Dudu Fisher will entertain

CYNTHIA RAMSAY

In the time it took to prepare for the interview, Dudu Fisher had left Florida and was in Missouri. Before Florida, he was in Mexico; after Missouri, he’ll perform at several locations in Australia and then Los Vegas, before his day in Vancouver, which will be followed by concerts in Argentina. The star singer spends much of his time traveling, yet was relaxed and charming when the Independent caught him for a phone interview.

Fisher has almost 40 recordings, more than a dozen children’s videos, one-man shows and concerts aplenty, and more of everything on the way; and he also takes on High Holiday cantorial duties for a congregation in Brazil.

“I have Barbara [Chipurnoi]; Barbara is my manager and thank G-d she schedules me,” said Fisher about how he manages to organize his life. “This, I don’t have to do, but all the other stuff, yeah, it’s a lot of work to prepare to record, to shoot, to do live shows and television programs and we’re very, very busy. I’m always planning two years in advance what I am going to do.”

About one of those plans, he explained, “I’m probably bringing back to Israel the concert version of Les Mis, the new version that they did in London.” This likely will take place in the summer of 2012, and for a limited run, he said. The event will mark the 25th anniversary of Les Mis.

“I’m just finished recording a new album, which is called Jerusalem, and it has 16 songs only about Jerusalem in six different languages,” he added. “And this summer, in May, we’re going to shoot in Israel a DVD for it, hopefully, so there’s a lot of stuff going on.”

In addition to his own work, Fisher said he receives at least 10 recordings a day – and has for years – from people convinced that he should sing their material. On those rare occasions when Fisher has time, he’ll listen to one or two of the CDs, sometimes at the prodding of his office manager in Israel. In the age of cassettes, one of the submissions to which Fisher listened was from Orit Vaganfeld. “She sent the cassette and she wrote a letter [saying] that she’s writing songs for little kids ... and if I would be at all interested to shoot a DVD for kids in kindergarten, and I never listened to the songs,” Fisher explained. She was persistent, however, and when she called the office, the manager assured her that Fisher would listen to the music.

“I took the cassette and I listened in the car, and right away, I called him from the car, and I said, ‘Listen, you’ve got to do business with her because these are great songs and let’s try to do something.’ So, we shot one [Dudu Fisher’s Kindergarten] DVD and it doesn’t have a number even, because we didn’t know then that we were going to do [so many]. Number 16 is coming to the market in a couple of months. We did one and it became such a big hit ... and, since then, everything is history.”

And, speaking of history, Fisher started his professional musical career as a cantor – in Winnipeg, of all places. “I was in Winnipeg in ’73, when the Yom Kippur War broke out,” he explained. It was soon after he had finished his Israel Defence Forces service, and he was singing at B’nai Avraham Synagogue. About that, he said, “This was my first job actually, and I liked it because I saw that the people appreciated what I do, and I had a great connection with the people and, between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, all the mothers came with their Harriets and Sarahs and Rebeccas, to introduce me to their daughters. I really felt I was at the top of the world, you know, and then, unfortunately, the war broke out, so I went back to Israel.

“Then I stayed a cantor for another some years, until I saw Les Mis in 1986 and it changed my life. I started singing in musicals, in Les Mis, in Israel and Broadway and London, and my real pride is the fact that I was the first actor on Broadway to get a contract which says specifically that Dudu Fisher will not be singing on Friday nights and Saturday matinées and Jewish holidays. It never happened before then and hasn’t happen again since then, that was the last time that a contract like this was signed on Broadway.”

Fisher said he didn’t know why producer Cameron Mackintosh did that for him, especially since Fisher was unknown in the musical theatre world at the time, “but even when you’re known, it’s a real problem for a producer to have somebody not to appear on a Friday night and Saturday matinées because what is he going to do? He has to bring in somebody else to do the show, he has to advertise him. It’s almost double money, everything is double the money for a producer and I understand very well the concern and why it’s never happened.

“But I asked Cameron Mackintosh once, ‘Why did you do it?’ And he said, ‘Because I love you.’ I said, ‘Alright, love is above everything.’ When there’s love, you don’t look at money, you don’t look at problems. You can solve everything when there is love.”

And perhaps that’s one of the reasons that Fisher is able to keep the pace he does.

“I really love what I’m doing,” he said. “I really love the stage. I love the people I meet, every time new people. I love new cultures. I love the traveling.... I love to be on stage; give me a microphone and I’m happy, I’m a happy man.”

He hasn’t always been such a performer though, admitted Fisher, who was born in Petach Tikvah. Although his parents moved to northern Israel, he said, “I was not there a long time because I was already 13, then I went to the yeshivah ... then I went to the army, so I didn’t spend much time in [Kiryat] Tivon, although I did sing there ... in the choir of the synagogue, but Tivon for me was nothing like Petach Tikvah, like where I grew up, and my grandparents lived there and I live there today.”

When he was young, he said, his parents “were working very, very hard to put bread on the table and they didn’t really have time, for a long time, to shlep us, the kids, to piano lessons and ballet lessons ... my parents couldn’t give us too much time of themselves, unfortunately, because they were really working very hard in Israel. We were not brought up, me and my sister [Ahuva], we weren’t brought up in an environment of kids who are pushed to do art and to go to learn how to play music or sing or things like this. We were playing in the street, we were ‘street [kids]’ and everything came at a much later stage.

“My mother, by the time she realized that I might have a little talent, it was too late already. It was like when I was 12 years old when my mother said, ‘Maybe you should play piano.’ Then she sent me to a teacher to study piano, but it didn’t work out.... I’m sorry for it, but that’s the reality,” said Fisher, adding that his father didn’t even get to finish school because of the Holocaust, through which he managed to survive.

“Each generation has its own problems and, thank G-d that, today, we can take care of our kids and we can send them [to lessons] and give them what we didn’t have,” said Fisher, who has three children with his wife, Donna.

About how he met his wife, Fisher said, “Like all Jewish mothers, my mother said, ‘Alright, singing is fine, but it’s a hobby, you must have a profession.’” This was when he was finishing his army service. His mother had seen a newspaper advertisement for a school that trained laboratory technicians and, since her brother had a laboratory, her plan was that Fisher would work with his uncle, which would give him a “steady income, and then singing will be like on the side.”

A good son, Fisher went to the school. He was the only man. “I was sitting at the back of the school [room], feeling all ashamed ... and then I saw this beautiful young lady come into the school, into the class, and that was it. I left after a week, but I left with a lifetime wife.”

Dudu Fisher will be in Vancouver Monday, March 14, 7:30 p.m., at Schara Tzedeck Synagogue for a concert presented by Congregation Beth Hamidrash. He told the Independent, “The show is going to built from songs that I have sang all through my career, from shows that I did. I did two off-Broadway shows, one was Never on Friday, which ... [tells] the story of how I got the part in Les Mis and ... [the other was] called Something Old, Something New, and I’ll do something from there, too. It will be a very, very mixed variety of songs.” Tickets for the concert are $54/$72/$108 and can be purchased from Beth Hamidrash, at 604-872-4222 or [email protected].

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