The Golden Land, 1985-6 Season

You Don't Have to be Jewish To Love 'The Golden Land'

by Clive Barnes

New York Post review, Tuesday, November 12, 1985

The story of the Jewish experience in New York City -- with that mighty wave of Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe that washed over the sometimes inhospitable rock of Ellis Island at the end of the last century and the beginning of this -- is truly one of the sagas that made America.

Zalmen Mlotek and Moishe Rosenfeld have come up with a theatrical idea -- it is a musical they call "The Golden Land," and it opened last night at the Second Avenue Theater -- that is of shining simplicity and wonderful effectiveness.

It is the celebration in word and song of that special Jewish experience during the past 80 years. But the songs and many of the words are authentically of the period, and they draw, appropriately of the period, and they draw, appropriately enough, from the great Yiddish Theater that once flourished along Second Avenue, including this very same theater, at 12th Street, now just refurbished.

There is nothing that quite recalls the feel, sound, almost the very scent, of a period and a place better than the popular music and vernacular entertainment of its time.

The things that make a people laugh and cry are the things that do indeed make the people.

The beauty of the idea of "The Golden Land" has fortunately been captured by the show, and, of course, its staging and cast.

This agglomeration of Second Avenue nostalgia should be an enormous popular hit and like that famous rye bread, You Don't Have to be Jewish. After all, in new York, to an extent, everyone is.

It is the Jewishness -- combined with the Spanishness and the blackness -- of new York that makes us New York rather than foreign places, like Los Angeles. This heart-warming yet passionate show celebrates that Jewishness.

The Work has been staged, with split-second timing and panache -- which is sort of French for chutzpah -- by Jacques Levy, and you don't have to be Jewish to be called Jacques, with its supersmooth and Astaire-deft dance numbers contributed by Donald Saddler.

To give this anthology a shape, much helped by Lindsey Decker's ingenious and protean scenic design, Mlotek and Rosenfeld have divided the revue into nine scenes and two acts.

The structure is not evenly balanced. The first act is concerned with the decade of so up until the end of World War I, whereas the second takes the story up through the Depression to World War II, and ends, somewhat pantingly out of breath, with today and the establishment of Israel.

The first half, for a number of reasons, not least the original musical material, is the better of the two. In the second, the skating over such subjects as middle-class anti-Semitism, and the plight of Jews in the torture camps of Nazi-occupied Europe, is too cursory.

Yet let us not quibble. The second half contains a lot of good stuff about the Jewish migration uptown from grand and Delancey, the Yiddish Theater -- including the great Thomashefsky -- and Yiddish Radio.

The poignancy of the opening, the saga of the sweatshops, and the rise of organized labor, these, however, are strongest, most touching notes -- with pungent memories of the scandalous Triangle Fire, and a sad little song about the death of an early unionist, Motl the Operator.

The cast is as terrific as the show itself. Six people without a solitary weak link. Bruce Adler, Phyllis Berk, Joanne Borts, Avi Hoffman, Marc Krause, and Neva Small.

If I single out for special mention Adler (his rendering of Aaron Lebedeff's Yiddish classic, Rumania, Rumania, must nowadays be definitive), Berk, and Hoffman, I am simply being slightly unfair to the other three.

Finally -- for this is a musical and, as it proclaims itself "a JOYOUS musical" -- there must be a special word for the Golden Land Klezmer Orchestra, a 7-piece band conducted by Mlotek h8imself, who also made all the musical arrangements, which adds so much to this evening of authentic ethnicity and, yes, joy!