One letter led to another and it wasn’t long before he realized he had found the hook for a memoir that people had been encouraging him to write about his 42-year career as owner and director of the Golden Apple Dinner Theatre in Sarasota and his even-longer marriage to MacDonald. A Broadway veteran as a teenager, MacDonald became Sarasota’s leading lady starring in dozens of shows during the theater’s long history.
“Now it may seem that writing a letter to someone who is no longer alive would raise many an eyebrow, but to me it was the most natural thing to do,” he writes in the introduction to “Dear Roberta, Letters to My Wife: A Golden Apple Memoir,” published by Smith & Kraus.
Despite the demise of a previous incarnation of the Sarasota Jewish Theater, director Carole Kleinberg is eager to prove that the community is ready for, and needs, a new, more professional version.
She admits the timing could be better – opening a theater in the middle of a pandemic adds to the challenge – but she is moving forward in leading a revival of SJT with a series of online performances that begin Jan. 31.
“There are 38,000 Jewish households in the Sarasota-Manatee area – that’s households, not individuals,” said Kleinberg, the former artistic director of the late Banyan Theater in Sarasota. “It seems to me in a community with 38,000 households and in a world where haters have been able to crawl out from under rocks and felt permission to spread their anti-Semitism and fear of others, that there should be a vehicle for spreading positive elements of Jewish history, culture, literature and humor.”