By Eileen Wingard
SAN DIEGO — As Hershey Felder entered the café across from the Birch North Park Theatre, I thought the slim man in sneakers was just another college student. But he immediately recognized me, thanks to the description I gave his publicist, and, finding a spot farthest from the loudspeaker’s rock music, we began our interview.
“May I call you Hershey?” I asked, feeling as if I were speaking to a long-time acquaintance. After all, I saw him in all four composer plays, and I even had an email exchange, questioning a fact about Leonard Bernstein’s wife, Felicia. “Of course, that’s my name,” he smiled, disarmingly.
His black mane of shoulder length hair and his engaging, grey eyes were fascinating. Yes, this was the consummate 44-year-old actor, playwright and concert pianist, whose remarkable portrayals of George Gershwin (George Gershwin Alone), Frederic Chopin (Monsieur Chopin), Ludwig van Beethoven (Beethoven, As I Knew Him), and Leonard Bernstein (Maestro: The Art of Leonard Bernstein), had me and hundreds of other theater fans throughout the country enthralled.
This was Hershey Felder, whose strong-nosed, full-lipped face was convincingly transformed into the countenances of four different musical geniuses, his polished acting fleshing out those believable impersonations. This was the man who wrote scripts which, as he put it, “had arcs,” dramas with conflicts and climaxes, theater experiences of the highest order, enhanced by the composers’ own music, and performed by a pianist with the skill of a concert artist. He has given over 4,000 performances of these plays, which he calls, The Composer Sonata.
Hershey was very excited about his current project, An American Story, for actor and orchestra, based on the music of Stephen Foster. It depicts the life of an unsung hero, a 23-year-old Union Army surgeon, who attended the play at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C., the night President Abraham Lincoln was shot, and oversaw his treatment during his final hours.
As with his other plays, Hershey is the actor portraying the main protagonist, in this case, the 23-year-old doctor.
Hershey’s original orchestral score is based on the music of Stephen Foster, whose lyrics were about the South and the culture of slavery. Foster, himself, was a resident of the North, and interestingly, his life was intertwined with that of the play’s main character.
Hershey was thrilled to have this premiere production in the Birch North Park Theatre. “The venue of a play is as important a factor for its success as the actors and the script,” he maintained. “It was serendipity that brought my play and Birch North Park Theatre together.” The theatre actually resembles the Ford Theatre in Washington, D.C.
An American Story had a workshop production in Pasadena before coming to San Diego, and I noticed that the title for that included Lincoln’s name. When I asked about that discrepancy, Hershey responded, “I believe in honesty in advertising, and since the play is essentially about the young doctor, and Lincoln is only tangential to the story, I decided to drop his name from the title.”
“Why were you, a Canadian, attracted to this subject?” Apparently, Hershey, even though he was born in Montreal and spent his childhood in Canada, lived, since the age of 18, in the United States; therefore, he considers American history to be part of his personal background.
Hershey is a first generation North American. His father, Jacob Felder, was born in 1929 in Ustrzyki, Poland, and his mother, Eva Surek, was born in 1946 in Budapest, Hungary. In Montreal, Jacob Felder established a Kosher Food Products business. Later, he went into the construction business. Eva died of terminal cancer in 1982, leaving 14-year-old Hershey and his younger sister, 8-year-old Tammy, to be raised alone by their father.
In Montreal, Hershey attended the Hebrew Academy Day School and studied both piano and acting from early childhood. He performed in the Yiddish Theatre at the Saidye Bronfman Centre for the Arts in Montreal.
Moving to Los Angeles in 1994, Hershey worked for a brief time for Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation, interviewing Holocaust survivors in order to catalog their oral histories on film. In 1995, he was invited to be one of four interviewers at the 50th anniversary of the Liberation of Auschwitz in Poland.
When he returned to the States, he was invited to present a concert performance at the Canadian Consular Residence in Los Angeles in honor of Kim Campbell, Canada’s only woman Prime Minister. He and Campbell entered into a common-law marriage the following year. They now spend part of the year in Chicago and the other part in France.
“Is An American Story appropriate for all ages?” I queried. “Most definitely,” he responded.
I asked whether this play marks a diversion from Hershey’s other plays about composers.
“Actually, Gershwin was the diversion from my path as a playwright and composer. This is the kind of work I intended to do in the first place.”
In response to my wondering whether any other composer plays might be in his creative pipeline, he acknowledged that he was thinking about the possibilities of a two-character play about Wagner and Liszt as well as a portrayal of the life of Debussy.
Meanwhile, he is working very hard in preparation for the opening of An American Story, which is scheduled for a limited San Diego engagement from January 4 to February 3 (tickets 619-239-8836). Following its San Diego run, An American Story will open in March at the Royal George Theatre in Chicago.
During my interview with Hershey Felder, I felt like I was speaking with one of my own children, who are about his age. There was such a feeling of “haimishness” and unaffected sincerity about him–no airs, no pretense, just a hard working creative master of his craft, a genius tempered by humility. I look forward with great anticipation to seeing An American Story.
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Wingard is a freelance writer and retired violinist with the San Diego Symphony. She may be contacted at eileen.wingard@sdjewishworld.com