Raise your voice up and prepare to mend a broken heart. –Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach
By Eric George Tauber
SAN DIEGO — Welcome to The House of Love and Prayer where klezmer mixes with wild, invigorating drumming. Hippies dressed in yoga pants and adorned with love beads are freestyle dancing around a pretty groovy-looking ark. Hey, at least they’re in synagogue.
When Shlomo’s very frum, traditional father enters … Oy Gevalt! Ten generations of rabbis and THIS is the kind of shul his son is running?!
The beginning of Shlomo’s story begins with “the beginning.” A giant prayer shawl becomes the screen for shadow puppetry telling the story of creation and humanity’s origins. “Music is the beginning … And it is good.”
Fast forward from Eden to 1938, Vienna. In the year of the Anschluß, (Nazi Germany’s annexation of Austria) Shlomo was a boy studying for his Bar Mitzvah. Now subject to the Nuremberg Laws, he is forbidden even from playing ball in the street. Jews can be brutally beaten for any and no reason. As the city’s chief rabbi, his father thought he still had some pull. But his cries for justice were met with an order of immediate deportation, a left-handed favor considering…
The transition from an Orthodox rabbi to a Hasidic guru didn’t happen overnight. First, he had to realize that you can’t bring people together by putting a mechitza (wall of partition for men and women) between them. Josh Young portrays Shlomo with such sincerity, I really felt the conflict of his soul. He wants to be true to his heritage, but his calling is not to tradition. He has the spirit of a healer and the souls of his people are gravely wounded.
“If we abandon our brothers and sisters, then Hitler did win the war.”
Wandering the night like a beggar, he wanders into a jazz club where he encounters the intoxicating jazz music of Nina Simone. Ester Rada channels Nina’s strength, conviction and sultry mystique. Shlomo had never met anyone like her, but they had more in common than it would seem. Growing up with Nazis and Jim Crow, they’ve both tasted the bitter herb of injustice.
Nina’s mother was a preacher at a little storefront church, just across the street from the synagogue and yet a world away. Shlomo enters visibly nervous, but soon electrifies them by leading them in Ki Va Mo’ed (For the time has come.)
There’s much more to the story, but it’s theirs to tell. And a wonderfully fluid ensemble tells it with vibrant, loving energy. There are too many actors to praise all of them by name. But I enjoyed Mitch Greenberg’s dry wit in asking the rabbi if he was on drugs, the Jewish mother shreing of Mimi Besette, and the off the rails expressiveness of repentant sinner, Abdur-Rahim Jackson. When Billy Cohen played a Nazi, we saw the battle within raging in his eyes. Dylan Hoffinger surprised us going from a nerdy bar mitzvah boy to busting some serious dance moves. And Ginna Doyle, a lost junkie who’s too tender for this cruel world, broke my heart.
My guest and I danced with the cast and left walking on air. If your heart is broken, then come for the healing touch of the Soul Doctor playing at the Lyceum Theater April 3-22, 2018.
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Tauber is a freelance writer specializing in coverage of the arts. He may be contacted via eric.tauber@sdjewishworld.com