Jewish Play Doesn’t Beg Off Universal Themes

The title “King of Schnorrers,” the musical opening tonight at the Westwood Playhouse, is best defined by a joke.

The schnorrer, one of the stock characters of Yiddish culture, is a beggar, strictly speaking, but a beggar with an attitude. Thus, in “Fiddler on the Roof” when Tevye has a bad week and tries to give the village schnorrer one kopeck instead of the usual two, the schnorrer snaps, “Because you had a bad week, I should suffer?”

Schnorrers, explained Judd Woldin, who wrote the play’s book, music and lyrics, don’t ask for alms, they demand them.

Schnorrers see themselves not as losers, but as benefactors who give other people the opportunity to obey God’s commandment to give to the poor.

“It’s your lucky day when you run into a schnorrer because he allows you to do a good deed,” Woldin said.

Set in the same 18th-Century London as Henry Fielding’s “Tom Jones,” the play deals with the intra-tribal warfare between the city’s aristocratic but often impoverished Jews from Spain, the Sephardim and the Ashkenazi Jews who had recently come from Eastern Europe.

A young Ashkenazi cabinetmaker falls in love with the beautiful daughter of DaCosta, the self-styled king of schnorrers. To win the Sephardic Juliet, the Ashkenazi Romeo must out-schnorr her father, an arrogant authoritarian who believes his unusual calling can’t be learned. “It’s a gift,” he insists.

The Westside production is quite different from the version that premiered off-Broadway in 1984, its creator said. New songs, characters and scenes have been added. But, according to Woldin, its essence has not changed.

The play is based on a novella by English-Jewish writer Israel Zangwill, published in 1894. Woldin said he was drawn to the material for many reasons, including its Jewishness, its universality and its attack on prejudice and materialism. He said he also liked the way “it makes fun of gainful employment.”

Woldin said he endured years of being asked when he was going to get a real job while he did the things he wanted to do, including performing with Lionel Hampton and other jazz greats.

“After years of defending myself, I finally found a hero,” Woldin joked of DaCosta.

Woldin, who won a Tony and a Grammy as composer of the musical “Raisin,” described “King” as lighthearted in tone but serious in its treatment of snobbery and hatred. Prejudice within, as well as between, ethnic groups continues to surface, he said, recalling how he once played at a German-Jewish country club that wouldn’t let Russian Jews become members.

“We don’t have enough trouble from the outside?” he asked.

Disturbing subject matter can often best be handled with humor, said Woldin, who believes people are more likely to listen to jokes than to sermons. “Mark Twain is the man I admire most, and he dealt with the most serious material using comedy,” he said.

For director Avi Ber Hoffman, one of the special pleasures of “King of Schnorrers” is its music. Hoffman, who also plays the young suitor, David, noted that the score combines elements of klezmer, the traditional music of Eastern European Jews, with classical Spanish music and even echoes of Bach and other great 18th-Century musicians.

Hoffman, 34, is unusually well-qualified to play the Ashkenazi hero. Although he also does rock and rap, Hoffman is the lead singer of the Don Byron Klezmer Orchestra, whose founder and namesake is a young African-American. Hoffman speaks Yiddish and Hebrew as well as English.

He grew up steeped in the Yiddish music, lore and literature that is a major element in the play, he said. The New York-born son of Holocaust survivors, Hoffman was raised with the awareness that Hitler had all but destroyed Yiddish culture in Europe and that its survival depends on teaching the language and traditions to a new generation.

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Hoffman made his professional acting debut when he was 9 at the Yiddish Theater in New York, but he insists he was born acting. He was delivered by Cesarean to the applause of 50 medical students who had been brought in to watch the procedure. “It was a very easy room,” he said.

Hoffman’s directing credits include “Songs of Paradise,” a production for Joseph Papp’s Public Theater that Hoffman describes as “ ‘Saturday Night Live’ Meets the Bible.” And he has starred in an independent film with Yiddish roots, “The Imported Bridegroom.”

But you don’t have to be Jewish to enjoy “King,” Hoffman said. One of the new additions to the play is an opening song that melodiously defines its terms, from schnorrer to Sephardim.

“King of Schnorrers” continues at the Westwood Playhouse, 10886 Le Conte Ave., through Feb. 28. Information: (310) 208-5454.