STAGE REVIEW : The Surprising Freshness of ‘Catskills’

“You have a new hearing aid?”

“You don’t have to shout. I have a new hearing aid.”

“What kind is it?”

“Ten o’clock.”

To anyone who sees and hears most of the show-biz relics of the tummler days of the Catskills, the faintly desperate Hollywood cigar-butt brotherhood (who shall remain nameless in the name of charity) pathetically hanging on to a faded glory, the thought of a tribute to the golden days of the old Upstate New York hotels that spawned them would seem at best suspect and at worst dreary.

But “A Night in the Catskills,” the musical revue conceived and produced by Bernie Lawrence at the Las Palmas in Hollywood, takes the only possible angle of approach in resuscitating a form that now, in retrospect, seems corny and larded with sentimentality. Lawrence presents the show head-on, the aromatic steam of an old borscht still alive in its nostrils, as though time had never withered the ham of its performers, nor custom staled their jokes.

There is nothing ironic, deconstructivist, post-modern, or self-consciously ambiguous about this production. Jerry Graff’s four piece band backs three performers--Claire Barry, Bernie Berns and Sascha Torma--and although the show is a tribute to one of the great mother lodes of American entertainment, nobody depends on looking back. Barry, Berns and Torma aren’t dusting off a museum form. They’re there as they always were, belting and schmoozing and joking and schmaltzing, as though time never broke up the act. The freshness alone of “A Night in the Catskills” is astonishing.

Ann Bruice’s costumes, John Iacovelli’s Melrose Avenue-cum-Miami Beach set (the show is staged in the Pink Flamingo Room of a place called the Pincus-in-the-Pines Hotel) and Paulie Jenkins’ lighting together give the show a bright first-night ambiance, as though an eager and expectant audience of vacationing New York City shopkeepers and businessmen--and their wives and children--were settling in for an entertainment.

Bernie Berns supplies the comedy (and returns for a spiffy comedic pas de deux with Barry). He has the dry assurance of an old pro who knows that a good joke takes care of itself. “What’s selling short?” he asks his stockbroker. “It means you sell something you don’t own,” is the reply. “That’s fine,” Berns says. “I’d like you to sell Rockefeller Center.” Torma is an absolutely shameless sentimentalist on the violin who promises his heart to every woman in the house before plunging into languid and pained renditions of songs such as “La Vie en Rose,” “The Very Thought of You” and “You’ll Never Know Just How Much I Love You,” a first-rate stylist whose brio is comical and touching. He returns in Act Two for a vigorous, heroic rendition of “Exodus.”

Barry, a glamorous-looking woman with short blond hair and a charismatic touch of show-biz glitter, is an impeccable comedic actress who still has her pipes as a singer. She has a bright, generous voice and a firsthand knowledge of the luxuriant repertoire of American songs from the Big Band era that did so much to define the sentiments of a generation. Just the mention of Helen Forrest and “I Don’t Want to Walk Without You, Baby” serves a full emotional plate for a lot of people.

An early slide show and film segment shows how the Catskills became a vacation redoubt for European immigrant Jews whose ambitions began taking hold in the New World. And in their native music’s quarter-tones you realize how much of Jewish culture has always been rooted in the Middle East, which lends more poignancy to Barry’s line about “the wandering, the longing. . . .”

You can hear the call-and-response one-liners of these old comedy routines and the gentle fray of marital discord, at the root of every sitcom on American TV, and in the plaintive address of the majority of our stand-up comedians. The show plays to one’s adoration of cheap sentiment with the abundance of a thick deli sandwich. Finally, it has the exuberance of a people who know that they’ve truly escaped pogroms and persecution, that a new life isn’t a miserable threadbare ghetto fantasy after all. “We’ve come through,” the show says underneath. “Look at us. Americans and Jews, free at last.”

Maybe it’s that subtext that beams up this old show with such a surprising light.

Jules Aaron directs.

At 1642 N. Las Palmas Ave. in Hollywood, Thursdays through Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 4 and 8 p.m.; Sundays 3 and 7 p.m. Indefinitely. Tickets: $25; (213) 410-1062 or (714) 634-1300.