Word: sokol
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...latkas is doing the same with the stage. Comfortable and at ease with the silliness with the lyrics, he sings with the glee of a Puck and the energy to match the Klezmer Band's clarinet. Also exceptional are the buffoon Gronam Ox and his wife Yenta Pesha (Marilyn Sokol). Shlemiel himself (Will LeBow) is shlemiely enough and improves in the second act when his role becomes more dynamic...
They mask and they are loud, never sentimental and wimpy. They command their characters and the stage with farcial abandon. Yenta Pesha (Sokol) throws giant plastic pickles at her husband, Gronam Ox (Levin), whenever be does something stupid. She wags her tongue, spits and gags attempting some of the more delicate words of the Yiddish language, and her flexible face will always tell you what she's (not) thinking even if her words do not. In other words, she knows how to put on a show; it has little to do with drama, at least the type proffered...
...everyone (including and especially his wife) gets assigned missionary duties by the village wisemen (read: idiots) only to lose his way and assume another identity. For reasons unexplained and unimportant everything somehow, oddly works out for the better, I think. The end. Cut back to the music; enter Sokol, Airaldi, Levin etal...
...best of all possible worlds Sokol, Airaldi, and Levin would carry the main strain of the show. Instead of musical theater there would be only approximations of cabaret style theatrical music shows. Then real entertainers like Sokol would never have to mix their song with Andrew Lloyd Weberesque drivel, and anyone tempted to drama would have to be good--and find good scripts. Why do real entertainers have to be the sideshow for insipid love-interest fragments which gets dragged and carted through the interruptions of festive show tunes posing as drama...
Through the choreography of chair dances, great moments with Sokol et al, and some well executed sequences with Airaldi, Schlemiel may be worth seeing for true fans of the genre. But one can never have too much of good music, especially when the alternative filler is drama of the substance and caliber that Schlemel has to offer. If only there was no need to wonder "What it?" about the future of musical theater; what a wonderful world it would...