PTC's "Stars of David' at the Suzanne Roberts (2nd review)

"Jews know two things," goes the quip from the 1982 film, My Favorite Year: "suffering, and where to find great Chinese food." My longtime literary agent, Julie Fallowfield— who wasn't Jewish— knew something else about Jews: They buy 25 percent of all hardcover books (at least as of 1975).

They also, I would add, comprise a major segment of the theater audience in big cities like New York, Philadelphia, Chicago and Los Angeles. If you want to write a book or produce a show, it helps immensely if its premise, no matter how slender, contains a Jewish angle.

Besides, as I discovered at the opening of the new musical Stars of David, many more words rhyme with "Jew" than with, say, "Catholic," "Protestant" or "Muslim." Let's face it— with Jews, you just can't go wrong!

Of course Jews are indeed a fascinating people. Thanks to their 2,000-year history of survival in the face of persecution, they've produced a remarkably disproportionate number of overachievers in relation to their small population (Einstein, Saul Bellow, Don Rickles— you name it).

Yes, Jerry Seinfeld

But then, the same could be said about other demographic groups, too: the Scots, say, or Hungarians, or even redheads. Did you know that Franz Liszt, Eugene Ormandy, Joyce Carol Oates, George Soros, Nicholas Sarkozy, Frieda Kahlo, Andrew Grove, Edward Teller, Estée Lauder, Joseph Pulitzer, Sir George Solti, Paul Newman, Leslie Howard, Frank Capra, Harry Houdini and Jerry Seinfeld were all either partly or entirely Hungarian? Or that many of the greatest figures in English history— William the Conqueror, Henry VIII, Elizabeth I, Shakespeare, King James I, Oliver Cromwell and Winston Churchill— were all redheads, not to mention Thomas Jefferson, Mark Twain, Emily Dickinson, Antonio Vivaldi, Titian, Sarah Bernhardt and Jesse James? I thought not.

As a redhead of Hungarian descent, I draw comfort from my lists of famous Hungarians and redheads whenever BSR readers tell me how stupid I am. If it's your misfortune to have been born neither redhaired nor Hungarian but merely Jewish, you may draw comfort from your tribe's long lists of Nobel, Pulitzer and Oscar winners. But is this information useful to anyone else? Doubtful.

Like Midnight in Paris

Which brings me to Abigail Pogrebin, who as a magazine writer had the good fortune to be born Jewish rather than, say, a gypsy. Nearly a decade ago she conducted a series of interviews with notable American Jews (Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Edgar Bronfman, Norman Lear, Gloria Steinem, et al.) and in 2005 cobbled them together into a book called Stars of David: Prominent Jews Talk About Being Jewish. Aaron Harnick, who as a theatrical producer had the good fortune to be born not only Jewish but the nephew of the Fiddler On the Roof lyricist Sheldon Harnick, has now adapted Stars of David for the stage as a musical.

The show's plot, such as it is, follows a secular Jewish writer as she discovers the richness of her Jewish heritage by interviewing famous Jews after her daughter unexpectedly demands to have a bat mitzvah. In that respect, Stars of David is a cousin to Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris, in which a struggling writer purportedly finds inspiration by time tripping with Ernest Hemingway, Salvador Dali, Gertrude Stein et al.

Gay and Jewish

Unlike the great names dropped throughout Midnight in Paris— who seem to have nothing to tell the protagonist that they haven't already said in print— in Stars of David Pogrebin does elicit some original insights from her subjects: Tony Kushner points out the similarities between being Jewish and being gay; Leonard Nimoy recalls a magic kit he got as a child that turned out to be anti-Semitic; Joan Rivers does an over-the-top (even for her) and utterly unfunny rant about gentile hatred of Jews.

The trouble with this approach is its selection process: Pogrebin sought out only subjects who were wonderful people to begin with; and the only people who would grant her interviews were Jews who feel good about being Jewish. Consequently, the stage version of Stars of David provides little dramatic conflict; it's all heroes and no villains, sort of like one of those gay celebrations in which all the characters are warm, witty, wise and practically perfect in every way.

Pogrebin and this show would have been better served had they included a few of those alleged self-hating Jews whom the Zionist Organization of America is always kvetching about, or a few who had no use for their Jewish roots (Madeleine Albright?), or maybe some Jews for Jesus, or perhaps even some Jewish crooks. How would Bernie Madoff or Ivan Boesky square their Jewish heritage with their awesome swindles? Now, there's a dramatic angle.

Uneven songs

No fewer than 13 famous Jewish composers (Jule Stein, Sheldon Harnick, Marc Shaiman, etc.) and 11 lyricists contributed original songs to Stars of David. On paper these numbers sound impressive; on stage it's a case of too many cooks. The songs are wildly uneven, many of them unsingable and unhummable.

Two exceptions are the witty "Smart People," written for Aaron Sorkin by David Shire and Richard Maltby; and Amanda Green's show-stopping "Just Be Who You Are," belted out by Donna Vivino as Fran Drescher.

(I also liked "Broken Pieces," Alan and Marilyn Bergman's touching collaboration with Marvin Hamlisch about their tradition of saving the broken shards at a wedding and sending them to the bride and groom on their first anniversary. But as the Bergmans' cousin, I'm a less than objective observer.)

The five-person cast (directed by Gordon Greenberg), the five-piece orchestra and the set design by Beowulf Boritt were all competent enough. The trouble with Stars of David is not so much its execution as the narrowness of its appeal. Not every book can be transferred to the stage.

Stars of David is unlikely to be translated into a dozen languages (like The Diary of Anne Frank) or produced in places like Japan (where Fiddler On the Roof was acclaimed as a quintessentially Japanese tale of generational conflict). But your synagogue sisterhood should eat it up.♦


To read another review by Steve Cohen, click here.
To read a response, click here.