By Eric George Tauber
SAN DIEGO — Hershey Felder’s Great American Songbook Sing-Along was the first course of a kosher feast served up at the Balboa Theatre kicking off the 22nd Annual Lipinsky Family Jewish Arts Festival.
There was one man with a grand piano playing to a pretty full and appreciative house. Hershey Felder is famous for his one-man portrayals of great composers: Monsieur Chopin; Beethoven, as I Knew Him; Maestro Bernstein and George Gershwin Alone. Felder got the inspiration during his Gershwin show. As he played the opening notes, he would hear voices from the audience singing, “S’wonderful, s’marvelous….” So, why not?
It says a lot about this country that so many of the songs listed in The Great American Songbook were written by immigrant landsmen. People like Irving Berlin –who ironically wrote White Christmas and Easter Parade, Harold Arlen & Arthur Schwartz (Wizard of Oz) and Oscar Hammerstein (Sound of Music) created some of the best-loved American music of all time. The Library of Congress has even named a prestigious award after the Gershwin Brothers and given it to another great landsman, Billy Joel. But I digress…
How did their being Jewish influence their music? Well, if you listen carefully, you can hear a common strain between a cantor’s Boruch atah Adonoy… and It ain’t necessarily so….
We could have used a screen scrolling the lyrics, but Felder preferred to feed us lines as he played. Like an unrelenting Hebrew-school teacher, Felder didn’t hesitate to playfully admonish us when our singing efforts seemed “pathetic.” But that just spurred us on to do better.
Interspersed between songs were stories. Some were impressions from his other shows. Some were back-stories from Broadway. Some were from Felder’s own life, and these were the most touching. My favorite was his last-minute casting as Golda in a Yiddish Theater production of Fiddler on the Roof.
This sing-along, like the festival, is all about community, fostering a sense of togetherness among strangers through shared experience. That night, we truly beheld how good and pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together –and sing together- in unity.
The Festival runs May 21st-July 26th with events at the Lyceum Theatre, the Oceanside Museum of Art, Moonlight Stage in Vista and the Encinitas Library. For a complete list, go to https://www.sdjewishworld.com/2015/04/07/2015-jewish-arts-festival-schedule-announced/
Tauber is a freelance writer specializing in coverage of the arts. You may comment directly to him at eric.tauber@sdjewishworld.com, or post your comment on this website provided that the rules below are observed.
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