He flies high and lone up there, only to be lowered down onto a throne set atop a pillar footstooled amid property plastic fronds and hunks of foamquarried marble, from that vantage to offer His answers to questions that’d been earlier offered to select audience members, memorized by them preshow (questions asked to themselves in their minds throughout the performance, just as He’s been practicing answers, silently rememorizing what’s anyway always fed to His mouth by a device spooned into His ear) only to be offered back up to Him as if so much sacrifice, too turned and false to be accepted by even the cheap seats and their miserly gods. What did the yadda say to the blah, Ben? Knock knock, who’s there, Jaffa orange you happy I didn’t say Eden’s apple? That, and how many chickens does it take to cross what. Are sons responsible for the sins of their fathers, another goes, and its answer is yes, or no, contingent, of course, on the humors of any sins in the question, on which fathers and sons. How many crickets can outsound a heckle. Though often the answers and questions are reversed for effect, as if He’s telling the joke of a fortune: don’t bother, the audience would say all as one, or half the house that and the other, I’ll just sit in the dark, and then how He’d have to ask, humiliatingly, and with a smile that turns His glossy teeth to mirrors of the audience’s yawning and sleep, how many mothers does it take to screw in a lightbulb; and then, how the houselights would abruptly die or be killed in a fizzle, and how there’d be murmuring, too, bleats and more booing less and less sheepish — the Maestro would pad. A hook might become crooked from the wings. This is how a shepherd loses His flock.
In the early days, the initial run to fleeing sense and proportion to say nothing of dignity, respect, or the holy, the profaning previews, the underrehearsed, the yetunfinished, not quite there — they’d tried to class it up a bit with witty bits, highbrowraising oneoffs that failed (they being the first three of the spectacle’s by now twelve directors fired, or quit, or else disappeared both), such as progressive readings of the Law by prominent voiceover talent, Talmudic debates accompanied by interpretive dance performed on one leg; disputations of the type once held between popes, papabili, priests, and the rabbinate, or with the sacredly simple, devolving into mere roundtable discussions in which no position’s untenable, arguments without consequence, nothing at stake at which any will burn and so, worthless; in which every opinion’s welcomed, countenanced and considered, given an air, suffusued by the pedalheavy, flatfingered pianist Siamese plunking selections from the opera of the Second Viennese — intermezzi between the acts of this revue initially abriged, then outright freely adapted (destroyed, copyright wronged, misprinted corrupt like the program notes crumpled by the showrooms’ shined exit doors); as scenes from The Tempest became interpolated with others of The Merchant of Venice under a entire script of provisionary titles, including Don’t Be Shy, Live Long & Prospero, A Few Pounds of Wet Flesh, and Such A Big Storm As You Wouldn’t Believe; in which, we’ll be quick and synopsize the summary, Ben as the Shylock sells the King of Sicily who he’s surprisingly Aryan, well-mannered and handsome as if, a dinghy secondhand known as the S.S. Putz, which founders then sinks, stranding the King and his entourage on an Island named Coney off the coast of south Brooklyn where they can’t speak the language, are forced to dress heavily, eat oversalted foods, and pay retail; an Island lorded over by the Shylock’s business associate and, as it happens, His brother-inlaw, widely known as the Third Assistant Rabbi of Besonhurst. In the final scene, the Shylock, the Rabbi’s onemensch agency, rubs His hands, as greedily stagedirected, then offers the King, in a memorable soliloquy, safe passage off the Island He’s saying,
SHYLOCK:
I’ll deliver all,
and promise you calm seas and auspicious gales,
and sail so expeditious, that shall catch
your royal fleet far off
for a hundred shekels
a head…audiences suffering this and other such Narrisch,
Mishegas (such as vocabulary tutorials: Nonsense, Insanity…a blackboarded, graybearded explanation of the Theory of Relativity as interpreted by a professor recently sabbaticaled from Cal State, the selection of an audience member for a stint upon the stage’s analysandical pleather, a Doctor Tweiss impersonator attending; regional stock actors and actresses reading drastically edited excerpts of poetry and prose in up to and including onehundred languages: the corpora of many, from that of Modernity’s most exalted — persecuted, the truth is — names to that of Moses’ God, Who’ll be theirs by curtain; to be followed by a Mary or two as a ventriloquistic Hanna & Daughter as featured in a potboiler of a cooking segment, before the mime’s hauled out yet again to demonstrate appropriate application of tallis and tefillin upon an attractive, intelligent, altogether responsive volunteer, preselected only after being pre-screened); husbands woken up by wives woken up by kinder eyes and ears unhanded throughout for the good stuff it’s called, though a majority of them’ve left before the encore to beat traffic, make the midnight buffet.
And so the pretense is dropped like a name: Israelien, I got blessed by Him once live and I got a stub here to prove it; the extravaganza more like the injoke — the extrava-ganze, the allinclusive, oneprice, oneticket, oneshow one-nighttime only now with more musaf…upcurtains reworked after the opening acts, and then the overture anthem, upon an expensive display of lasering lights along with the introduction of that comely couple known as Smoke & Mirrors, overlaid with Der’s recorded exhortative in a voiceover the quality of which’s hoarsed worse by the night, scratchier, worn to a hiss, welcoming everybody, introducing and thanking, mentioning merchandise, setting the tone. Segue to a set featuring the pit orchestra again with a sleight’s fast, slut-tier than flirty cut to the dancinggirls, the Benettes — chubby virgins, but intelligent, as it’s claimed in the playbill, whose looseleafed content makeshifts the program, crying that they’re kind at least, sensitively single, amazingly over-achieving; quoting praise lifted from the sag of their mothers: she’s a good girl, you’d do well to applaud — for a number that’s presented in two tableaux one of secular succubi the other of lilin; then, another set from the pit, this with an exciting lead shofar feature that culminates on an expert High C, the girls out again in change of costume, now with a little stretching (too tight, they’ve put on weight, it’s the roomservice): Benettes as peacocks doing a routine of sequined sequences, the whole rathskeller gig, the burlesk and the topless, bottomless, ever refillable cancan, them up in gildgirded birdcages, feathered nests and upskirty swings, behind a quartet drawn from their ranks referred to in not one review as the Four Whores of the Apocalypse tonight doing a few USOstyle girlgroup numbers if only for the Fourth’s hell of it, the last sake less of patriotism than of their nostalgia — anything, then, in the public domain: this a starry spangly requiem, without bigbeat, without backbeat, the tin not panned anymore but made silvery threnody, the beguine once begun now elegiacally ended, the trot become outfoxed to a dirge: don’t sit under the appletree / (with anyone else but me), anyone else but me, anyone else but me, no, no, no, then the orchestra again in a medley of your favorite zmirot you love to hate, harmonized alongside many of your least favorite nigunim you hate to love but have to own anyway and now made conveniently available to the public in one (1) boxed set between the banter, accompanying a candled ceremonial, roasttoasting memoryfest, a participatorily projected montage of “This Is Your Life…” a drum solo under the death of the Affiliated edited together out of stock Army footage and scraps schnorred off the remains of the networks; then, a hazy fading out on the anthem again, exitmusic for intermission, a pause for refreshments — an opportunity made the most of to hock them schlock in the lobby.