THEATER FOR THE NEW CITY
Executive Director, Crystal Field
Presents
“Sima” and “E.G.: A Musical Portrait of Emma Goldman”
Two productions, One Journey of Jewish Survival and Defiance
January 8 – January 25, 2026
Thursday, Friday, Saturday at 8:00 PM, Sunday at 3:00 PM
Sunday January 25 performance is CANCELLED due to incoming weather.
Tickets $25, Students & Seniors $15
JOHNSON THEATER
THEATER FOR THE NEW CITY
155 First Avenue (between 9th and 10th Street)
New York, NY 10003
Directions
Presented in alternating performances:
“Sima,” an opera with music and libretto by Leonard J. Lehrman
PERFORMANCE SCHEDULE OF “SIMA”
Thursday, January 8 at 8:00 PM
Sunday, January 11 at 3:00 PM
Friday, January 16 at 8:00 PM
Saturday, January 17 at 8:00 PM
Thursday, January 22 at 8:00 PM
Sunday, January 25 at 3:00 PM
Runs 90 min. incl. intermission
“SIMA”
“Sima,” an opera in two acts, will be directed by Lissa Moira and conducted by composer Leonard Lehrman. This will be its NYC premiere. In a first for TNC, this opera will be performed with a 10 piece orchestra.
“Sima” is the attempted adoption of a poor Jewish girl who has been orphaned by a pogrom in 1905 Ukraine. A wealthy couple, Yakov and Regina Krasovitsky, visit an orphanage for children left parentless by pogroms. A little girl named Sima seems to recognize Regina as her mother and rushes to embrace her before realizing her mistake. The couple, touched, adopt the girl. She, however, has escaped one trauma only to enter another: a household on edge, barely capable of caring for her. She breaks a statue and becomes increasingly distressed. The household has its own tensions: Yakov fears repercussions of a strike at his factory. Regina appeals to wealthy friends to adopt other children, but her friends dismiss her, fearing the kids will be mistaken for their own illegitimate offspring. The couple’s Ukrainian maid, Manya, grieving over the death of her own child from malnutrition, resents the adopted girl. Their anguishes are a canvas in which one small girl mirrors an entire society’s failures–and its fleeting moments of grace.
As Regina and Yakov weigh returning the child to the orphanage, Sima wakes from a nightmare. Manya enters the room in anger and is unexpectedly softened by the child’s fear. She takes Sima in her arms and sings her back to sleep, suggesting that kindness comes not from wealth or good intentions, but from those who have known suffering themselves.
The music of the opera is in collage style with authentic Russian and Ukrainian folk melodies, a revolutionary song, a prison song, and a love song that becomes a fugue–contrasting with very violent pogrom music. Lehrman dedicated the work to his teacher, Nadia Boulanger, and to his grandmother, Sima Glukhovskaya Rosenstein Peterson Yaffe, whose first name is echoed in the opera’s title.
Cast of “Sima”
Christine Browning for 1/8 and 1/11, and Claire Iverson for 1/16, 1/17, 1/22 and 1/25 – Regina Krasovitzky
Bennett Pologe – Yakov Isaevich Krasovitzky
Perri Sussman – Manya, Ukrainian maid
Samantha Long – Lyuba, Orphanage Supervisor
Hannah Grace Hollingsworth – The orphan Sima
Adele Grant – Lyuba’s Aide
Noelle Louis – Understudy Sima
Children of the Orphanage:
Addie Grant
Jacob Hollingsworth
Michael Jiang
Boaz Katz
Miranda Libanan
Noelle Louis
Lily Nussbaum
Desi Sandoval
Luka Zylik
Niko Zylik
PRODUCTION
Director – Lissa Moira
Composer/Librettist, Conductor – Leonard Lehrman
Stage Manager – Rachel Drummer
Set Design – Lytza Colón
Light Design and Board Op – Marsh Shugart
Costume Design – Billy Little
Graphic and Video Design – Roy Chang
“E.G.: A MUSICAL PORTRAIT OF EMMA GOLDMAN”
(1869-1940), with music by Leonard J. Lehrman and words by Lehrman and Karen Ruoff Kramer
PERFORMANCE SCHEDULE OF “E.G.”
Friday, January 9 at 8:00 PM
Saturday, January 10 at 8:00 PM
Thursday, January 15 at 8:00 PM
Sunday, January 18 at 3:00 PM
Friday, January 23 at 8:00 PM
Saturday, January 24 at 8:00 PM
Runs 90 min. incl. intermission
About “E.G.: A Musical Portrait of Emma Goldman (1869-1940)”
Set in 1933, “E.G.” is a music-theater biography of the legendary Russian Jewish American Anarchist Emma Goldman. She defends her life as an anarchist, activist, and revolutionary thinker as she attempts to re-enter the America that had deported her in 1919. The piece combines musical numbers, spoken monologues, melodrama, historical photos, and audience interaction to create a kaleidoscopic portrait of Goldman’s life, ideals, and struggles. Caryn Hartglass plays Emma Goldman. Piano accompaniment is by composer Leonard Lehrman, who also portrays all the men in Emma’s life. These include the artist Modest Stein, the roustabout Ben Reitman, and especially Alexander Berkman (“Sasha”), a leader of the anarchist movement in the early 20th century who was famous for his political activism and writing. In the opera, he is a confidant and chorus who frames the narrative and provides a counterpoint to Emma’s voice. Visuals include 266 projections and a newsreel, all operated by Janet Kalish.
“E.G.” celebrates the life of a woman who dared to defy authority, insist on justice, and assert that love, art, and anarchism could coexist–leaving audiences to consider what it means to live and fight for one’s convictions. Musical passages serve both narrative and ideological purposes, dramatizing philosophical debates and historical events. Audience interaction and repetition of chants reinforce Goldman’s enduring message about anarchism, resistance, reproductive freedom and social responsibility.
CAST
Caryn Hartglass – Emma Goldman
Leonard Lehrman – The Men in her Life
PRODUCTION
Composer/Librettist/Pianist – Leonard Lehrman
Music and direction – Leonard Lehrman
Lyrics – Leonard Lehrman and Karen Ruoff Kramer
Stage Manager – Geoffrey Carlson
Set Design – Lytza Colón
Light Design – Marsh Shugart
Adviser to the production – Lissa Moira
This opera includes music inspired by the American Musical, encompassing many different styles.
About Caryn Hartglass (Emma Goldman)
Caryn Hartglass has performed in opera and musical theater in the U.S. and Europe. Recent roles include Madame Armfeldt in “A Little Night Music” and Old Lady/Blair Daniels in “Sunday in the Park with George.” She has also appeared as Blonde in “The Abduction from the Seraglio,” Queen of the Night in “The Magic Flute,” Eliza Doolittle in “My Fair Lady,” Aldonza in “Man of La Mancha,” Johanna in “Sweeney Todd” and Cunegonde in “Candide.” Between 2002 and 2019, she appeared in seven performances of “Memories & Music of Leonard Bernstein” with Leonard Lehrman and Helene Williams.
Hartglass was Grand Prize Winner of the International Eisteddfod Classical Voice Competition (Roodepoort, South Africa) and won the Concours International d’Oratorio et de Lied (Clermont-Ferrand, France). She has recorded a CD of German Lieder, French melodies and American art songs on the French label Ligia Digital.
About Leonard J. Lehrman (composer of both operas, librettist of “Sima,” co-librettist of “E.G.”, director of “E.G.”)
Leonard J. Lehrman made his NYC debut as composer and conductor with the Bel Canto Opera in 1978, winning the first Off-Broadway Opera Award for “most important event of the season,” while also conducting as Assistant Chorus Master backstage at the Met. In 2022, his completion of Marc Blitzstein’s “Sacco and Vanzetti”was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. “Sima” is the third of his twelve operas, written while he was studying opera conducting at Indiana University. He earned his BA at Harvard and MFA from Cornell. He also studied in Fontainebleau and Paris with Nadia Boulanger. In 1983, he became the first Jew to conduct “Fiddler on the Roof” in Berlin, where he founded the Juedischer Musiktheaterverein, produced “Sima” in German, and co-wrote “E.G.” with Karen Ruoff, his fourth of seven musicals. At the invitation of Wolfgang Wagner, he and his wife Helene performed the first Yiddish song recital in Bayreuth during the Wagner Festival in 1998 with a return engagement in 2000.
Lehrman describes the creative influence of his Jewish heritage and that of family members, mentors, and colleagues who have shaped his life and work in a recent memoir published by Dorrance Press, “Continuator: The Autobiography of a Socially-Conscious, Cosmopolitan Composer.” (https://tinyurl.com/ContinuatorPreOrder)
Lehrman writes, “TNC has always valued bold, socially conscious art. Thank you, Crystal, for hosting my opera about the scars of the pogrom in 1905 Ukraine, and for enabling me to bring Emma Goldman, the great Russian-American Jewish anarchist and troublemaker, back to the Lower East Side. I hope the pairing of these two works will produce dialogue about nationalism, antisemitism, activism, and the ethics of resistance–topics that are again at the forefront of global public life.”
About Lissa Moira (Director of “Sima”; Advisor to the Production of “E.G.”)
Lissa Moira is a playwright, screenwriter, director, artist and poet. She is two-time Jerome Foundation grantee and an OOBR Award-winning actress. In 2025, she received an Acker Award, which is presented to NYC residents who have made unique and under-recognized cultural contributions to their communities. In her long and varied career, she has directed everything from Sophocles to Shakespeare to Lanford Wilson. She has written and been produced in a wide variety of genres as well.
In recent seasons, she has directed a succession of musicals at TNC. These include “Rappaccini’s Daughter” by Michael Cohen, an opera based on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story; “Who Murdered Love?” a sold-out, critically-praised Dadaist musical comedy that she wrote with Richard West; “Bliss Street,” an Indie Rock musical set in New York’s decade of punk, glam and glitter rock; “The Boy Who Listened To Paintings,” based on a memoir by visual artist/poet Dean Kostos; “Woman on a Ledge,” an autobiographical work by harpist Rita Costanzi, and “Café Resistance” by Roberto Monticello, a harrowing and heroic story of the WWII French Resistance highlighting the power of defiance in the face of oppression.
Ms. Moira writes, “I wish to thank Crystal Field for her unwavering support and her abiding faith in me as a writer and director, and for maintaining TNC as a haven for artistic freedom.” More info: https://www.broadwayworld.com/people/Lissa-Moira/
