From The Advocate May 2012
Not Your Bubbe's Yentl
A story made famous by Barbra Streisand gets a queer 21st-century retelling.
By Diane Anderson-Minshall
http://www.advocate.com/Print_Issue/Advance/Not_Your_Bubbes_Yentl/Long before Katy Perry gave the world faux bisexuality, singer-songwriter Jill Sobule offered up the real thing in her 1995 hit single, "I Kissed a Girl." Sobule, who has 10 albums under her belt, has been asked whether she's bisexual thousands of times in the years since ("Hmm, thinking queer sounds even more apropos than bi or gay," she says after a conversation about her girlfriend of six years.) But these days Sobule is raising eyebrows even more with the world's first retelling of Yentl in a way she's envisioned since she read the Isaac Bashevis Singer short story "Yentl the Yeshiva Boy," which inspired Barbra Streisand's 1983 film.
"I really thought Yentl was a transgender boy," she says, succinctly describing her Yentl, which is running at Sarasota, Fla.'s Asolo Repertory Theatre through April 26 (and has requests to play other cities, including London and San Francisco). Sobule's Yentl is about a transgender boy's coming-of-age rather than a straight girl's secret. The singer composed all original songs for this new Yentl, giving the score a klezmer, folk, rock sound.
