Eliezer Sobel and his traveling Jewish minstrel show
Contact Eliezer to book his current ongoing show, “Songs & Stories of the Soul.”
“The road to authentic art is through the self, more specifically, it lies through the heart, not the head. Your loves, your hates, your scars, glories, fears, losses, triumphs… your heart is the heart of the matter. Heart is where the art is.”
— Julia Cameron
I was part of Gabrielle Roth’s original Mirrors Ritual Theater Troupe in the early ‘80s. Every week we performed our own lives in front of several hundred strangers in New York City.
Gabrielle’s idea of “The Holy Actor” was that in dramatizing the ever-changing ego characters living inside our heads, it would enable both performer and audience to be transformed. We would give names to these people within us: I would go from Danny D. Presso to Larry Look-at-me in the blink of an eye, while Connie Cling would literally jump on my back and not let go. Judy Judge stood on the side, criticizing everyone in the cast, as Gladys Gorge devoured a box of cookies in record time, and Captain Control ordered all the other actors around. I would also offer a comedy monologue about my sexual identity. I was very confused at the time, but eventually concluded that I was a polymorphously perverse cross-dressing bisexual transgender lesbian in a male body who preferred straight women and long walks on the beach.
Godspell (Judas)
During a 40-day solo retreat in a mountaintop hut, I had the realization that ever since my parents had taken me to see My Fair Lady and The Sound of Music on Broadway, I had wanted to be in a musical, so I went on to perform in community productions of Pippin, Camelot, Cabaret, Godspell, and a Yiddish revue. I was Judas in Godspell, my biggest musical role. In Cabaret I played a Nazi.
Dirty Hands (Hugo)
I was the lead, Hugo, in an NYU production of Sartre’s Dirty Hands, an endlessly tedious seven-act play. The plot reached its zenith in the penultimate scene, when I could be seen approaching my office with a gun, about to discover my wife in the arms of another man, who I would shortly kill. It was a very tense, silent moment in the theater, but my grandmother, sitting in the 3rd row, said aloud, “Oy, El-yot (her way of saying my English name, Elliot) Elyot is going to be so upset.”
Lost in Yonkers (Uncle Louie)
As Uncle Louie in Lost in Yonkers at Live Arts in Charlottesville, VA, I played a cocky gangster. Who knew?
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