Persistence, thy name is "Soul Doctor"!
Every time you think this good-natured but clunky biomusical about Shlomo Carlebach, the singing rabbi, is down for the count, it pops up again.
"Soul Doctor" did well enough off-Broadway in 2012 that the following year, producers, no doubt sharing Carlebach's can-do optimism, decided to have a go at Broadway. The show closed in three months.
And now here it is again, in a slimmed-down, 100-minute version that's playing at the cozy Actors Temple Theatre, which is, aptly enough, a synagogue by day.
At least the earlier productions had Eric Anderson, whose charisma helped you understand how Carlebach became so popular in the '60s and '70s. Now we have Josh Nelson, who sings Carlebach tunes like "Ki Va Moed" and "Ode Yishama" well enough, but whose acting range is limited. His Shlomo is so sweet, so naive, that at times he feels, well, not too bright.
In all fairness, Nelson doesn't have much to work with. The show has been whittled down so much that it's now a succession of barely connected numbers that take us from Carlebach's boyhood in Nazi Austria to his growing up in New York and his becoming a "rock 'n' roll rabbi" who brought the Torah to flower children.
Key in this evolution was Carlebach's unlikely friendship with Nina Simone, the High Priestess of Soul. Dan'yelle Williamson belts out such classics as "I Put a Spell on You" and "Sinnerman," but comes across as cloyingly corny — a trait shared by the other actors.
Mindy Cooper's bare-bones staging reinforces the sense that we're at a cheery pageant. With the actors happily running up and down the aisle, you get the impression you're watching a summer stock production of "Hair."
Minus, of course, the pot and nudity.
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