THEATRE REVIEW: A JEW GROWS IN BROOKLYN
3 May'10

Brooklyn tale likely fares best in…Brooklyn

JOHN COULBOURN - QMI Agency
Rating: 2.5 out of 5

If one is looking for a few good reasons why a little show titled A JEW GROWS IN BROOKLYN took root and thrived in the Broadway milieu, all one need do is look at a demographic map.

Even a quick examination will tell you that there are few better places, other than Brooklyn itself perhaps, to do a show about growing up Jewish in Brooklyn than in that little burgh right across the river from Brooklyn — a place that just happens to be the centre of the universe when it comes to theatre in the English-speaking world. If a show like this can't find an audience in New York, the reasoning no doubt went, then just open up the bridge and let the audience walk over.

The commute to Toronto, however, won't be quite so easy, and in the wake of Sunday's opening of Jake Ehrenreich's celebrated memory show at the Panasonic Theatre, it remains to be seen whether A JEW GROWS IN BROOKLYN can take root and thrive in the Toronto market.

Certainly, it's a good-hearted affair, as Ehrenreich takes to the stage to recall his Brooklyn childhood — but a good heart can only carry one so far. The youngest child and the only son of Polish Jews who fled Poland and survived World War II in a camp in Siberia, was born in America after his parents had arrived. The only survivors in their respective families, his parents built a life for themselves and for their family in Brooklyn, but their background and their experiences in Europe set them apart from everyone else, at least in the mind of a son who was desperate to fit in.

Nonetheless, young Yankele as he was known, had a pretty relentlessly ordinary childhood, based on his own memories and the family photos he shares — and anyone who ever played pick-up hockey or posed for first communion pictures or was embarrassed by the way their parents dressed can share the spirit, if not the full ethnic flavour, of his recollections. Of course, not everybody has a mother who is periodically overcome by the loss of her entire family or a father who doesn't understand baseball — but these things are touched upon only briefly, almost in passing, in a 90 minute piece that is largely self-referential.

As a playwright Ehrenreich (who also directs, with John Huberth) also obviously subscribes to the notion that a picture is worth a thousand words, particularly when the picture in question gives you a chance to make fun of the way people are dressed. Mind you, Ehrenreich doesn't limit himself to memories of his Brooklyn childhood; he also devotes an inordinate amount of time to his childhood experience in the Catskills, where he apparently memorized every bad bit of schtick that ever hit the Borscht Belt, all of which is lovingly recreated here with a verisimilitude that is nothing shy of excruciating (which can only occasionally be confused with excruciatingly funny).

For the rest, it's a pastiche of largely inconsequential memories and personal insights, interspersed with songs, both pop and Yiddish, sung in a sort of a crushed-velvet-fog style, with Ehrenreich backed by a four piece ensemble.

Oh, and there is one bit of memorable theatre — a brief film clip of Ehrenreich's father, recorded for the Shoah Project — and it makes you long to know both the man and his story better. For the rest, if you aren't Jewish and if you didn't grow up in Brooklyn or the Catskills, one suspects it's got only limited appeal.