Having elsewhere in these cyber-pages—in this same battery of late-August 2013 reviews—bemoaned the proliferation of A-plus craftsmanship spent on the trivial and trendy in new musicals, I hasten to add, I find it even more disheartening to encounter a new musical like Soul Doctor, which should be setting the “finer example” but can’t. This would be a lot easier to take if it were horrible.
A biographical musical, it tells the story of Schlomo Carlebach, who witnessed WWII atrocities as a child (Teddy Walsh) in Vienna, before his father, seeing the writing on the wall, moved his family to America, Brooklyn to be precise. A dedicated, orthodox Jew, Schlomo studied from an early age to become a rabbi, and as a young man (Eric Anderson), sought expression of his faith through music. Discovering he had a connection to popular jazz, folk and even rock music, he tried to introduce the new vocabulary into his community, where it was met with instant resistance and rejection. Even though he understood the risk to his standing, he strove to follow his heart and his musical inspiration, and took to combining devout religious text with secular melody of his own composition, accompanying himself on guitar. In short order, he was discovered by a record producer and became a recording phenomenon, often known as “The Singing Rabbi”; his concerts took him around the world and during the 60s hippie years he parked himself for a long time in San Francisco, where he opened a center called the House of Love and Prayer and attended to the disaffected, disenfranchised Jewish youth of the area, including drug addicts and runaways, reconnecting them with their faith and families.
Dramatically
speaking, Schlomo’s goal is tangible enough to work as a quest; those who
functioned as his inspirational triggers, in particular future pop star Nina
Simone (Amber Iman) are interesting enough supporting characters to be
idiosyncratic and entertaining; and the barriers he had to overcome, put up by
his family and native community, and a little by his own initial naivete, are
sufficient to function as a collective protagonist. There’s enough of a real
story here, with a larger-than-life hero, conflict and propulsive forward
movement, to motor a musical.
And
it does. Sort of. The problem is, the authors aren’t delivering an A-level
game.
They’re
all veteran professionals whose credits, and whose work on Soul Doctor suggest that they’ve been in and around the business
enough to have developed a certain base-level proficiency. Daniel S. Wise’s
book (and direction) are attuned to economical narrative and guiding key story
points toward song; his collaborator lyricist David Schecter likewise lands on the right things to sing about,
with the right characters singing. (Actually, the focus somewhat falls apart in
the middle of Act Two; once Schlomo enters his Haight-Ashbury phase he runs out
of quest and the show starts to meander; but let’s assume that’s fixable, and I
believe it is, or at least might have been.) But Wise and Schecter, at least
within the confines of this material, are mediocre writers. Dialogue and lyrics
that should crackle, inspire or transcend are often amusing but rarely clever
or insightful; for the most part they’re merely functional. A score that should
be powerful and/or deeply moving likewise merely gets the job done, with the
familiar ethnic-rhythmic carpentry appropriate to the moment, but no melodies
that rise above the generic.
Ironically,
the shortfalls of the music lie in the fact that (with the exception of a
couple of public domain jazz-crooner songs for the nightclub scene in which we
meet Nina Simone) it has all been drawn and adapted from Carlebach’s catalog of
recorded songs. And Carlebach wrote short melodies in a Jewish folk-music idiom
about religious faith. And he didn’t read music. His palate was limited to what
he could create by ear, strumming on his guitar. Which is not a well deep
enough for the richness of drama in a musical theatre context. (What has, since
The Producers, become the standard
credit for a composer-surrogate workerbee who fleshes out material created by a
note-illiterate tunesmith is “music supervisor” and in this case, that title
goes to Brian Koonin. I don’t think he’s to be blamed. In such a
situation you’re only as dynamic as your source material allows you to be. And
I hasten to add, that has nothing to do with how effective Carlebach’s material
may be on its own terms. A book musical perforce introduces a whole different
set of requirements.)
There’s
also a strange kind of “score confusion.” Since all the music is drawn from the Carlebach catalog,
there’s not much aesthetic difference between the tunes used to advance the
story and the tunes meant showcase Schlomo in performance, so the two kind of
run together and both feel a little diluted because of it.
The
cast is generally quite fine, with lead performances that don’t quite rock at
star level, but very agreeably hit all the familiar ethnic tropes with grace,
humor and humanity—in particular Eric Anderson as Schlomo—but then,
perhaps the actors are limited by the “glass ceiling” of the material too.
This
should have been so much better. How wonderful if it could be as simple as
saying Soul Doctor, heal thyself…
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