The heir prepares his inheritance for display

When Michael Tilson Thomas was growing up, some parents still told children who were acting up, “Don’t be a Thomashefsky!”

But even if the future San Francisco Symphony conductor was behaving, he was doomed to be a Thomashefsky -- those were his grandparents, after all, Boris and Bessie Thomashefsky, immigrant kids from the Ukraine who in the 1880s began their lives in this country rolling cigars and sewing clothes but who became founding luminaries of the Yiddish theater and wound up in a mansion in Brooklyn with a Turkish-themed floor, a Chinese floor and another with a “Monte Carlo Moonlight” motif.

Even the couple’s eventual scandals and split-up didn’t hurt their standing, for Boris went on playing romantic heroes in tights and performing his Yiddish Hamlet and Bessie went on playing wiseacre street girls or stealing Boris’ roles just to show the philandering cad who really had the talent.

That Tilson Thomas did not inherit their name was due to his father -- their youngest son -- who wanted to escape that madness and fled to Hollywood, where he went by Ted Thomas instead of Theodor Thomashefsky and began working on Roy Rogers westerns.

But who can really escape the past?

After the Yiddish theater faded, Bessie moved west too, and on weekends would visit her son’s home in the San Fernando Valley, regale his son with tales of the old days and re-create some bit of business, perhaps portraying a girl fresh off the boat who seeks help from a distant relative, only to be locked overnight in his office, where she’s terrorized by its strange hazards -- the typewriter, intercom and pneumatic tube. Sunday evenings, they’d put on a show in the living room with Bessie singing the old songs, often joined on piano by her precocious grandson.

So when she died in 1962, that grandson inherited more than her gold opera glasses inset with diamonds.

This evening the other stuff handed down to him -- the stories, songs and family soap operas -- will be the raw material for “The Thomashefskys: Music and Memories of a Life in the Yiddish Theater,” a concert at Carnegie Hall’s Zankel Hall. Tilson Thomas’ tribute to his grandparents is scheduled to be repeated only twice -- here Sunday, then June 29 in San Francisco -- but it’s the end product of years of work.

“I think it’s called obsession,” he says.

This week, Tilson Thomas was still boiling down the script, which tapped more than 100,000 pages of source material, during run-throughs at a basement rehearsal space on 42nd Street.

“The money poured in ... and Boris spent it,” Tilson Thomas narrated as Broadway veteran Judy Blazer dashed about the cramped room miming Bessie’s old roles, plopping on a new hat for each. A piano provided music-hall-style accompaniment, but a 17-piece orchestra will be onstage tonight to play the century-old arrangements that Tilson Thomas re-created, with the help of a computer, from surviving sheet music.

Tony Award winner Shuler Hensley (“Oklahoma”) plays the rollicking Boris most of the time, but a pair of young opera singers -- Israeli-born soprano Ronit Widmann-Levy and Romanian baritone Eugene Brancoveanu -- will perform songs from the Thomashefskys’ earlier shows, when the Yiddish theater still reflected its European roots more than the Tin Pan Alley sounds it would help create.

Boris was recruited to sing first in a Manhattan synagogue when he landed here at 12. His career took a turn when the president of the shul staged an operetta with prominent performers from the old country, only to have the female lead bow out. Boris pinned himself into her costume, sang her part and brought down the house.

He kept portraying women until his voice changed, then set out to find someone who could do those roles without pretending to be a girl. Bessie was 14, a seamstress with one year of schooling, when he made her his protegee and, in 1889, his wife.

Boris discovered his niche playing heroes in the likes of “Alexander, the Crown Prince of Jerusalem,” an epic with “vows of silence and poisoned rings and lifelong quests ... all that stuff,” Tilson Thomas says. This being Yiddish theater, there were kibitzers too, interjecting turn-of-the-century equivalents of “Get real!” or “Look who’s talking!”

At their height, the Thomashefskys had their own theater on 2nd Avenue, opened another in the Catskills -- the area’s first -- and published a magazine.

But Tilson Thomas does not ignore the underside to their tale. For Boris, “What was another fling?” he says, and Bessie put up with it until her husband made an actress 20 years younger his new “protegee.”

Bessie supposedly greeted him, “Welcome home. You look terrible. Good. I’m leaving you!”

But if Boris enjoyed $8,000 diamond studded garters, “Bessie had 17 secret bank accounts,” her grandson reports, and an eye for a certain young doctor.

Soon the pair were serializing rival biographies in the Yiddish press and heading rival theaters, Bessie vowing, “I’ll act you right off the stage.” Yet she never divorced him, and once said, “Boris and I were a mistake, but we were a beautiful mistake.”

The Yiddish theater declined after World War I, when immigration was curtailed and film began siphoning off entertainment dollars. But “crossover” was not in the cards for the Thomashefskys.

Boris tried Broadway in the ‘30s, and rehearsals of “The Singing Rabbi” went well. But he froze on opening night -- he could not manage a word of English. After that, he performed mostly Yiddish dinner theater, reprising his old roles, until he died in 1939. “They broke up,” notes Tilson Thomas, “and their world broke up.”

In putting together his tribute, their grandson worries that their over-the-top personalities will obscure the serious role they played in orienting new immigrants to this country. Bessie even wrote columns of beauty tips, one of which is read in the show by actress Debra Winger.

As Bessie neared 90, surviving friends would tell her she’d been a genius, Tilson Thomas says, but she’d counter that her work was no different from making strudel -- you just go in the kitchen and do it. “So who’s a genius?”

The conductor says her last words to him were: “Oh, Michael, so much is going to happen to you. No matter what may happen ... never ever sign a release!”

Tilson acknowledges that his father contributed mightily to the new show. Ted Thomas may have fled his heritage, but he tried to recapture it in his last years. He wrote 1,000 pages about his father that he called “Kaddish for a Giant.”

“In a way, this was kind of something I promised my father I would do,” Tilson Thomas says.

He formed a foundation in 1998 to carry out the Thomashefsky Project. Its executive director, Linda Steinberg, inventoried Boris’ papers, kept by the New York Public Library since his death, and had thousands of pages translated into English. She now hopes the concerts will lead to a TV documentary and perhaps fully staged revivals of the old plays.

But even without their efforts, the Thomashefsky name will linger. Audiences at Mel Brooks’ “The Producers” will continue to hear Max Bialystock bluster, “As the great Thomashefsky said to me on his deathbed!” And insomniac TV viewers who stumble on the Marx Brothers’ “Monkey Business” will still hear Groucho, when told he can’t stay in a closet, babble back how “that’s what they said to Thomas Edison, mighty inventor; Thomas Lindbergh, mighty flier; and Thomas-hefsky

So does their grandson. At his 60th birthday party in December, at a club in San Francisco’s North Beach, he did not play Beethoven for the guests. He got up and imitated a TV preacher scamming a few bucks from the faithful.

He is, in fact, the last of the line, the only surviving grandson of the Thomashefskys, with no children of his own. The bloodline ends with the conductor who has made their memorial his obsession.

“He is,” says Steinberg, “the heir.”