With theater in his blood, Robert Binder is happiest producing plays
By BOB SLATERrobert binder521(photo credit: Brian Negin)
A veritable jack-of-all-trades, theater director Robert Binder designs and sews costumes, builds theater sets, recruits acting talent, produces three plays a year, acts on occasion, oversees publicity, and writes grants to finance the plays; but once a production is running smoothly, he falls asleep behind the curtain.“Being backstage from opening night on,” he tells The Jerusalem Report, “is one of the few opportunities I have to sleep while we are in production. I don’t get much sleep at night while we are rehearsing. So with my job basically done, while everyone is performing, I go to sleep very easily.”Lacking sleep, but drawing in huge audiences for his Jerusalem-based Gilbert & Sullivan productions and Broadway musicals, Binder runs one of Israel’s most successful community theater groups, the Encore Educational Theater Company, founded in 2006. Proud of what he has accomplished, the 69-year-old, born in Schenectady, New York, acknowledges that producing Englishlanguage musicals in the Holy City is quite the challenge.For a country with only some 100,000 English-speaking residents, the Englishlanguage community theater program in Israel is surprisingly robust. Apart from Encore and other Jerusalem troupes, there are other groups in Tel Aviv, Haifa and Beersheba. The Light Opera Group of the Negev is especially strong, Binder concedes.But the twin challenge of raising funds and bringing in large audiences faces every theater director, he acknowledges.Rob Binder (everyone knows him as Rob) and I met on May 30 at the King David Hotel, just around the corner from the Hirsch Theater, where, in late May and early June, he was directing Encore’s production of “The Secret Garden”, a classical children’s musical play. With one performance already under his belt, Binder was calm and delighted that opening night had been nearly all sold out. He has a rich baritone voice and speaks with such precision and clarity that he almost sounds English.Theater seems to be in his blood. His mother Lily Stungo Binder wrote and directed plays; his younger sister, Helena Binder, is an opera and theater director in the US; and Binder himself, he says, displayed an interest in theater already as a toddler. Once, when he was two years old, his parents watched and listened in disbelief as he stood in his crib and, using his imagination, pronounced to them with great seriousness, “I am the king. Your ships will be sinked [sic] in the ocean.” He might as well have been auditioning for “H.M.S. Pinafore.”His parents, not surprisingly, expected him to become an actor.At the age of six, when in second grade, at his teacher’s behest, he wrote and directed plays that were produced for his classes on successive Fridays. And as an 11-year-old sixth grader, he made costumes for a school production of Gilbert & Sullivan’s “Trial by Jury.” It was his first experience with the work of Gilbert & Sullivan – their plays would become a lifelong passion for him.On reaching early adulthood, Binder decided he wanted to be either a puppeteer or a rabbi. The bizarre contrast of the two professions was not lost on him. Working with puppets from the age of five, he performed at neighborhood children’s shows. But by high school, he had put his puppet business on hold, realizing that handling puppets, while fun, would make him impecunious.He studied English literature and art history at Columbia College in New York; his interest in Gilbert & Sullivan took a major step forward when he joined a Gilbert & Sullivan Society where he became director and costume designer.He then attended Yale University School of Drama, on a track to obtain a Master’s degree.Despite the school’s prestige, and the chance it offered him to get ahead in the theater, Binder felt uncomfortable at the famous school. “While at Yale,” he recalls, “I found the professional theater not very glamorous or appealing. I didn’t want to be associated with the type of people who were involved in theater.” He left after only a few months.Steeped in a rich Jewish education as a youngster, and skilled in public speaking and singing, he thought he could become a rabbi.Though he was less observant in childhood than he would become later in life, he did feel devout and sensed that standing at the pulpit issuing sermons and leading prayers had some similarity to acting on a stage. And, unlike in the theater, he could make a living as a rabbi.After leaving Yale in 1967, at the age of 23, Binder met a Queens College student named Sharon Zibitt, whom he married two years later. She became his greatest fan, but sometimes gave him a certain look when his obsession with Gilbert & Sullivan took hold.They have two daughters – Tamar, 39, and Rachel, 38 – and two sons – Nahum, 35, and Ben-Zion, 28. An observant Jew, Binder wears a kippa but takes it off when acting on stage, as do the other religious actors in his troupe.Binder spent 1967 to 1972 in rabbinic studies, but still produced theatrical shows for Long Island synagogues. After becoming a rabbi in 1972, he spent the next decade serving in that capacity in Canadian synagogues. He talks little of his experiences as a rabbi; but it is clear that even as a rabbi, he yearned to be part of the theater. While in Canada, he joined another Gilbert & Sullivan society, which held meetings in a church. It was, he recalls, his only venture into non-Jewish life, noting that there were only a few Jews in the society.Moving to Israel was always in the Binders’ minds, and finally, in 1983, Binder was offered a post-graduate fellowship enabling Jewish professionals to spend three years in Israel.The idea was that after the three years in Israel, he would commit to spending five years in the Diaspora helping organize Jewish education.“They didn’t know what to do with me,” recalls Binder. “They had no experience with anybody in the arts.” Rather than enter the thickets of Jewish education in the Diaspora, Binder decided to stay on in Israel.He began a Jewish puppet theater in Jerusalem’s Old City; and from 1986 to 1995, he administered grants in the creative arts.But he yearned to be more directly involved in theater and to bring his passion for Gilbert & Sullivan to the stage.What made him such a fan of Gilbert & Sullivan? Binder explains, “I liked the tremendous wit. I think Gilbert’s themes and his way of handling them are eternal, particularly a show like “Iolanthe,” my favorite of their plays. The writing always seems topical. I also liked their music but I was more interested in their text.”Binder’s devotion to Gilbert & Sullivan is best exemplified by his acknowledging that he knows almost every word of every one of their plays by heart. “Don’t test me on it,” he smiles, “but it’s pretty close to true that I have memorized every word.” What that means practically is that should someone not show up at rehearsal or at a performance, Binder can act as understudy without batting an eye.In 1984, Binder put an advertisement in The Jerusalem Post, asking Gilbert & Sullivan aficionados to come to a meeting in celebration of the birthday of “Pirates of Penzance” character Frederick, on February 29, a key element of the plot in the play.Twelve people showed up for the birth of the Gilbert & Sullivan Society in Jerusalem; and for a number of years, the group met, schmoozing about Gilbert & Sullivan, but not producing plays.Then came, in Binder’s words, “one of the great days of my life.” It was in 2001, when the phone rang. Calling Binder was a talented musician named Paul Salter, who had just made aliya from Manchester. “Paul asked me how would I like to start a Gilbert & Sullivan company,” Binder relates, “and I replied, ‘Where have you been all my life?’” Their first major Gilbert & Sullivan production, “The Mikado,” a joint production with JEST (Jerusalem English-Speaking Theater), came in 2007. At the time, Israel was the only non-English-speaking country to have a Gilbert & Sullivan company. Although attracting a theater audience seemed a challenge, Binder did not allow himself to worry. “I knew that Gilbert & Sullivan was great entertainment and we had good talent on stage,” he says.Audiences for Binder’s Gilbert & Sullivan plays are 90 percent English-speaking, mostly older immigrants from England, South Africa, Australia and the United States. Despite his apparent lack of concern about attracting an audience, he notes, “Maintaining an audience is hard because there are so many other events going on in Jerusalem and around Israel.”Each fall Binder produces a Gilbert & Sullivan play; and in the spring, a Broadway/ West End musical. Prior to this season’s production of “The Secret Garden,” Binder staged seven other Broadway musicals – “Oklahoma,” “Carousel,” “My Fair Lady,” “West Side Story,” “Fiddler on the Roof,” “Hairspray” and “The Wizard of Oz.”He acknowledges that he and Encore have reached a “crossroads” at which it has become difficult to find Broadway shows that have not been done by others in Israel and are worth producing. Binder tries to have each Broadway show impart a message, sometimes a Jewish one, sometimes not.In addition to himself and Paul Salter, the musical director, a typical Binder stage production has a set designer, choreographer, 40 to 60 actors, a 12 to 15 member orchestra, depending on the play, a dozen or so backstage hands and a makeup artist. Binder, too, takes small parts in some plays. He was a butler in “My Fair Lady,” and Ko-Ko, the Lord High Executioner in “The Mikado.”How does he direct and act in a play at the same time? “It’s just one more headache to deal with,” he says, when in fact his love of theater suggests that such doubling up is no headache at all.Binder rejects doing certain Broadway musicals despite knowing that audiences would be large. Lionel Bart’s “Oliver” is one of them. “I think the play is a perversion of what Charles Dickens was trying to do in his novel, which was to write an exposé of British society,” he says. “Bart meant his play to be a jolly, sing-along, but all the characters are reprehensible, pickpockets and the like, and there is of course Fagin, meant to be an ugly Jew.”Binder also rejected “The Sound of Music,” because he did not want to do a show “with nuns and Nazis. I don’t think it’s appropriate for Jewish theater.”Encore is largely a volunteer organization.Binder says professional theater people attending his shows are astounded to learn that the actors work for free. Why do they do that, they ask? The answer, says Binder, “is that the actors love what they do and being in our plays gives them an opportunity to get a foot in the door.”Though not paid for their performances, Binder expects the actors to strive to perform at a professional level. Some had no trouble at all. Binder was delighted that actors, especially those capable of playing leads and possessing first-rate voices, sought out Encore. During rehearsals, he passes on tricks of the trade to the actors. Every once in a while, Binder takes needle and thread and fixes a fallen hem or a dress that is too long.There is another unusual element to Encore theater productions. After rehearsals and between acts of theater productions, many cast members often gather for maariv or mincha prayers. Most cast members are religious.Says Binder, who often joins in the services, “The actors may have just played in the scene with the House of Lords in “Iolanthe” or a pirate in “The Pirates of Penzance.” Without missing a beat, they pick up their prayer books and begin praying. I think it’s hysterically funny.”Apart from directing Encore, Binder and musical accompanist Salter have performed two-man shows to packed audiences at the Bible Lands Museum in Jerusalem, with Binder singing songs of Irving Berlin and George Gershwin. He not only sings; he explains the background of each song.Binder believes he is performing a great service for Jerusalem’s English-speaking residents. “Encore fills a very important part of the Jerusalem scene and of the Israeli scene,” he says. “It gives a lot of people an opportunity to be on stage, to work on a show and feeds their desire to be part of something, to be part of a company. We don’t have prima donnas. We don’t have big egos. We try to avoid them. We see the group as a family.”Binder has also written and staged his own play, “Keys of the City,” dealing with Jewish life in Jerusalem as the Ottoman Turks abandoned the city when British forces under General Allenby arrived in 1917. He is busy writing another play focusing on the Jewish Nili spy network during World War I.He rarely loses his cool. The best way to identify him at one of his theater productions is to look for the calmest person in the hall holding a needle and thread.
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