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.