Rough-Edged ‘Sing!’ Takes a New Look at Holocaust

George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue”--one of the most beautiful pieces of music ever written. Right?

Well, listen again, keeping in mind the words of an Auschwitz survivor who, as a boy, kept himself alive in that horrific concentration camp by running messages for death doctor Josef Mengele while other prisoners were marched off to their murders.

“George Gershwin was a prophet” because, when he wrote the piece in 1924, he could hear the future’s awful sounds, the survivor says. “Can’t you hear them screaming?”

Howard Hersh Felder--who has been reporting the survivor’s words in his one-man theater piece and piano recital “Sing!”--then walks over to a concert grand and begins to play. And, suddenly, “Rhapsody in Blue” takes on a terrible sort of beauty, for we notice how its main theme, a peaceful rhapsody, is interrupted again and again by passages filled with skittishness, frenzy and, finally, terror. It becomes a history of the Jews--or any oppressed people--as their tranquil lives are blasted apart by persecution, pogroms and, ultimately, the unimaginable.

Felder’s “Sing!”--which plays through Sunday at UCLA’s Freud Playhouse--is rough-edged and only intermittently successful. Yet it insinuates itself in unexpected ways, enabling listeners to hear what they already know--whether music or Holocaust tales--in new ways.

Early on, the show seems none too promising, especially as Felder--a 29-year-old Canadian actor and concert pianist--relives his bar mitzvah by providing a running commentary on all the smart-aleck thoughts playing through his mind. Then, out of the blue, young Felder suffers an irreplaceable loss, and as his story progresses, we sense that this early exposure to death explains why he is so conversant with it when, in 1995, he is sent to the 50th anniversary of Auschwitz’s liberation to record survivors’ stories for Steven Spielberg’s Survivors of the Shoah Foundation.

Felder speaks as himself, as well as taking on the personas of Helmutt Spryczer, the survivor who muses about Gershwin; Dasha Lewin, another survivor; and a kindly uncle who is a sort of guardian angel. Felder doesn’t have the imitative gifts of someone like Anna Deavere Smith, but he capably effects these transformations. Director Kay Cole subtly modulates the action--turning it into music, making it sing.

* “Sing! A Musical Journey,” Freud Playhouse, UCLA campus, Hilgard Avenue at Westholme, Westwood. Today at 8 p.m.; Sunday at 2 p.m. $30. (310) 825-2101. Running time: 1 hour, 15 minutes.