By Donald H. Harrison
LA JOLLA, California – For the last 17 years Joey Landwehr has served as the artistic director of the JCompany youth theatre. Now, he’s been elevated to the position of artistic director of the San Diego Centre for Jewish Culture, of which JCompany is a part.
He’ll continue to direct the JCompany, even while overseeing other components of the CJC’s progamming, which this year will headline former U.S. Senator and television comedian Al Franken on Thursday, Nov. 16, and include among other offerings the San Diego International Jewish Film Festival, a Sephardic lecture series, talks by prominent authors, travel seminars, talks on Jewish cooking, a concert by a Barbra Streisand impressionist, and a tribute to songwriter Charlie Fox, who has a grandchild in the JCompany.
The theme for the 2023-2024 CJC season is “Lev (Heart in Hebrew) and Levity” – which Landwehr said was decided in follow-up discussions he had with Lawrence Family Jewish Community Center staff and supporters after he was asked to take the new job by LFJCC Executive Director Betzy Lynch. The Center for Jewish Culture is based at the Lawrence Family JCC.
“At almost every one of those wonderful meetings that I had, they said, ‘Oh, everything is so dark. Why is everything so dark and dreary?’ I think we are in a place now where we still can have some humor as well as heart. We can pull on the heart strings at the same time as lifting people up and bringing them to a new level of happiness during this strange time that we are living in right now.”
Landwehr added that those he surveyed told him “they would love to be able to celebrate themselves more, celebrate our Jewishness more, celebrate what we are about more, especially with the way the world in many ways is being down. Antisemitism is so rampant. With what is happening in the world today, it is important for us to celebrate the joys of who we are as well as appreciate the depths of who we can be.”
After he accepted the job in March, Landwehr began immediately to put together an overall season calendar and season brochure – the first for the San Diego Center for Jewish Culture in its 24-year history. “It is giving us the ability to curate a season and connect it with what is going on in the world, what is of interest to our community, as well as to the people who are outside of the community,” Landwehr said.
Putting the brochure out in a timely manner, enables people to “actually plan when they are going to see shows and when they are going to be part of something. Generally in the past, it was a little ‘fly by the seat of your pants’ or ‘we’ve got something coming up—here it is!’”
The upcoming season, which begins with Landwehr in conversation on Thursday, Aug. 17, with his friend, Broadway Theatre guru and musician Seth Rudetsky, will be quite varied. Landwehr said that the season reaches out and tries to bring through the doors of the LFJCC Jews who have not been well represented before including Sephardim, LGBTQ Jews, and Jews of Color.
Rudetsky is an LGBTQ advocate and “with this whole war on drag queens, which is a thing that is happening in our world today, my dear friend Steven Brinberg is going to come out,” Landwehr said. “He is going to do a holiday show on December 25th. He is just an amazing performer that sings Barbra Streisand in her key, live on stage. What could be better than that?” Given that the show is scheduled December 25th, it will be combined with Chinese food that has become a staple for many Jews on Christmas day.
“We have an entire Sephardic series,” said Landwehr, with Tuesday lectures on Nov. 28, Feb. 27, and May 21 bringing to LFJCC Abrevaya Stein, Rabbi Daniel Boouskila, and Devin Naar to speak about different aspects of Sephardic life. There also will be a trip on a date to be decided in November to visit various Sephardic sites in Los Angeles.
Landwehr said his outreach to Jews of color is still in progress. There is an African American comedian “who is very funny” and who is married to a rabbi. “We’ve been trying to get her.” While the schedule and brochure have been printed, he said, there are dates available to add programming.
Among six authors who will be speaking at the Center for Jewish Culture are two on topics that perhaps would have been verboten years ago. Fancy Feast will discuss her book, Naked: On Sex, Work, and Other Burlesques on Saturday, Feb. 24, and Abby Chava Stein will follow the next month, March 28, with Becoming Eve: My Journey from Ultra-Orthodox Rabbi to Transgender Woman.
I asked Landwehr the intent behind programming what others might have considered too risqué.
“I believe that unless you jump, you never know if that net will appear, so at some point you have to take the leap,” he responded. “I think it is important to challenge. That is what art is all about. I don’t want to just do the same thing over and over again … I think I’ve done that [taking leaps] through my JCompany time, where we’ve done shows that normally wouldn’t be done by a youth theatre, like Who’s Tommy? or Ragtime or we did an all-female version of 1776 which was unheard of in many ways, and now it’s on Broadway tour.”
This year JCompany will start with a production in October of SpongeBob SquarePants: The Musical; move on in January to Shakespeare’s The Tempest; to Disney’s Finding Nemo in March; to Mean Girls in May, and to the tribute to Charlie Fox in June. Fox wrote the lyrics to such songs as “Killing Me Softly with His Song,” and “I Got a Name” and the themes to such popular past TV shows as Happy Days, Laverne & Shirley, The Love Boat and Wonder Woman. He also wrote the music for a mini musical about JCompany which will be premiered in the Sunday, June 2 tribute.
Adult J Plays to be presented in cooperation with the Roustabouts Theatre Company will include Watch on the Rhine in October; I Never Saw Another Butterfly in November and May; The Last Night of Ballyhoo in April; and the San Diego premiere in June of Falsettos Trilogy: In Trousers—March of the Falsettos—Falsettoland.”
The San Diego International Jewish Film Festival, which has always been a mainstay of the Center for Jewish Culture, will kick off with the showing Wednesday, Sept. 6, of Nicholas Steil’s The Way to Happiness, a dramedy in French, German and Yiddish, with English subtitles. Separately, the three-day 6th Annual Joyce Forum Jewish Short Films gets underway on Thursday, Oct. 12.
The various offerings mentioned in this article are just a sampling of what’s on tap during the Center for Jewish Culture’s 2023-2024 season. There also will be exhibits in the Gotthelf Art Gallery; a Tapestry of Jewish learning; and monthly lecture series at the Carlsbad City Library, and the Coronado City Library. Contents of the printed brochure may be accessed via the Center for Jewish Culture’s website.
“We have worked very hard to make the season diverse and challenging and open-minded, and with our theme of Lev and Levity, not only will you find humor in the things that you will come to see but things that will touch your heart really,” Landwehr said. “It is a well-rounded, beautiful season, and I’m already beginning to prepare next season, believe it or not.”
I asked the artistic director to share a little bit of his biography with me. Born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1972, he obtained a master’s of fine arts from Ohio State University, and then moved to New York City, where he performed in some Broadway shows and national Broadway tours. He won a trip to a vineyard in Northern California, and with his husband, Dr. Clarence Perry, a psychiatrist, he traveled there, not learning until the next day about the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington D.C. After returning to New York City, he said, he and Perry felt that life in that city wasn’t enjoyable anymore. “I said ‘what would you think about moving?’ He said, ‘I never thought about it before, I love New York, but I will try.’”
Dr. Perry quickly lined up a position in San Diego, while “I came out here with no prospects whatsoever, but thank you, Alan Ziter — he hired me with the San Diego Performing Arts League.”
The couple moved here in 2003. With the Performing Arts League, Landwehr interacted with members of the San Diego Arts community, and brought many of them to KNSD to be interviewed on-air. “One of the segments was JCompany Youth Theatre and I remember sitting with Becky Baird and saying, ‘Hey I want your job,’ and she said, ‘Hey, I’m going to have a baby; you can apply for it.” I did and I never looked back. I’ve loved every moment that I’ve been there.”
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Donald H. Harrison is editor emeritus of San Diego Jewish World. He may be contacted via donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com