Theatre in Review: Soul Doctor (Circle in the Square Theatre)

	Eric Anderson, Amber Iman. Photo: Carol Rosegg

We've had bio musicals, songbook musicals, and jukebox musicals; we've now entered the era of the halo musical, in which music-industry characters are not so much dramatized as canonized. Last season, we got Motown, which revealed that Barry Gordy lived for others, selflessly creating a galaxy of singing stars who abandoned him, one by one. (Who can ever forget the scene where Gordy, shattered by the death of Martin Luther King, is reminded by Diana Ross that he, like Martin, is only interested in raising up his people?)

Now comes Soul Doctor, about Shlomo Carlebach, the so-called "rock star rabbi," a Talmud scholar who combined traditional Jewish melodies with folk and gospel sounds to forge a distinctive and long-lasting musical career -- and who, with his House of Love and Prayer in San Francisco in the 1960s, presided over a kind of flower-power Judaism that drew many young devotees. A controversial figure in his own time (to say the least), and dogged by unpleasant questions after his death (more about that later), he's a ripe subject for dramatic investigation. Instead, we have Soul Doctor, a portrait that comes with angel wings firmly attached.

An escapee from the Nazi regime -- his family fled Vienna in 1938 -- Carlebach was preoccupied with trying to reinvigorate a religious tradition that he saw as rendered moribund by the horrors of world war. Daniel S. Wise's libretto shows him and his, brother, Eli Chaim, falling under the influence of Menachem Schneerson, the leader of New York's Hasidim. This upsets his Orthodox parents, but they have bigger problems in store, especially when Shlomo befriends the jazz singer Nina Simone. Before long, he has a recording contract, is sharing the bill at music festivals with the likes of Bob Dylan and The Grateful Dead, and is presiding over the House of Love and Prayer, where men and women freely embrace and keeping kosher isn't required.

It's quite a story, and the best thing you can say about Soul Doctor is that it provides an outline of Carlebach's remarkable life. In Wise's hands, however, this story of his spiritual progress plays more like a revival of Catskills on Broadway. Reb Pinchas, Shlomo's teacher, shouts, "Being a Jew is about pain and suffering! Joy is for the Genitiles!" (That's not a typo.) Shlomo meets up with a dance band named The Meshuggah Cubes. An agent, trying to impress Shlomo, says, "Not to drop names, but you've heard of Peter, Paul, and Mary?" He replies, "I don't know so much the New Testament." Shlomo's mother, referring to their past in Hitler's Vienna, complains, "You've forgotten what it was like to live under a ruthless dictator?" His father replies, "How could I forget, darling? I've been married 48 years!" Really, it's like Henny Youngman never left us.

Other scenes are filled with little historical news bulletins. "Wake up, man! There's a revolution going on," a hip musician announces, cueing the '60s. "A million kids are heading out to San Francisco, searching kids," Nina says, advising him to follow them. David Schechter's lyrics, set to Carlebach's melodies, range from the routine to the risible. An outraged Eli Chaim, taking a look at the Village Gate, where Shlomo has a gig with Nina, sings, "Is this our revolution?/ A house of prostitution?" He follows that up with, "So you're gonna do the horah/In Sodom and Gomorrah?"

That Village Gate scene is preceded by an unintentionally hilarious dance sequence depicting Greenwich Village as a den of sin. (The choreographer is Benoit-Swan Pouffer, who uses the same vocabulary for athletic Torah students, decadent Village denizens, and flower children.) Shlomo's tentative entrance into this worldly dive reminded me unaccountably of Debbie Reynolds in The Singing Nun, peering into a sleazy bar and seeing young couples frugging away with abandon to the strains of "Dominique." But I digress.

Actually, Soul Doctor is most reminiscent of Scandalous, another not-good-enough musical about a driven religious figure whose populist musical ministry challenges the status quo, and whose possible sins are carefully whitewashed. Shlomo remains a regular Boy Scout -- trustworthy, loyal, friendly, clean -- even as he infuriates his tradition-bound family. (His father is horrified to see men and women mingling at the House of Love and Prayer. "In San Francisco, we don't place partitions between people," says Shlomo. "Apparently, it interferes with your orgies," the old man replies, cracking wise even when scandalized.) The show makes a nemesis out of Reb Pinchas, who is fired by Shlomo's father for making a racist remark about Nina. He subsequently follows Shlomo to the ends of the earth, devoting his life to heckling his former student. (He is also a spy; acting like a private detective in a divorce case, he takes a photo of Shlomo chastely embracing Nina and gets it published in a Yiddish newspaper. The headline: "King of Kosher Music, Caught with Queen of Jazz!")

Interestingly, Soul Doctor has little or nothing to say about Shlomo's private life. According to a recent story in The New York Observer, the jury is still out on whether or not he had an affair with Nina, but here they are just good buds. An early contender for Most Thankless Role of 2013 - 14, Zarah Mahler is saddled with playing Ruth, a cynical hanger-on who falls for Shlomo, only to be told that he is too busy fixing the world to settle down and get married. In compensation, she gets the eleven o'clock number. (In real life, Carlebach had a wife and two daughters, one of whom is involved with this production.) Not a word is breathed of the detailed accusations, published some years ago in Lilith Magazine, that he was a serial sexual abuser. Then again, if Berry Gordy can scrub his many wives, mistresses, and offspring from Motown, what the hey?

Eric Anderson's performance goes a long way toward keeping Shlomo from seeming impossibly smug and self-involved; he certainly conveys his mad enthusiasm for music, leaping up and down like an excited kid while singing. As Nina, Amber Iman is the most interesting person on stage; she also delivers a beguiling version of "I Put a Spell on You," the only non-Carlebach song in the score. Everyone else, especially Ron Orbach as Reb Pinchas and Michael Paternostro as Milt Okun, the agent who launched Shlomo's career, are confined by their cardboard characters.

For a show that roams from Haight-Ashbury to the Wailing Wall, Neil Patel has designed a skeletal, two-level set plus a pair of multicolored patched curtains. The good news is it allows for fast scene changes; the not-so-good news is that it isn't very evocative. The set is backed by a stone wall that Jeff Croiter treats with a parade of color washes, part of a design strategy that results in a remarkable number of layered and highly dimensional looks. Maggie Morgan's costumes appropriately range from dark suits for the Hasidim to period casual wear for the teenage characters to a couple of diva gowns for Nina. The sound design, by John Shivers and David Patridge, preserves the intelligibility of the lyrics.

Carlebach's simple melodies are catchy enough to set off frequent bouts of clapping in the audience, but they were never meant to perform the tasks assigned to them here, where they are expected to dramatize a broad variety of emotional situations and points of view. As a result, they blur together, unaided by the clunky lyrics. Clearly intended as a celebration rather than a probing biographical drama, Soul Doctor does its subject no favors by so strenuously pleading his case. It practically begs you to love him, but it never lets you get to know him.--David Barbour