World-famous mime Marcel Marceau entertained global audiences on stage and screen for more than 60 years.
But a lesser-known fact about Marceau, who was Jewish, is that he rescued more than 70 Jewish children during the Holocaust as a member of the French resistance.
And now, a new play that focuses on this remarkable chapter of Marceau’s life is coming to a New York stage. “Marcel on the Train” follows Marceau as a young man living in Nazi-occupied France, and how he helped smuggle children from an orphanage in France to safety on the Swiss border — using his early attempts at pantomiming to do so.
“Marcel on the Train” is co-written by and will star Jewish actor Ethan Slater, who is best known for his Tony-nominated performance as the titular character in “SpongeBob SquarePants: The Broadway Musical.” Slater, 33, also played Boq Woodsman in the 2024 box office hit, “Wicked,” where he met his famous girlfriend, pop star Ariana Grande.
A production of the Classic Stage Company, “Marcel on the Train” will make its debut off-Broadway in February 2026 at the Lynn F. Angelson Theater at 136 East 13th St.
The play is being co-produced by Mitch Marois and Maxwell Beer, who produced “Maybe Happy Ending,” a musical currently on Broadway that just won three Tony Awards, including Best Musical and Best Original Score.
Previously, “Marcel on the Train” was workshopped in July 2024 at Williamstown Theatre Festival in Massachusetts.
“Growing up Jewish, as I did, and also being obsessed with silent film, silent comedy, and physical storytelling, [Marceau’s story] immediately sparked something in me that I wanted to learn more about,” Slater told the Boston Globe ahead of the workshop last year.
Jewish Broadway actor Julie Benko, known for portraying Fanny Brice in “Funny Girl,” was cast as a character named “Berthe” for the Williamstown workshop. No other casting announcements have been made yet for the forthcoming New York production, save Slater’s role.
Marcel Marceau was born Marcel Mangel in 1923 in Strasbourg, France — an important Jewish hub at the time — to Anne Werzberg and Charles Mangel, a kosher butcher.
To better blend in with their non-Jewish neighbors, Marceau and his brother, Alain, took on the surname Marceau — borrowing it from an Alsatian general in Napoleon’s army, François Séverin Marceau-Desgraviers. Around 1940, as the war began, Marcel and Alain and their parents moved to Limoges in southwestern France, and then to Paris, with false identification papers.
In 1943, Marcel Marceau was recruited into the French resistance by his younger cousin, Georges Loinger. Marceau helped evacuate the Jewish children hidden in an orphanage in the Parisian suburb of Sèvres, and brought them to Annemasse on the border with neutral Switzerland. To evade detection by the Nazis, the group dressed as and posed as a boy scout troop.
Marceau made the journey three times, rescuing 24 children each time.
Having been raised on the silent films of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, Marceau had developed a passion for physical comedy and pantomime. As a young man, he used his fledgling talents during these train journeys to the Swiss border, where he used pantomime to keep the children quietly entertained.
“The kids loved Marcel and felt safe with him,” Loinger told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in 2007. “He had already begun doing performances in the orphanage, where he had met a mime instructor earlier on. The kids had to appear like they were simply going on vacation to a home near the Swiss border, and Marcel really put them at ease.”
After France was liberated in 1944, Marceau joined the French army. (He would later find out that his father had been deported to Auschwitz and died there in 1944.) He also gave his first public miming performance the following year in front of American troops.
In 1947, he created his famous, tragicomic “Bip the Clown” character. Bip’s look cemented the prototypical image of a classic French mime that we think of today: a white, brightly made-up face, a striped shirt and a torn-up hat with a red flower poking out.
“You see the pain and the sadness in his mime skits,” Loinger said. “The origin of that pain was his father’s deportation.”
In the following decades, Marceu made stage appearances across the globe. He also appeared in films like “Barbarella” and Mel Brooks’ “Silent Movie.” He became an Officer of the Legion of Honor in France, the highest order of merit in the country, in 1986.
Marceau died in 2007 at age 84.
Marceau’s Holocaust heroism was previously portrayed in 2020 by Jewish actor Jesse Eisenberg in the film “Resistance.”
In Sep. 2023, Slater posted a series of behind-the-scenes photos from rehearsals, and captioned it “L’shana Tova from Marcel on the Train.”
Slater grew up in the Conservative Jewish movement and attended the Charles E. Smith Jewish Day School in Bethesda, Maryland.
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