SOUL DOCTOR at Circle In The Square Theatre

(Seen August 14, 2013)


This new bio-docu-musical, SOULD DOCTOR, urgently needs a script doctor to pare some of its bulging two and a half hour length, as it meanders through the pseudo-life of Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach.  We follow him on his journey from a privileged childhood in pre-Nazi Vienna, to the heights of a pop  figure as the singing Rabbi who sets up shop in his hippie-laden temple of Love and Prayer in Haight-Ashbury during the thriving era of the New Age society.

SOUL DOCTOR could also use a surgeon to cut out much of the extraneous and trite dance numbers, seemingly inspired from FIDDLER  and HAIR.  They intrude into the already diffuse journey from devoted Rabbinic scholar to a cultural icon, always searching to heal the souls of the world, one at a time, while unable to heal his own.

The start of his conversion, in this saga, is his meeting with a then-unknown Jazz singer, Nina Simone, a night club singer and church soloist..  She teaches him how to reach a person's soul through music.  

The show is a series of hokey and stereotypical encounters --- from a senseless shooting of a singing yeshiva student by a Nazi soldier, to his meeting with an insightful phony "blind" singer in Washington Square Park.  She gives him her guitar and teaches him the few chords he needs to know to become the singing sensation of the 60s.

Unfortunately, we never get to see the inner Shlomo Carlebach, or learn who he really is   and why he embarks on this secular journey to find his place in God's world.

Eric Anderson physically and emotionally embodies Shlomo, and performs the pop versions of Carlebach's many religious melodies with appropriate intensity.  He is a relentless performer in a role that deifies the religious soul doctor who couldn't understand his own personal unfulfilled dreams.  The large and versatile cast fully supports the somewhat empty search.

I guess I shouldn't fault a show billed as "Based on the Real Life Story..." for the many missing and untold facts --- some, negative --- of what made Carlebach the man he was.  It all depends on who is telling the tale.

This is a show that was created for a specific target audience --- basically aimed at Jewish patrons.  And may appeal to Nina Simone fans as her character flits in and out of Shlomo's life.  But I'm not sure how it will resonate with the usual Broadway theatre-goers.  At the performance I attended, a huge number of males were wearing yamulkas.

As an entertainment, it is pandering, and draws applause, and hand-clapping to the music, but it is short on revelation and long on stereotype.