Hershey Felder

Hershey Felder, born July 9, 1968, in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, is a pianist, actor, playwright, and book writer whose career has centered on one-man theatrical productions portraying celebrated composers. Raised primarily in a Yiddish-speaking household, Felder lost his father Jacob — born in 1929 in Ustrzyki, Poland — at a young age, and from age thirteen was brought up by his widower father. His mother, Eva Surek Felder, was born in 1946 in Budapest, Hungary.

Felder relocated to Los Angeles in 1994, where he worked briefly for the Steven Spielberg Shoah Foundation, now known as the USC Shoah Foundation. Drawing on his fluency in Yiddish and French, he conducted filmed interviews with Holocaust survivors to preserve their oral histories. The following year, he attended the 50th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz in Poland, where he encountered Helmuth Spryzcer, a man who as a boy had been forced to whistle Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue for German guards. That meeting prompted Felder to create Sing! A Musical Journey, a work about two Holocaust survivors that concludes with Rhapsody in Blue.

After spending nearly two years researching the life and music of George Gershwin and meeting with members of the Gershwin family, Felder developed a one-man show, George Gershwin Alone, which received its workshop production at the Los Angeles Tiffany Theatre in 1999. The show subsequently ran on Broadway from 2001 to 2002 and has since been mounted in more than 40 productions across the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Italy. His Broadway credits also include Back From Broadway, for which he served as book writer.

Felder continued expanding his roster of composer portrayals in the years that followed. Monsieur Chopin premiered at the Royal George Theatre in Chicago in 2005, and Beethoven, As I Knew Him opened at the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego in 2008. In 2010, he premiered Maestro, his one-man play-with-music about Leonard Bernstein, at the Geffen Theatre in Los Angeles. That same year, An American Story was recorded with the Ars Viva Symphony Orchestra of Chicago. After receiving an invitation from Russian theatrical producers in 2013 to portray Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, and noting that the Russian Duma had passed anti-gay legislation that same month, Felder titled the resulting work Our Great Tchaikovsky and performed it exclusively in the United States, given Tchaikovsky's widely held association with homosexuality. Following two years of research and meetings with members of the Irving Berlin family, Felder also developed a dramatic portrayal of the American songwriter Irving Berlin. His major composer portrayals to date encompass George Gershwin, Frédéric Chopin, Ludwig van Beethoven, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Claude Debussy, and Irving Berlin.

In 2013, Felder directed concert pianist Mona Golabek in The Pianist of Willesden Lane, his stage adaptation of her book The Children of Willesden Lane, which tells the story of Golabek's mother as an adolescent during the Kindertransport in World War II. As a composer, his works include Noah's Ark, an opera; Aliyah Concerto on Israeli Themes; Song Settings, set to the poetry of Vachel Lindsay; Etudes Thematiques; and Les Preludes.

In May 2020, Felder live-streamed Hershey Felder as Irving Berlin from his home in Florence, Italy, as a fundraiser for the San Diego Repertory Theatre and a dozen other theaters where he regularly performs. The following month, he performed an online benefit of Hershey Felder: Beethoven. These productions led to the creation of Live From Florence, a broadcast entertainment brand through which Felder produces original work performed and filmed on location for worldwide audiences. In November 2021, he expanded into on-demand musical films with the premiere of Dante and Beatrice in Florence, for which he wrote the script and score, co-directed, performed two roles, and played piano and sang. In 2022, Felder produced, narrated, conducted interviews, and accompanied cellist Amit Peled on piano in the film Musical Tales of the Venetian Jewish Ghetto.

Felder's discography includes Back from Broadway, George Gershwin Alone (2005), Broadway in Concert (2004), Monsieur Chopin, Beethoven As I Knew Him, An American Story, Hershey Felder as Irving Berlin (2018), Our Great Tchaikovsky (2019), and Beethoven (2019). He is married to Kim Campbell, former Prime Minister of Canada, and the couple maintains residences in Paris and Florence.