STAGE REVIEW : ‘Follies’ as Comfortable as an Old Shoe

Hollywood has a phrase for it: Special material. Fond, nostalgic, tenderly comical, utterly Yiddish special material is what Fyvush Finkel brings to the Westwood Playhouse in “Finkel’s Follies.”

What can you say about a lilting, lighthearted show that revels in the benignancy of its bad jokes, is blissfully unself-conscious about its homespun yarns and can dispense smiles, high notes and figurative chicken soup in equally generous doses? Nothing bad.

This is a let-your-hair down kind of an evening with twinkle Finkel and a truly supporting cast of three: Mary Ellen Ashley as your all-purpose Mama, Avi Hoffman as your all-purpose boychik , and Kim Cea as the pretty girl who can be all things to all people and even Irish (“Oy, gosh ‘n’ begorra!”).

The best thing about this sort of revue is that it knows what it is: an unpretentious couple of hours in the company of friends who can guess at the jokes you’ll tell. They’ve heard them before? Good. That’s the idea. It adds to the sense of family. This is not a program designed to amaze, but rather to reignite a few cultural sparks like Friday night candles. The fact that it doesn’t try to please everyone is what makes it special to the people it’s for.

So what if, even within that context, there are a few lulls and some of the banter begins to repeat itself? Nobody’s perfect. The philosophy here is that nobody has to be. The jokes may all start to sound like the ones Uncle Milton told at last year’s Seder, but the sprightly Finkel spirit endows them with benevolent freshness. With that pear-shaped body and that moonstruck grin and a name like Fyvush, you know he was born to make people laugh.

Highbrow humor this isn’t. And when Finkel tells us, “I was 14 1/2 years old when (Willie Howard) played this theater,” you can forget facts as well. This playhouse didn’t even exist when Finkel was 14 1/2. But that’s not important. What’s important is the act of recollection itself: the dusting off of “a Yiddish theater that began in 1876 in Romania . . . was full of fun and lots of laughs, but also had heart.”

Yiddish theater had its hey-day in the U.S. in the early part of the century and its key word was heart. Also heartburn. “Jews always eat before they eat,” says Finkel, so “Finkel’s Follies”--conceived by him, adapted and directed by Robert H. Livingston, with original music by Elliot Finkel and lyrics by Phillip Nammanworth--is a kosher-style smorgasbord of new and old Yiddish music, vaudeville, song and dance. It starts with the appetizers on how it all began (with Abraham Goldfaden, Boris Thomashefsky, Jacob P. Adler and all the other Adlers), continues with the jokes, the routines, the songs--and closes with a sugary souffle re-enacting the vows of a couple married for 50 years.

This theatergoer’s favorites were the traditional items, the genuine articles as the program calls them, invested as they are with a kind of natural bravery and wistfulness. But the program thrives on its variety. Ashley does a beautiful solo in “The Shawl” and a very funny one as a Yiddisha Mama from Napoli. Finkel is terrific in his impersonation of the late Menasha Skulnik and Hoffman and Cea are strong comedians who amply fill in the blanks in a number of other roles.

Director Livingston neatly balances the old with the new, the saucy with the sentimental, never losing track of the importance of the cultural tracery, but keeping things light and airy. The stage itself has the casual look of a rehearsal hall with racks of costumes and other props, all designed by Mimi Maxmen.

If this is your cup of borscht, try it. It’s the semi-genuine article and Finkel is better tonic than 12 bottles of seltzer.