Meet Brandon Uranowitz, Star of Broadway’s Must-See Hit, ‘Leopoldstadt’

The Broadway play Leopoldstadt begins with joy. It is 1899, and a wealthy Jewish family living in Vienna is gathering for Christmas. They are drinking, teasing each other, and chasing after kids. The men are debating Zionism, Jewish identity, and culture. One daughter gossips with her aunt about a crush. A son starts talking about his dreams for the future.

Sir Tom Stoppard’s newest work is a personal opus, inspired by his own family’s experience during the Holocaust and the years leading to it. It charts 50 years of that family’s existence as they come of age and grow old, navigating love, sex, business, and their faith against the rise of Bolshevism and a palpable antisemitic mood.

That culminates with a sequence set in 1938, when the Nazis have arrived and, along with them, Kristallnacht. The act unfolds, appropriately, like a tense horror scene, with crashes, screams, and explosions in the distance as the family gathers and attempts to prepare their affairs. The Nazis requisition their home, and they are transported to camps the following day.

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