Good luck marketing "Soul Doctor" to a general audience. This adorable musical biography of Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach, the so-called “rock star rabbi” credited with infusing Jewish music with 1960s pop culture musical idioms, has obvious appeal to its core audience of fans. But there is nothing transcendent about Daniel S. Wise's laborious book or Rabbi Carlebach's “soulful” but dated music to push the show out of its narrow niche and give it the universal appeal of a recent “Fiddler on the Roof.” days.
Eric Anderson, who played Shlomo Carlebach in a 2008 production at the New York Theater Workshop, has the voice and presence, not to mention the physical stamina, to pull off the demanding role of a character who never leaves the stage. Except, of course, in the early scenes of his childhood in Vienna, when a moppet actor (Ethan Khusidman and Teddy Walsh, alternating the role) plays the dutiful son of a wise father (Jamie Jackson), a revered rabbi who shrewdly packs reunites his family and flees to the United States in 1938 while the Nazis carry out their pogroms.
Helmer Daniel S. Wise has staged the hair-raising events of the rabbi's early life in Vienna with efficiency, if not great originality. Here's a stage full of Austrian Jews, dressed in ethnic costumes (by Maggie Morgan), singing an ethnic song ("Good Shabbat"), dancing an ethnic dance, and cowering before a high-booted Nazi in black leather. Message sent.
Once in New York, the eternal conflict between severe parents and their rebellious children causes a rupture in the family. The elder Carlebach opens a conservative yeshiva in Brooklyn with the expectation that his children will follow in his traditional footsteps ("Keep the Fire Burning"). But young Shlomo, encouraged by a charismatic Hasidic rabbi, embarks on a mission of his own creation: to bring his music, with its message of love and peace, to the masses: "He sang his song to / The lost and the lost." lonely/Lifting up their brothers/heartbroken, one by one.”
Unless you like it personally, there's just too much of this heavy religious pedantry to keep an audience on their toes. And while the cast seems to be in constant motion, the choreography is clunky and obvious.
According to historical legend, Shlomo Carlebach was inspired by American gospel and jazz musical idioms that he absorbed from his friend Nina Simone. The show comes to life with the entrance of Amber Iman, a dynamic young performer who makes a stunning Broadway debut as her. Her voice is rich and smoky on "I Put a Spell on You" and "You Know How I Feel," beaming on gospel numbers, and on top of that, she can really act.
In Act II, which is just as jam-packed with incident and rhetoric as Act I, the focus shifts to San Francisco, where the message of peace and love in Shlomo's music catches on with young hippies who accept him as their guru. . -rabbi. But at this point, all the songs have started to sound alike, and by the time Iman comes to the rescue, it's too late.
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