Insite

What happens when a cast aims for your funny bone, takes up a tale teasing the preservation instinct’s strange ways, and does onstage gender changes—er, costume changes—to a brash klezmer score? Shlemiel the First, if you can get to the Kasser Theater by January 24 for this rambunctious revival by Peak Performances and the National Yiddish Theatre–Folksbiene.

Shlemiel sports an evening’s worth of pleasures and a lively raft of theatrical wiles. The brainchild of Robert Brustein, the theater Hall-of-Famer who founded Yale Rep and American Repertory Theater, the piece has an astonishing pedigree: adaptation by Brustein from a play by Isaac Bashevis Singer; music by Hankus Netsky, who’s done klezmer with Itzhak Perlman and runs the New England Conservatory’s improv department; lyrics by Arnold Weinstein, librettist for operas including William Bolcom’s A View from the Bridge; and music direction by Zalmen Mlotek, Folksbiene’s artistic director. And with director/choreographer David Gordon at the helm, Shlemiel brims with chutzpah and every other effusive tagline in the book.

At daybreak, on an off-kilter stage, Shlemiel the beadle (Michael Iannucci) and Tryna Ritza (Alice Playten), his long-suffering wife, sleep in a vertical bed. Well, Shlemiel sleeps. Gently accompanied from the pit by Mlotek’s eight-piece band, Tryna dresses to market her radishes, singing “If I didn’t love him so much / I wouldn’t love him at all.” It’s the safest terrain the evening will traverse.

Their bedroom becomes village HQ for the sages of Chelm (as well as the Shlemiels’ dining room in both Chelm and “Chelm Two”). Those learned, very-bearded gentlemen display knowledge’s elusive appeal and their own delusive capacities, deferring to their top dog, Gronam Ox (Jeff Brooks): “We all come from north and south / to hear him open up his mouth.” They task Shlemiel with carrying news of Gronam’s wisdom out into the world. The play’s underway as Shlemiel—married for twenty years, with two oversized, over-affectionate brats—has wanderlust. If you sense things won’t go as planned, you would not be wrong.

Her husband goes and Tryna pines, singing “My One and Only Shlemiel” as she’s towed off stage on a sheet. Red boulders set the next scene, towed in from the wings, along with the trombonist and the mandolin and clarinet players (with an ensemble of MSU alums doing the towing), presaging stage-filling frolics in the finale. It’s the open road, where our wanderkind meets Chaim Rascal, who’ll turn the pilgrim’s progress about—fortunately.

From hearth and home to the wide, wild world, Shlemiel lovingly probes the Great Unknowns, as was the wont of Singer, the 1978 Nobel laureate in literature. Premiered at ART in 1994 and a success at Lincoln Center, Shlemiel toured to the south—and got cold shouldered in Florida. In the Kasser lobby during intermission, Robert Brustein said the powers that be saw audiences walk out, and the tour’s plug got pulled.

We were nearly alone in the lobby. The opening night house was being regaled with an impromptu klezmer blowout by Mlotek, jaunty at his piano, and the spirited band—payback, perhaps, for the enthusiasm and guffaws that peppered Act One. The enjoyment would soon resume, with the beadle deciding he’s returned, not home, but to its simulacra, “Chelm Two,” in about as real and sexy a bout of surrealism as theater has on offer.

May this Shlemiel revival prevail. Gutsy and full of verve, the musical gives a fresh boost to love and takes a sly jab at leaders’ whims. Such jabs were at the fore in autumn for director Gordon’s loose, smart UNCIVIL WARS, which featured a chair dance more chilling than the one in Shlemiel. After the show, asked what had changed since the original production, Gordon chuckled about adding the litany of jobs the beadle said he couldn’t do. With employment not exactly on the uptick, the political nudge is hard to miss. And with opinionated, ineffectual debate the order of our day, so is the bald observation in Shlemiel that “when a person knows he’s dumb, he’s smart.”

Alan Lockwood’s piece “American Voices: Robert Ashley and New Opera” is in the Autumn ‘09 issue of PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art. His writing on music appears in Time Out New York, Musical America, the New York Sun, and other publications.