Aarcflick

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 reuni...