ENGLISH CORNER, CON LINDA JIMÉNEZ – This week’s trivia question: How did David Serero adapt Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice to a Sephardic style?

David Serero was born in France and relocated to New York, where he started his career in musicals and theater. In 2002 he discovered opera, and In 2004, he began to study at the Rimsky-Korsakov Conservatory in St Petersburg, where he made his operatic debut.

He has acted in many feature films, TV films and series, plays and operas, and traveled extensively, giving concerts in many countries, including France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Belgium, Russia, the USA and Israel. He has also brought Broadway musicals to international audiences.

Serero currently lives in New York, where he recently played Shylock in a version of Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, which he adapted and staged for the American Sephardi Federation at the Center for Jewish History.
He also devotes a good deal of time to charity work, organizing concerts to benefit UNICEF, WIZO, schools and hospitals, including Hadassah hospital in Jerusalem. He was named President of Young Hadassah France in 2011. In addition, he founded Forbidden Talents, an organization dedicated to rescuing the music of composers suppressed during the Nazi regime.

David Serero has recently released Sephardi, A Musical Journey of Ladino Songs, a CD of his own arrangements of traditional Sephardic songs.

January performances of The Merchant of Venice

The music on this program:
“Tomorrow Mountain” from Duke Ellington’s Beggar’s Holiday
“If I were a Rich Man” from Fiddler on the Roof (in French)
“Ya salió de la mar la galena”, from Sephardi, A Musical Journey of Ladino Songs