a member of the Progressive Jewish Alliance. At the New England Conservatory, where he received a Masters of Music at New England Conservatory, he studied Yiddish Music with Klezmer Conservatory Band founder Hankus Netsky. He initiated the student Klezmer and Yiddish Music Ensemble at Berklee, as well as a class in Musical Theater Writing.

Wartofsky's late uncle Marx Wartofsky, a philosophy professor at Boston University, was an active member of Boston's Workmen's Circle. His cousin, also named Michael Wartofsky, is a teenage Klezmer violinist in New York.

Following the study with Netsky, Wartofsky studied Yiddish language privately with Daniella HarPaz Mechnikov, a Brandeis Yiddish instructor, and at the Uriel Weinreich Summer Language Institute at Columbia University, an intensive Yiddish language and culture program sponsored by YIVO. During this period, he lived at Houston and Norfolk Streets in the Lower East Side. Following an MFA from the Tisch School of the Arts Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program, he served as the children's choir accompanist at the Brookline Heights Synagogue from 1996-97, and played in a Yiddish basketball league with members of Columbia’s YIVO program.

HarPaz and Wartofsky have performed Yiddish folk and theater songs at various Jewish events, and have taught several workshops on Yiddish music at the Workmen's Circle, Brandeis’ Genesis Program, and at Brookline and synagogue adult ed programs.

“I was commissioned by Loraine Obler,” he noted, “to write a setting of the Priestly Blessing in honor of the bar mitzvah of Nathaniel Fearey Obler in July 2001." The piece, "Be Who You Are," was performed at Temple Israel with Wartofsky on piano, Mia Olson on flute, and Betty Silberman, formerly of the Klezmer band Shirim, on vocals.”

On November 15, audiences will hear excerpts from Public Domain by Rachel Peters in the program.

Peters, a 1999 Brandeis music and theater grad, has been a NOMTI writer for two years, and currently teaches at The New School of Music in Cambridge. “Public Domain,” she said, “is an interweaving of scenes based on actual events, people and conversations in the MBTA."

A St. Louis, Missouri native, she was bat mitzvahed at the United Hebrew Congregation. In high school, she sang in that synagogue's choir and starred in two productions at the JCCA's Studio Theatre. “I served as a cantorial soloist for Washington University's Hillel during the High Holidays,” she added, “and just a few weeks ago I sang in the choir at Temple Israel in Brookline for their High Holiday Services.”

"I'd like the showcase to become a Boston tradition,” said Wartofsky, “where local producers and artistic directors, along with curious members of the public, can come see who local musical writers are and what they are coming up with."

Tickets for the NOMTI showcase are $10 in advance and $12 at the door. For information, please call 617-547-6789 ext. 1, or visit www.ccae.org and www.nomti.org.