Hershey Felder & Jonathan Silverstri to Star in RACHMANINOFF AND THE TSAR at The Town Hall

Known throughout the world for his solo composer plays, in Rachmaninoff and the Tsar, Felder appears for the first time opposite another actor. Felder plays the role of Russian composer and virtuoso pianist Sergei V. Rachmaninoff, while British-Italian actor Jonathan Silvestri (HBO’s “Borgia,” “Dakota,” “The Young Pope”) takes on the role of Tsar Nicholas II.
 
Having safely left Russia during the 1917 revolution, Rachmaninoff made his home in the United States. In 1942, at the age of 68, he applied for American citizenship and bought a home in Beverly Hills, but his soul never left Russia. Six months thereafter, a terminal illness brought forth the memory of an encounter with Russia’s last Tsar, Nicholas II, and the Tsar’s daughter, the Grand Duchess Anastasia. This memory would haunt him until the end.
 
Featuring Rachmaninoff’s most beautiful music including the Second Piano Concerto, the Rhapsody on a theme of Paganini, Preludes, Symphonic Selections and more, Rachmaninoff and the Tsar had its world premiere at the Eli and Edythe Broad Stage in Santa Monica followed by the Balboa Theatre in Santa Monica where the San Diego Union Tribune said that “Felder gives a heartbreaking performance in his masterful drama about Rachmaninoff in what is his best work.”
 
Rachmaninoff and the Tsar features the music of Sergei V. Rachmaninoff with a book by Hershey Felder. The production is directed by Trevor Hay. Dramaturgy by Jerry Patch. Concept design is by Hershey Felder. Lighting is by Erik S. Barry. Sound and production management is by Erik Carstensen. Sound operation by Jeremy Kalke. Projections are by Stefano Decarli. Costumes are by Marysol Gabriel. Wigs are by Judi Lewin.
 
Since the 1998 premiere of his internationally lauded play with music, George Gershwin Alone, Hershey Felder has appeared on world renowned stages throughout the United States and abroad giving more than six thousand performances in original works that include George Gershwin Alone, Beethoven, Maestro Bernstein, Hershey Felder as Irving Berlin, as well at the appearances of Our Great Tchaikovsky, A Paris Love Story - Debussy, and more. Film world premieres at the Saban Theatre in Beverly Hills include several of his award-winning films: Musical Tales in the Venetian Jewish Ghetto, The Assembly, Noble Genius Chopin & Liszt, and more. In all, Hershey Felder has performed on more than one hundred stages in leading worldwide theatres.
 
Sergei Rachmaninoff was born in 1873 in the Russian village of Semyonovo, more than one thousand miles to the east of Moscow. Beginning piano lessons at four, when he was ten he entered the St. Petersburg conservatory later moving to the Moscow Conservatory. He was known as a first-rate pianist, a world-class conductor and heir to Tchaikovsky as composer. He spent most of his life performing as a pianist in Europe and the US. While he was world renowned as a pianist and conductor and beloved for his compositions, he was not critically well received by cognoscenti until the second half of the 20th century. He died just days before his 70th birthday in Beverly Hills, only weeks after finally receiving his American citizenship.
 
This exploration of Sergei Rachmaninoff’s itinerant but extraordinary life illuminates the master’s sense of home and family and how those elements influenced his art. Featuring his world-famous C# minor Prelude to his second piano concerto, his symphonies and his Paganini Variations, Rachmaninoff did leave Russia, but Russia stayed with him until the very end, influencing every aspect of his life. This New York premiere promises to be another mystical musical journey in the Hershey Felder style that audiences have come to know and love.