Fyvush Finkel: Mensch for the Modern Masses : Stage: He’s bringing his recollections of a life spent in Yiddish vaudeville theater to the Westwood Playhouse tonight.

If you had never seen a picture of him, and though he did nothing for the moment but sit, it still wouldn’t have been hard to pick out Fyvush Finkel onstage during a rehearsal of “Finkel’s Follies” at the Westwood Playhouse (it opens tonight). He was the tall old gent folded in his chair like a big half-opened pocket knife, a bemused island of calm sunk amid the organized chaos of a musical number lurching to fruition through dropped papers, uncertain pit cues and a dancing couple at his side spinning and stepping to silent music all their own.

The performers around him--Mary Ellen Ashley, Veanne Cox and Avi Hoffman--appeared to be in their 20s and were dressed in casual street clothes. Finkel, whose body language seemed composed around one message--”Not to worry”--wore a dark suit and a subtly patterned bow-tie with matching pocket handkerchief. At 68, he looks like a fleshier version of the late Vladimir Horowitz, but he’s played a lot of waiters in his nearly 60 years in the theater (most recently in the New York production of “Cafe Crown,” for which he won an Obie) and that’s what he seemed most like now. A patient soul resting his tired dogs. His white socks completed the picture.

“Finkel’s Follies” is a vaudeville of Finkel’s own devising, or more accurately, his recollections of a life spent in the Yiddish vaudeville theater beginning in the days of the Great Depression in New York. His current tranquillity was probably owed to the idea that he needed to satisfy only two entities, himself and an audience, and since one of them wasn’t there, he didn’t have to fuss.

Not that this is always the case. He tells this joke on himself: “I’m performing a show one night. This married couple is sitting in the front row. I’m singing and dancing. The woman’s husband is asleep, snoring. I step up. ‘Please wake him up,’ I say to the wife. You can talk to them, you know, when it’s live. She says, ‘ You wake him up. You put him to sleep.’ ”

Finkel has played Los Angeles before, both in the 1966 production of “Fiddler on the Roof” at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion (“One of the most beautiful theaters in the country”) and in 1981, in the reprise of ‘Fiddler’ which opened at the Ahmanson and moved over to the Pantages (“Such atmosphere, the Pantages, such history. You can feel it.” Finkel rubbed his fingers together to denote the tactility of the Pantages’ ambience. Aside from those venues, Finkel the theater-man feels a fish out of water in Los Angeles). After that he played Mr. Mushnik, the owner of “The Little Shop of Horrors” through its New York run. In addition to “Cafe Crown,” those productions represent the bulk of his life in the theater for nearly the past three decades. “I never leave a hit,” he explains.

This time he is on his own, with a little help from his young cast, his son, Elliot, who is musical director (his other son, Ian, is musical arranger) and director Robert H. Livingstone (the show has just finished a run at New York’s John Houseman Studio Theater).

The gentle buoyancy of his manner is unmistakable. He is after all playing out one of the richest lodes in modern theater history, the Yiddish tradition of song and dance, jokes and stories, that reaches back in European history to the 11th Century and erupted with particular fervor in Eastern Europe in the late 19th, before it jumped the Atlantic in waves of Jewish immigration.

That it’s gutting out now-- shtetl life and the Yiddish language itself have little meaning to the majority of young Americanized Jews--is of little or no concern to Finkel. The tradition warms him like a topcoat. To him, it’s all present tense. His appearances before elderly Jews in their Florida condo complexes are just as vital to him as his legit venues.

He will joke about it, however. “I was with Molly Picon. The show was a big hit. This old lady from Connecticut came to the box office. She said, ‘My children drove me down and left me here. I want a seat.’ The box office man says, ‘We’re all sold out. Packed.’ ‘I’ll take standing room,’ she said. ‘There’s no standing room,’ he said. ‘You wouldn’t let an old lady like me stand?’ ‘Lady, we can’t let you in.’ ‘No wonder the Jewish theater is dying,’ she said. True story.”

Seated in the corner of a dressing room sofa, Finkel smiled and folded one leg over the other. He generates an Old World courtliness and tactful, discreet attentiveness. A kibitzer’s nose and occasional comedic roll of the eyes are his only concessions to humor--he doesn’t buttonhole you with gags. There’s a delicacy about him; when he raised an arm to impersonate a man who tames lions in a Jewish circus by playing the violin, you could almost hear the schmaltzy melody pour through his tremulous fingers.

“This show began when my son said Brooklyn College wanted me to do a program of scenes from vaudeville 45 years ago, translated into English,” he said. “We sold out. I said, ‘We should do this seriously.’ My wife, Gertrude, who’s a playwright, was like the historian and translator of facts. I’d been working in ‘Little Shop of Horrors.’ When that was over, this producer, Eric Krebs, said he wanted to do ‘Finkel’s Follies.’ That’s how it blossomed. I could feel the pulse of the audience. When Jewish people laugh, you can hear it for blocks. I wanted to show my Yiddish world that I was in since age 9. I was 44 when I went to work for Jerome Robbins in ‘Fiddler,’ but this other world was inside me.

“There’s some new music, but we’ve retained a lot of the old favorites, like scenes from the Depression, a marriage broker scene, a golden wedding anniversary scene, and my impersonation of Dracula, which is one of the funniest things I do.” (Coming from him, this last note sounded more matter-of-fact than grandiose.)

He spoke of joining the Clinton Street theater as a boy soprano (“My father wanted me to be an actor so he could get in for free”) and working until his voice changed. As an adolescent during World War II, he played Pittsburgh and Cleveland and knew he had arrived when he was called back to New York, where “they wrote the part for me of a tall lanky soldier who doesn’t get the goil. I created a following and remained there until I was 44, and went with ‘Fiddler.’ I didn’t become an overnight sensation until I was 60.” (He gave a memorable portrayal of a lawyer in Sidney Lumet’s “Q&A;” and says he always plays the videotape for his relatives when they come for dinner whether they want to see it or not. “My wife’s relatives,” he adds.)

Finkel doesn’t seem to feel like a curator of any kind of museum theater. “Yiddish theater contains heart,” he said. “It is feelings. It is fun. Even when you go to the synagogue, people are not somber. It’s uplifting. Same with the theater. And such great artists that we’ve had, they always gave everything they had on stage. Yet the comedies were funny, the tragedies really dramatic. I don’t care what kind of show it is--the heart is everything.”

He opened the door to give a cordial farewell, and the sound of the little orchestra poured bravely through. Some of it evoked the sardonic grubbiness of Brecht, but a noodling clarinet passage conjured the merriment and wisdom peculiar not only to a time and place, but to the flavor of a people. In the space of that sound, all distance between then and now seemed to vanish.