Photo by Carol Rosegg.
Jake Ehrenreich’s
A Jew Grows in Brooklyn
Runs until June 13 @ The Panasonic Theatre
By Jeff Maus
A Jew Grows in Brooklyn is easy to enjoy. It tells the story of 54-year-old Jake Ehrenreich, who grew from being a boy to a man, throughout his life surrounded by survivors of the Shoah. He was a moderately successful musician from a young age, working with Richie Havens and auditioning for KISS. He married late in life, and happily his survivor father lived to see his wedding in the mid-1990s. Ehrenreich’s marriage produced a young son and a happy family. Near the end of the play he mentioned in a sentence or two that he didn’t get a lot of joy from booze or drugs, and is a very happy man.
That’s it. I left the theatre thinking, “this is an off-Broadway hit?” It was essentially a very good performance next to a slide show of family photos: a mediocre cabaret. Something akin to a Regis Philbin concert, I’d imagine. Ehrenreich sings jazz, lounge, Yiddish, and Christmas songs, many written by Jews. After one one medley of rock songs from the 60s, he later tells us were all written by Jewish people. He summarizes his rock-and-roll career in a few minutes with essentially no anecdotes. He’s a decent singer, but his jokes are super corny and unoriginal. He revels in the corny, it is a large part of his charm.
The Shoah is a thread throughout the play, and his families’ stories are tragic. That being said, they’re by no means unique or explored in very much emotional depth. For the majority of the play, Ehrenreich provides a faithful tribute to the Borscht Belt, the place where Jewish immigrants to the United States tried to find relief after surviving World War II. “There we learned to laugh again,” he says. Better known as the Catskills, the area was the Jewish entertainment capital of the country and where Ehrenreich made his professional start. It was the kind of place where if a young musician made one mistake, the bandleader would forgive you. If you made two or three, well, that was just fine, too. At one point in the show, Ehrenreich leads the audience in a game of Simon Says, which he (inaccurately) says was a Borscht Belt night club invention. We all got some chuckles out of the game.
It’s tough to criticize this play, but it is equally tough to praise it very much. This is a one-man show pulled off just fine, but its impact was fleeting. It was overtly inspirational (think Anthony Robbins or Oprah Winfrey). Ehrenreich was charming, and I laughed a bunch of times, then it was over. Ehrenreich literally closed the show by announcing he would sign merchandise being sold in the lobby. While I walked away from the theatre, I felt the show’s presence and influence on me evaporating in seconds, and I wondered what I had just watched (and whether I even really liked it.) I think that the best I can say is that I didn’t dislike it.
