My favorite genre is the movie musical; my least favorite, the musical-theater-kid movie. Both Spielberg’s Story and last year’s other corny pretender, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s In the Heights, have arrived as quaint, todos-juntos representatives of the latter brand. Bright, high-pitched, and would-be weird, they come from a time when we weren’t shaken by a global pandemic that wiped out millions of the bottom and made billions for the top. Miranda had the audacity to state in a promotional podcast for In the Heights that he wanted to “transcend” (“progress beyond”) West Side Story by not making “yet another gangster movie.” Good for him.
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The first time I entered Yonah Schimmel’s Knish Bakery on Houston Street, I was greeted, across from the signs selling cherry-flavored cream cheese knishes and egg creams, by the poster for Joan Micklin Silver’s
Hester Street (1975). I’d just moved from Los Angeles to New York City, unsure of where to go or what to do for paid work, and was spending a lot of hours milling about the Lower East Side, browsing bookshops. On the walls of Yonah Schimmel’s I would pore over the strips of yellowed newspaper clippings, which told stories of the local Yiddish theater players who’d come there in the ’20s to unwind over a knish after a night of performances, and who would stay talking into the next morning. When I finally sat down with a black-and-white egg cream, I made sure to face that