A Date With the Thomashefskys

Los Angeles, California – I was titillated by Boris and Bessie Thomashefsky and their grandson Michael. It was in public at the Disney Concert Hall and it was wonderful. It took over a century and was worth every decade. If only to have been there at the beginning to experience it all firsthand, but then again, there is such a difference between living through a historical period and learning about it later through skilled storytelling with time to digest. Even if I had been there, I still would have been high goyim and a shiksa to boot; macht nicht (“mox nix” = “whatever”). If it weren’t for Michael Tilson Thomas and his “Thomashefsky Project” in which he presents his painstakingly catalogued history of his grandparents, Bessie and Boris Thomashefsky, and their creating and nurturing of the Yiddish theatre in America, a whole portion of early Yiddish theatre history and American Jewish culture might have drifted away without ever being allowed to engage and enchant all ages and all faiths.

I’d heard of Thomashefsky from the line in the movie The Producers, where an actor is accused of “being some kind of a Thomashefsky,” and I’d heard of Jacob Adler and the Yiddish theatre, but only after Fiddler on the Roof opened and became an eternal success. I’d heard of Michael Tilson Thomas for decades because of him being such a musical wunderkind and protégée of Leonard Bernstein. Then I saw there was an upcoming performance of The Thomashefsky Project presented by Michael Tilson Thomas with the LAPhil at The Disney Concert Hall. Michael Tilson Thomas, the music director of the San Francisco Symphony for the past ten years? That Michael Tilson Thomas? Bessie and Boris Thomashefsky, who brought the Yiddish Theatre in America to the public and, as a couple and singly, developed it into an art form to be reckoned with? Those Thomashefskys? Count me in. Of course, I expected an evening of “yidle-didle” and klezmer music reminiscent of Fiddler on the Roof, or maybe a really gemutlicht bar mitzvah. I was so culturally and aesthetically off-base.

The show, which had its world premiere at Carnegie Hall’s Zankel Hall in New York, is like the pages of a scrapbook sprung to vivid life. The production design established the tone the evening as soon as we entered the always wonderful Disney Concert Hall, which accommodates any genre of performance. On the back wall was a huge projection of a vintage photo of Boris and Bessie. This screen was used throughout the evening as a backdrop, framing the projections of family photos, production stills, copies of scores, and sheet music, period posters, and other artifacts, assisting Tilson Thomas in warmly telling us the story of his grandparents. Oy! If it weren’t for Power Point presentations!

The stage he used was divided into two working sections of upstage and downstage; upstage is the orchestra and downstage is the performing area. The orchestra was separated from the downstage performance area by a waist-high black curtain on a brass railing which was “of the period.” There often wasn’t the luxury of an orchestra pit in some early theatres, and also the personality of the orchestra is an integral part of the performance. With our senses already piqued, although the show hadn’t even begun, the audience was having a good time just reminiscing with one another about what they were going to see. As I sat there waiting for the show to begin with a friend who’d never even had a bagel until she was thirteen, there was a very spirited conversation next to me about the differences between schlemiel, schmegegge, putz, and schmuck. Even though I know the differences from personal experience, this was one conversation I stayed out of.

Tilson Thomas youthfully strode on stage with his long, lanky body casually dressed in black slacks and a comfortable black shirt, shared some inside jokes with the orchestra, and warmly greeted us with a nod and a big smile…and from then on, we were his.

Of course, we began with the overture, which always whets the appetite. This one lived up to my expectations. First a trumpet and then expanding into a “Sunday in the park” sort of brass band, moving to full orchestra which nothing less than the word “zeal” can describe. With no pretense, he began involving us in the larger-than-life stories from his family which were supported with readings from the couple’s published works and from their autobiographies, vintage recordings of the duo, and a host of monologues and songs from Thomashefsky plays and musicals. He told us about American Yiddish Theatre in its earliest days, when the Yiddish theater was a pivotal institution for this generation of Jewish immigrants. It has even been said that it seemed to replace the synagogue, the school, and the social hall. Moreover, says Tilson Thomas, the Thomashefskys’ work casts long shadows that indelibly shaped American theater and culture for decades to come.

Boris and Bessie were bigger than life on and off the stage. Boris Thomashefsky was the first star of Yiddish theater in America. A flamboyant celebrity to New York Jews, “Boris pranced around Manhattan with Diamond Jim Brady, carried a jewel-encrusted riding crop, and rode in his Stanley Steamer through the crowded Lower East Side, tossing his top hat to his adoring fans.” Thirty thousand of those fans lined those streets for his funeral in 1939, five years before Tilson Thomas was born.

Bessie, who also emigrated from Ukraine, posed no less a formidable presence: At age 14, with just one year of formal education courtesy of a one-room schoolhouse in Baltimore, she ran away from home to become an actress, marrying Boris four years later. Eventually splitting up with Boris, Bessie found a new identity as the head of her own business empire, emerging as a professional — and personal — rival of her former husband.

All of this is brought to life for us with the simple set downstage of a grand piano for Tilson Thomas, an overstuffed chair and table on either side of the stage, all sitting on a rug. Tilson Thomas is joined throughout the evening by a host of actors to reenact Boris, Bessie, and their cohorts. We learn that Boris was a Yiddish Hamlet (Shakespeare “adapted and improved,” as the posters put it) and even a Yiddish Parsifal. At the turn of the previous century, when English-language theater was still censored in America, Yiddish theater wasn’t, and works by Ibsen, Gorki, Strindberg, and Shaw were often first done in Yiddish. Even Bessie’s Salome and Dance of the Seven “Schmatas” was allowed. We heard sentimental songs like “Shabes, yontef un rosh khoydesh” (Sabbath, Holiday, and New Month) from 1880′s Shulamis to the brassy, Americana-flavored exuberance of “Vatsh yor step” (no translation needed) from the 1923 production Berele Tramp.  Let’s not forget Tilson Thomas himself, during the evening, whimsically dancing with his gangly, flat-footed grace and singing what sounded like a Yiddish version of Vaudeville’s “Willie the Weeper.”

The Thomashefskys were also known for their more populist productions, called shund, which is Yiddish for “trash.” “It seems to me now,” Tilson Thomas says, “that the shund plays are the more interesting ones to know about.” Radical politics were espoused in those melodramas, as were the social issues of immigrants becoming assimilated, while at the same time attempting to retain their old culture and language.

“They had ‘hyper-stardom,’” says Tilson Thomas. Working together and separately, the Thomashefskys were a tornado-level force for the Lower East Side, on all levels. Not only were they richly celebrated actors, producers, and theater owners, but they sponsored the immigration of other Jewish artists, held fund-raisers for various progressive causes, owned a music publishing company, had their own magazine, and wrote newspaper columns. Eventually, each also published autobiographies that were serialized in competing Yiddish-language newspapers. “They were like the Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor of their time,” Thomas says with a laugh.

“The Thomashefsky Project” is truly a fascinating evening of entertainment. The show, re-creating a lost era through song, narration, film, and theater, resulted in a theatre full of smiles and clapping, and a deep sign of contentment and sense of fulfillment. Tilson Thomas ended the evening by sharing with us Bessie’s words of wisdom for making strudel: “First I comb my hair, then I wash my hands, put on a clean apron, and I make the strudel.” It’s the same approach Tilson Thomas says he uses before he goes on stage, and if you don’t get the metaphor, Azoy giat es! But, vahksin zuls du, tsu gezunt, tsu leben, tsu langeh yor. Don’t worry, just “vatsh yor step”!