“I had the whole picture,” Sondheim explained. “He’s a tired businessman on his way home to Westchester, and he thinks, I’m going to stop and see a musical. The curtain goes up and six ballet-dancing juvenile delinquents in color-coordinated sneakers go, ‘Da da-da da da,’ with their fingers snapping. And he thinks, ‘What—? My God!’ … I can’t blame him! But that’s when I knew my career was in trouble.”

Another kind of Broadway artist might have seen this as a warning; for Sondheim, it seems to have been a challenge. If that “tired businessman” found the Jets and Sharks too unconventional for a musical, just imagine what he and his descendants thought about the stories Sondheim would go on to bring to the stage in a career that has spanned almost 60 years. There have been shows about marital anguish and loneliness (Company, Follies), about artists who sell out (Merrily We Roll Along) and cut themselves off from love (Sunday in the Park With George). Then there are the evenings devoted to the opening of Japan to the West (Pacific Overtures), presidential assassinations (Assassins), and serial murder and cannibalism (Sweeney Todd). It’s all a long way from “In your Easter bonnet/ With all the frills upon it.”

Yet this month, as Sondheim publishes the second volume of his lyrics—Look, I Made a Hat, with the subtitle Collected Lyrics (1981-2011) With Attendant Comments, Amplifications, Dogmas, Harangues, Digressions, Anecdotes, and Miscellany—it comes as the latest crown on a career full of honors. The first volume of Sondheim’s lyrics, Finishing the Hat, was a best-seller and a cultural event when it appeared last year. (The titles come from a song in Sunday in the Park With George, in which George Seurat sings about the costs and pleasures of artistic invention—making a picture of a hat “where there never was a hat.”) His 1971 show Follies is currently back on Broadway, the latest in a string of successful Sondheim revivals. Next year, City Center’s Encores! series will produce Merrily We Roll Along, a legendary flop in 1981 that, like so many Sondheim scores, has steadily gained in popularity thanks to recordings. He has won seven Tonys, seven Grammys, an Oscar, and a Pulitzer Prize.

No wonder that in 2010’s Sondheim on Sondheim—the latest of several revues drawn from his catalog of some 800 songs—Sondheim contributed a tongue-in-cheek number poking fun at his status as Broadway’s “God”:

God.
I mean the man’s a god.
Wrote the score to “Sweeney Todd,”
With a nod
To de Sade—
Well, he’s odd.
Well, he’s God!

It’s strange to think that a man so honored could remain a minority taste. Yet that is clearly the image of himself that Sondheim cherishes, and he insists on it in the two volumes of his lyrics, which double as a kind of self-portrait. In particular, he is obsessed by the longstanding charge that he is a cold artist, admirable but not lovable. As he goes on to say in “God”:

Smart!
The lyrics are so smart!
And the music has such heart!
It has heart?
Well, in part.
Let’s not start—
Call it art.

Arthur Laurents, the writer-director who worked with Sondheim on West Side Story and Gypsy, told Secrest, “I don’t think there’s any question that he is the greatest lyricist there’s ever been.” Leave it to such a lyricist to capture the whole dynamic of his career in a simple, even banal rhyme, “heart/art.” For the struggle Sondheim records in his collected lyrics is precisely the attempt to shift the musical from an affair of heart—naive beauty and emotion—to one of art—deliberate construction, in which every lyrical and musical choice serves the overarching theme.

Sondheim was not the first Broadway composer to make this shift. He refers often in his collected lyrics to the “Rodgers and Hammerstein revolution”—the attempt, starting with Oklahoma in 1943, to give the musical comedy the integrity of a play, by grounding the songs more deeply in plot and character. Musicals before Oklahoma—with the notable exception of Show Boat, which was also written by Oscar Hammerstein II—are almost never revived today; their songs may be standards, but their plots and characters were deliberately disposable. It is the decades after Oklahoma, the 1940s through the 1960s, that gave us virtually all the musicals now considered classics, from Carousel to Fiddler on the Roof.

Sondheim worked on two of these classics as the lyricist, West Side Story and Gypsy, and his lyrics for Gypsy are one of the high points in Broadway history. In Finishing the Hat, he remembers the time he played “Together Wherever We Go” for Cole Porter. When he reached the wonderful quadruple rhyme—

Wherever I go, I know he goes.
Wherever I go, I know she goes.
No fits, no fights, no feuds and no egos—
Amigos,
Together!

—he recalls that Porter gasped with pleasure and surprise at that unexpected fourth rhyme. “Any time I need an ego boost, I conjure up that gasp; it may well be the high point of my lyric-writing life,” Sondheim writes.

Continue reading: An artistic revolution

Madoff, of course, has not ended his life. But he is destined to spend what remains of it in jail, an appropriate way-station on the road to the hell he so richly deserves. The published accounts of his apparent indifference to the emotional pain and financial suffering he caused trusting friends, mostly Jewish investors, and innocent bystanders in his quest for—what?—resonate throughout the words and deeds that Rattigan wrote for his play’s anti-hero, Gregor Antonescu, a Depression-era Romanian-born crook and con man, brilliantly interpreted in a new Broadway production by Frank Langella.

It’s easy to see why the Roundabout Theatre Company thought the moment had come for a revival of this creaky drama, originally performed in 1963, a decade or two after Rattigan’s best work had been written. The company’s bet on this lesser play is vindicated thanks mainly to the astonishing Langella, whose riveting, flawless performance almost gives depth and definition to a character who lacks both. Why anyone at all should love such a driven, egomaniacal monster is a mystery that Rattigan does not even attempt to resolve (just as recent books and the 60 Minutes interviews of Madoff’s wife and surviving son do little to explain how such an evil man could successfully impress others as a loving father and a respected member of his community). But Langella’s silky villainy makes him irresistibly charismatic to the audience and those destined to be manipulated and betrayed by him—namely, almost everyone in the play.

Nobody but nobody plays bad as well as Langella. I’ve been devoted to him ever since he seduced Kate Nelligan (Lucy Seward) in John Badham’s 1979 film version of Dracula. His sexy, sultry vampire was magnetic, making the prospect of feasting on humans and an eternity of night-life clubbing almost alluring. Then came his portrayal of the disgraced president in Peter Morgan’s Frost/Nixon, another theatrical villain to whom he gave not just jowls but complexity and a sort of grandeur. But Langella has a tougher challenge in Antonescu, another variety of vampire who preys on the financial blood of the living. Rattigan has written him as a stick figure—a “Romanian-born radio and oil king” whose motto for financial survival is “confidence and liquidity.” Unable to love—it’s a “commodity I can’t afford,” Antonescu says—he is hard to empathize with, or even to hate. But Langella performs the impossible: He makes an audience unable to stop watching him.

The play revolves around Gregor’s desperate effort to save his financial empire by using his illegitimate son to help persuade a potential merger target, American industrialist Mark Herries (expertly played by Zach Grenier), not to abandon the planned deal upon which his solvency depends. Herries, like the late author, has an inconvenient secret: He is gay, or “queer,” an old-fashioned word uttered in another context by Gregor’s son’s girlfriend, Carol Penn (the able Virginia Kull, who struggles mightily with a poorly drawn character). So, Gregor’s plan is to use his son, who calls himself Basil Anthony, by introducing him to Herries not as his offspring, but as sexual bait. In the course of this play-within-a-play, Gregor suggests to Herries that he, too, is similarly inclined and that Basil just might be available to Herries if the price is right—that is, if the merger goes through.

Gregor, however, has a problem: He hasn’t seen Basil since a quarrel five years earlier that seems to have involved a revolver, a half-hearted effort by Basil to shoot his ruthless father, and a subsequent escape to New York to tend bar, play music, and flirt with “goddamn Bolshie” politics.

After dropping in virtually unannounced on Basil in his meticulously depicted, grungy Greenwich Village basement flat and begging for his help, Gregor fails to clue him in on his precise intended role in this financial rescue scheme. Basil (Adam Driver) is furious and crushed when he finally understands how his father has used him—obviously not for the first time. Throughout the play, Basil, as weak as his father is ruthless, struggles with his instinctive devotion to a man he knows is evil and whom in a particularly compelling moment of the play he denounces as “nothing.”

By the play’s end, Gregor is very much alone. His elegantly transactional former stripper of a wife (Francesca Faridany), grandly attired and perfectly coiffed, a “countess” whose title has also been bought and paid for, abandons him to his fate. So too does his efficient, self-serving factotum, an omnipresent right-hand man and enabler named Sven Johnson (played by Michael Siberry, who in his own smaller role is as compelling, perplexing, and chilling a character as his boss).

Crisply directed by the Tricycle Theatre’s Maria Aitken, Man and Boy may not be a great play. But thanks to the extraordinary Langella and a strong supporting cast, it is superb theater. After they’ve stopped watching re-runs of Ruth Madoff’s treakly performance on 60 Minutes, the Madoff family should go see it.

Wendy Wasserstein may not belong in the ranks of the greatest American Jewish writers, but like Neil Simon before her, she helped popularize the Jewish family romance by making it a subject for heartfelt and accessible comedy. And whether the characters in her plays are explicitly Jewish, as in The Sisters Rosensweig, or atmospherically so, like the heroine of her Pulitzer Prize-winning The Heidi Chronicles, Wasserstein left no doubt that it was her personal experience she was dramatizing.

Indeed, as Julie Salamon makes clear in Wendy and the Lost Boys (The Penguin Press, $29.95), her rather breathless new biography, Wasserstein was her own most popular creation. Fans reacted to her more like a character in a play or TV show than a mere playwright. “When we walked up the street,” remembered her friend William Finn, the songwriter best known for Falsettos, “all these sixty-five-year-old Jewish ladies would come up to Wendy, and she would talk to them. They’d talk about their husbands and their daughters, and when they left, I’d ask her who was that, and she’d say, ‘I have no idea.’ … People embraced her as if she were going to explain their lives to them.”

The key to Wasserstein’s appeal, however, was not that she had all the answers. Her gift was for tormented ambivalence—about daughterhood and motherhood, feminism, romance, achievement, and not least, body image. It’s rare, and illuminating, to read a literary biography in which so much attention is paid to the subject’s weight. It would never happen with a male writer, and that very fact helps to explain why Wasserstein’s open discussion of weight and food and dieting struck such a chord.

As Salamon shows, Wasserstein was not above using her candor strategically. In 1988, the actress Caroline Aaron, who had played a major part in the out-of-town tryout of The Heidi Chronicles, was replaced for the New York run. Salamon reproduces Wasserstein’s apologetic letter to Aaron, which begins, “Oy Gavalt!! I’ve had a baguette, a Saga Blue Cheese, and a nice bag of Reese pieces before I sat down to write this note.” It was a ritual abasement—a confession of weakness and a plea for sympathy—and it worked: “After reading Wendy’s words, Caroline Aaron had no doubt that she and Wendy would become even better friends.”

This is one of the useful and revealing anecdotes in Wendy and the Lost Boys, showing how Wasserstein could use weakness as a form of power. (There are many others that are much less useful—Salamon often seems to have put in everything her interviewees told her, and there were clearly a lot of people eager to talk about Wendy Wasserstein.) Even the book’s cover makes the point: It features a photograph of a ruefully smiling Wasserstein with her eyes closed and her palm planted on her face, as if she had just made some comical blunder. A born theater person, she had a sure instinct for dramatizing her incompetence: “Sometimes she forgot to wear a sanitary pad when she had her period and then walked around with stains on her dress,” Salamon writes.

Salamon tells us enough about Wasserstein’s childhood to make clear that her performance of helplessness was, at bottom, a defense mechanism. It may not be literally true that, when she won the 1989 Pulitzer Prize, her mother Lola went around bragging that her daughter had gotten the Nobel—this is one of many too-good-to-check stories that Wasserstein told in several versions (like the one about the time Joseph Heller introduced her as “the funniest girl in New York” and she promptly vomited). But Lola does seem to have been a world-class neurosis-inducer, a mother who set the bar for her children so high that even a Pulitzer seemed like a B-plus. She was also largely to blame for her daughter’s lifelong weight issues: In a horrifying detail, Salamon writes that Lola would walk down the street with the teenaged Wendy and tell her, “They are all looking at you and thinking, ‘Look at that fat girl.’ ”

From one point of view, this technique worked, since the Wasserstein children grew up to be very high achievers. Sandra became a pioneering female corporate executive, Bruce became a Wall Street billionaire, and Wendy became Wendy. (A third sister, Georgette, led a more normal life as a mother and innkeeper in New England.) Lola went around the house singing “There’s no children like my children,” to the tune of “There’s No Business Like Show Business”—one of many Mama Rose-like details in Salamon’s portrait—and she might well have felt justified. When Bruce was born on December 25, it was the set-up for a lifelong joke: “Bruce and Jesus Christ—the Messiahs, holy Jewish sons—shared a birthday.”

But this tiger-mothering (or is a more passive-aggressive animal called for?) exacted a high price. Its most dramatic casualty, Salamon writes, was Abner Wasserstein, who was born in 1940 and began to suffer from seizures and mental retardation at the age of 5. By the time Wendy was born, in 1950, Abner had been sent to a “home,” and she grew up unaware of his existence. She was also unaware that her older sister, Sandra, was actually Lola’s child by her first husband, George—the brother of her own father Morris. Parents of that generation believed in keeping secrets more than we do today, but by any standard, Wendy Wasserstein grew up in a family with a problematic relationship to the truth. And that’s not counting the more innocent, eccentric lies Lola indulged in—like cutting the line at Radio City Music Hall by telling people she was visiting from out of town.

It was all perfect training for a playwright, and Salamon shows that Wasserstein never stopped writing about, or mythologizing, her parents and siblings. In 1973, her early play Any Woman Can’t (already a characteristic title) dissected her brother Bruce’s marriage—so successfully that, after seeing it, his wife, Lynne, filed for divorce. Twenty-seven years later, Old Money was a thinly veiled commentary on Bruce’s plutocratic milieu and his relationship with his son. And the three sisters Rosensweig are clearly versions of Sandra, Georgette, and Wendy Wasserstein—the corporate conquistador, the homemaker, and the commitmentphobe.

The most intimate sections of Wendy and the Lost Boys show how Wasserstein’s ambivalence about romantic commitment played out in real life. The title refers, of course, to Peter Pan—Wasserstein was “one among the many babies [in the Baby Boom years] named for Peter’s beloved friend Wendy Darling”—and the “lost boys” in question are the gay men with whom Wasserstein had her closest relationships. The allusion is in poor taste and sets an unfortunately whimsical tone for a story that is actually quite sad.

Wasserstein repeatedly fell in love with openly gay men she met in the theater world, a distinguished list that included Christopher Durang, Andre Bishop, Terrence McNally, and Nicholas Hytner. In each case friendship turned into a quasi-romantic, quasi-sexual bond: “Wendy always tried to say, ‘Oh, let’s get married, let’s have children, and be sort of lovey-dovey,’ said Andre [Bishop]. I think she thought, ‘At some point he’ll marry me and we’ll have a strange but happy relationship.’ I thought it too. Seriously. I had nothing else in my life.” But inevitably, these relationships foundered on the bedrock of sexual incompatibility, and the men found love with other men—as happens to Pfeni, the Wendy figure in The Sisters Rosensweig.

Salamon doesn’t venture a direct psychological explanation for all this, but after reading her portrait of Wendy Wasserstein, it isn’t hard to imagine one. Convinced of her unattractiveness, still under the sway of her parents and siblings, Wasserstein shielded herself from romantic intimacy by falling in love with men she knew would not respond to her sexually. Not until the very last minute, at age 48, did she become a mother through artificial insemination, keeping the identity of her child’s father a closely guarded secret. Salamon does not reveal it, but she does show that Wasserstein tried for a long time to have a baby with the costume designer William Ivey Long—a failed effort that ended in bad feelings. “I don’t feel defined by being gay,” Long told Salamon. “Michelangelo wasn’t a gay artist. I have never felt I am a gay designer. But with Wendy I felt I was part of a big group of gay men, part of the people who had disappointed her. I kept thinking, ‘Why didn’t you go after straight men if we were going to fail you as a group?’ ”

It is an unusually candid moment in this usually fulsome biography, and it hints at the deep tensions in Wasserstein’s glitzy circle of friends. After reading Wendy and the Lost Boys, it’s easy to feel that the best play about her life has yet to be written—and that it wouldn’t be a comedy.

As the 20th century reached its midpoint, tunesmiths moved elsewhere. (The Brill Building, famously home to later generations of songwriters, is just north of Times Square.) Old buildings came down while new ones went up, and our portion of West 28th is now a bustling commercial hodge-podge bookended by the flower district to the west and the perfume district to the east. To learn more about our new neighborhood—where Emma Goldman founded her anarchist magazine, too, and Zero Mostel had a painting studio—Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry spoke to Jim Mackin, a New York City historian and tour guide, about West 28th Street, how specialized commercial districts come into being, and Irving Berlin’s first big hit. [Running time: 16:17.]

A Triple Bill by Woody Allen, Elaine May, Ethan Coen Heading to Broadway [NYT]

For the uninitiated, Sister Act tels the tale of Deloris Van Cartier, originally played by the EGOT-winning Whoopi Goldberg. After witnessing her lover and manager take out a snitch, the night club songstress must get herself to the nunnery via police protection. And so Sister Mary Clarence is born. Hilarity ensues as she adjusts to the habit while bringing tight beats to the church choir and inspiring the community to wake up and pay attention (oops, that’s from Sister Act 2, the one starring one Lauryn Hill.)

Mor Rossler, 27, watches Sister Act whenever it is on the tube. The Monsey, New York, native who teaches at a Ramaz first saw the film in theaters and remembers vividly watching Sister Act 2 with her friends. “My family is musical and I love Gospel music, it’s just so soulful,” she said. “They’re so nice. I feel bad singing them so I just ignore the words.”

Lyle Rothman, a fourth year rabbinical student at Hebrew Union College, enjoys the Isaiah imagery of “Hail Holy Queen.” Rothman got down with the movie while spending a year living in Israel as part of his ordination. “I may have sung ‘Hail Holy Queen’ with rabbinical and cantorial students on a Galil tiyul [trip] sitting around a campfire,” recalled Rothman. “But we also sang ‘Moshiach, Moshiach, Moshiach.’”

Whoopi Goldberg Bringing ‘Sister Act’ Musical To Broadway [Black Voices]

Here are lyrics to four songs.

“Some Hebrews”

MOSES
[Spoken.] You just don’t get it, do you, Aaron? Anyone who stays in Egypt is dead! If I die, it won’t be from slaving. It’ll be from fighting, to get up and get out!

Some Hebrews can get a thrill
Hauling stones up a sandy hill
That’s OK for some Hebrews
Who don’t know they’re alive

Some Hebrews can thrive and bloom
Digging pits for some Pharaoh’s tomb
That’s perfect for some Hebrews
For four centuries or five

But I at least gotta try
When I think of all the sights that I gotta see
And all the prayers that I gotta pray
All the tables I gotta eat at
Come on, Aaron, whatta you say?

Some Hebrews can get their kicks
Cutting straw and then making bricks
That’s peachy for some Hebrews
For some weak, dumb Hebrews to be
But some Hebrews ain’t me!

I had a dream
A wonderful dream, Aaron
All about God in a bush that was burning
That’s all that it took for the wheels to start turning

I had a dream
Just as real as can be, Aaron
There I was in Mr. Almighty’s office
And he was saying to me, “Mose,
Turn your old staff into a serpent
Plagues of frogs and blood in the river
Send a cloud of locusts to Egypt
Boils and hail and death to the firstborn
Go to Pharaoh, if he’s in pain then
You’ll be on your way back to Canaan!”

Oh, what a dream!
A wonderful dream, Aaron
And all that I need is 88 bucks, Aaron
That’s what he said, Aaron
Only 88 bucks

AARON
[Spoken.] You ain’t getting 88 cents from me, Moses

MOSES
[Spoken.] Well, I’ll get it some place else! But I’ll get it! And I’ll get my people out!

Goodbye to the Desert Sinai!
Good riddance to all the rocks that I had to carry
All the bricks that I had to cart
All the mummies I had to bury
Hey, Red Sea, get ready to part!

Some Hebrews sit on their butts
Hope for freedom, but got no nuts
That’s living for some Hebrews
For some dumb bum Hebrews I suppose
Well they can stay and rot!
But not Mose!

“Little Pascal Lamb”

YOUNG FIRSTBORN EGYPTIAN CHILD
Little blood, river blood
You left us with nasty mud
Little frog, little frog
Your croaking freaked out my dog
Little louse, little louse
Infected our whole damn house
Little cow, little cow
You’re no longer with us now
Little boil! Little boil!
You’re giving us all the blues
We look in the mirror and recoil
The dermatologists all are Jews
Little hail, burning hail
The firewall did not prevail
Little night, endless night
Will we ever again see light?
Will we ever again see—
[The Young Egyptian Firstborn Child falls down dead.]

“Everything’s Coming Up Moses”

MOSES
[Spoken.] It’s time we show them what Moses is really made of, what I really got inside me. Finished? Ha! This is only the beginning!

I had a dream, a dream about you, Aaron
It’s gonna come true, Aaron
You think that we’re through, but Aaron—

Lift the staff! Part the sea!
We got nothin’ to do but be free
Manna falls from the sky
Honey, everything’s coming up Moses

No more fights, no more fuss!
It’s the number we call Exodus!
Gotta rush, gotta fly
Honey, everything’s coming up Moses!

On to freedom, build your own pyramids
Jews don’t need ’em, they got a prophet to lead ’em!

Don’t need light! Don’t need bread!
Got a pillar of clouds overhead
We’ll be fine, we’ll be great
We’ll kvell, just you wait
That burning bush will never fade from view!
Honey, everything’s coming up Moses for me and for you!

We can do it, get to the old Promised Land
We can do it, Moses is gonna see to it!
Don’t need light! Don’t need bread!
Got a pillar of clouds overhead!
Lift the staff, part the sea
I can tell, we’ll be free
And no one’s gonna stop the freaking Jews!
Honey, everything’s coming up Moses and Miriam
Everything’s coming up farfel and matza brei
Everything’s coming up brisket and seder plates
Everything’s coming up Moses for me and for you!

“You Gotta Make a Living”

WISE SON
You can sing Aleinu
Til they say Dayenu
Bench at the bench til you’re bent
But you gotta make a living
If you wanna make your rent
You can sacrifice a heifer
Ostracize a leper
Spend Yom Kippur on your feet
But you gotta make a living
If you want your kids to eat

You can oy, you can oy
You can oy oy oy
It ain’t such a draw
Me I oy, and I oy
And I oy oy oy
In my practice of the law
My arguments are thrilling
And I ain’t even billing
I was first in my class at the bar
Make yourself a living
Israelites, and you’ll go far

WICKED SON
You can oy, you can oy
You can oy oy oy
It won’t make you well
Me I oy’d, and I oy’d
And oy’d, oy’d, oy’d
But I did it at Cornell
Tell me it’s farkakte
I’m still a fancy doctor
And clearing half a million a year
Make yourself a living
You can say goodbye to fear

SIMPLE SON
They can oy, they can oy
They can oy oy oy
That ain’t the golden goose
Me I oy, and I oy
And I oy oy oy
Yep, you guessed it—I produce!
Once I was a failure
Now I’m L.B. Mayer
For everything from films to Broadway
Make yourself a living
If you wanna win the day

ALL
Be a professional
Any old profession’ll
Earn you a house and a car
It’s easy to be giving
When you make a living
Can’t you see how happy we are
Make yourself a living
And you, Jew, can be a star!

If you’re already watching Glee, the most bizarre, delirious, delightful show currently airing on network television, well, then, good for you. You already know what I’m talking about. Feel free to skip the rest of the column and set your DVR for tonight’s episode. If you’re not, I swear to you that millions of Americans watched these events last week, rubbed their eyes, and continued rubbing throughout the episode as this rugged football player, Noah, paid court to Rachel by singing a Neil Diamond song. Later, after the brief relationship soured, Noah looked mournfully into space and then contemplatively perched a yarmulke on top of his mohawk. This all took place, it should be repeated, on network television—indeed, on Fox.

Glee is the brainchild of Ryan Murphy, who created Nip/Tuck. That previous show featured two non-Jewish plastic surgeons in Miami—an unlikely possibility, to say the least—so one might be forgiven for assuming that his new cult hit, which revolves around a cast of singing and dancing misfits in an Ohio high school that’s stocked with your usual John Hughes-ful of jocks and cheerleaders, would have very little to do with matters Jewish.

One might be forgiven, but one would be wrong. Some of this, I suppose, has to do with casting. The show’s charismatic female lead, Lea Michele (born Lea Michele Sarfati), who’s got a voice with enough power to supplant Middle East oil, has been playing Jewish roles for years: she was Tateh’s daughter in the original Broadway production of Ragtime and Shprintze, one of Tevye’s daughters, in the 2003 Broadway revival of Fiddler on the Roof. Lea’s ethnic looks clash nicely with the blond midwesterness of the “Cheerios,” the cheerleaders who serve as her ostensible rivals on Glee.

But there’s more than that.

The show is about misfits, and the ragged chorus that makes up the McKinley High School glee club is—and suffers a bit from being too much of—the “one in every category” sort: there’s an African American, an Asian American, a gay student, and a nerd in glasses who, to up the ante, is also in a wheelchair. In fact, without providing any spoilers, it’s fair to say that one of the show’s themes is that anyone—even the jocks—can be a misfit, a target for an unerringly aimed Slushee to the face. So if all these other minority groups are included, a Breakfast Club-like lesson in how outsiders become a community—presumably with a different ending—how could you leave out the Jews? They’re part of the story of minority America muscling their way, in their difference, to center stage, to the heart of American entertainment.

But it’s probably more than that, too. The show’s bones are in Broadway; and—in a truth espoused by William Goldman in his backstage classic The Season 40 years ago and more recently and pungently in Eric Idle’s score for Spamalot—you won’t succeed on Broadway if you don’t have any Jews. Jews are as much a part of the DNA of American musical theater—and, as such, of Glee—as, well, gay men. The episode in which the show’s flamboyantly gay character, Kurt, leads the football team to success by getting the players to dance to Beyonce’s “All the Single Ladies” (and then successfully comes out to his gruff father) is a sly suggestion of the real forces that make Glee move (and shake, and pop their hips, and do jazz hands). Why can’t a frustrated love story between two self-proclaimed hot Jews be next? It’s what the people who pack those seats on the Great White Way come to see.

Whether this’ll be the case in a much broader medium, of course, remains to be seen. It’s also an open question whether these stories will be occasional moments, relegated to the chorus behind the tales of Finn and Quinn, the singing quarterback and cheerleader. I tend to think not, though. Thankfully, we’ll have the chance to find out: a month ago, Glee became the first new fall series to get picked up for the full season.

Jeremy Dauber is a professor of Yiddish language, literature, and culture at Columbia University.

During the late 1960s, when Washington, D.C. native Jane Goldberg was a student of the historian and playwright Howard Zinn at Boston University, she thought she was on her way to becoming a socially conscious journalist who would help to realize Zinn’s pronouncement that, “If you can’t liberate the world, you must liberate the ground upon which you stand.” Then came Goldberg’s eureka moment, in the unlikely form of a book review: Jack Kroll’s account, in Newsweek, of Arlene Croce’s landmark study The Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers Book. Goldberg had never even seen an Astaire-Rogers film, but the article inspired her: She sought out other books on tap dancing, and enrolled in tap classes. And then she started to seek out the wonderful, famous, and, for the most part, African-American tap soloists (John Bubbles, Charles “Honi” Coles, Chuck Green, her eventual teacher and stage partner Charles “Cookie” Cook) whose golden age had been during the big-band and bebop jazz years of the 1930s and 1940s and who, thanks to the advent of television and rock and roll, had become sidelined from show business.

Ever the Renaissance woman, Goldberg put herself at the service of this older generation to bring them back into the limelight, arranging tap festivals, gathering oral histories, and, as in the case of Cook, performing with them, too. Her 40-year tap odyssey took her across the United States, to the Hollywood set of Nick Castle’s movie Tap (for which she served as a consultant and in which, at the request of her longtime friend and star of the film, Gregory Hines, she also appeared), and as far as India, where she brought her “rhythm-and-schmooze” tap act to quizzical audiences in Nehru jackets and saris. Some of her many achievements and tribulations, along with illuminating portraits of tappers she has spent time with—from Ginger Rogers to Meredith Monk—make terrific reading in her new memoir, Shoot Me While I’m Happy: Memories from The Tap Goddess of the Lower East Side.

You say that you came to an understanding of the difference between Broadway tap and jazz tap, and between show tap” and the real thing.” In tap dancing, what is the real thing”?

The first time I heard that expression was when Sammy Davis, Jr. used it in the movie Tap. He said, “In tap, we don’t go ‘5-6-7-8.’ We go, ‘UH, uHH. Bad um UH, uHH badum.’” Now, I just took the line the way he said it [that "real" means]: “black,” though he never said “black.” He might have meant that “real” means more syncopated and more…uncounted. That “real tap” was more old-school-on-the-streets, that it wasn’t taught, that it was self-taught.

Gregory Hines, Jane Goldberg, and Sammy Davis, Jr.

Dance teachers would never say that what Gregory [Hines] was doing was “improvising.” You know the steps and you pull them out and do them differently every time. That’s why Gregory wanted the word “improvography” to be more popular than it is. He used to have trouble with directors, say, for TV. They’d say, Where are you going to land?” And he couldn’t say exactly. He knew what steps he was going to be doing, but they were never the same twice…He used “improvography” in the credits of The Cotton Club and Tap. Savion [Glover] even named his show Improvography, but he never explained where the word came from.

For “show tap,” it matters a lot how one looks. You used to perform in high heels—wasn’t that constricting to the percussive dance effects you could produce? Isn’t “the real thing” in tap also about the many subtle changes of texture in the sound?

I don’t think you’re looking for an individual sound when you’re auditioning for a Broadway show. The Honi Coles school of rhythm tap, and that world in general, was about getting your own sound, as an individual.

Women were all wearing men’s shoes. I could buy a pair of Capezio 360 low-heel men’s tap shoes for $40, and I had to decide whether $40 for an hour of psychotherapy was worth it, when I could get a pair of Capezio tap shoes. I remember making that distinction: $40 for 40 minutes, or $40 for a pair of 360s with 20,000 taps in them!

Wasn’t the issue of costumes and shoes for women in tap the occasion of some arguments with your friend Gregory Hines?

I think he did come around. He focused so much on women and wardrobe, and I said to him, “Why don’t you just let us decide what we want to wear?” his idea of sexy was not loose and comfortable. What was so ironic was that I was the one who danced with cleavage and high heels, but I was still defending the loose and comfortable.

Savion Glover sounds like an entire orchestra when he’s tapping.

There was a very famous scene at a Grammys, when Savion was pitted against the Irish dancer, the famous Michael Flatley. Gregory said that was really important time for Savion: they challenged each other, and it was clear that Savion had much more technique.

You use the word “challenge” when you write about tap. Would you explain what the reference is there?

Tap, at its red-hot core, is about competition and challenge. Guys younger than Gregory may not like the challenge mentality, but they still know who the champ is. They like to think that they’re as good as Savion; and they are all really good. But in that black male tradition—tap and boxing came out of the same era. A couple of tappers from Bubba Gaines’s act were also boxers.

The challenges that interest me the most are the ones that don’t even happen on stage but that you just hear about. Like this guy, Groundhog, who was from Cincinnati. [Jazz dance historian] Marshall Stearns set up a venue at The Village Gate with Chuck Green and others. And he literally beat all the guys, and then he just fled back to Cincinnati. He wasn’t in it for the profession; he was in it just for the feet!

There are so many Jews, whom you discuss in your book, who have been part of tap—Carl Schlesinger, Mura Dehn, Sammy Davis, Jr., of course, who converted. And it worked the other way, too. Honi Coles goes to Seder at your house. . .?

And he knew more Yiddish than I did, because he had worked in the Catskills. He really did. All those dancers! Look, Jennie Grossinger hired all of them!

Would you speak a little about your Hebrew tap”?

I was hanging out with a girlfriend in a temple in South Orange, New Jersey, and I just started tapping to, “A-DON o-LOM, a-SHER Mo-LACH.” I got into that, but I never thought I’d use it in my act. Then I did a [demonstrates] “Ba-RUCH, a-TAH, A-don-AI ch-ch-ch-ch.” That’s a soft shoe. Cookie [Cook] really liked that, and he got off on doing his roots in sand dancing. So that was part of our act.

Yeah, I found that Hebrew was very conducive to tap dancing. I used to love to go to Hebrew school, just for the singing parts. You could really tap to it.

What music is tappable and what is not?

Savion asked me once why the guys I worked with, who were from the 1930s and 40s, didn’t tap to the music they were listening to now, rather than stay in swing music. In other words, Buster Brown might listen to Mel Tormé, but he’d only tap to his work song, “Cute” [a Neil Hefti chart for Count Basie]. I think jazz lends itself to tap, because the two really evolved at the same time. I can tap to Bob Dylan, so I am answering Savion’s question about tapping to music that I listened to, when I came of age. But I think the purest sound—I’ll get in trouble for this—is really jazz music and tap.

A friend just sent me CDs from the 1980s, and I’d listen and list off “tappable” or “not tappable.” It just depends on the song. Rock is a little bit square. Van Morrison is very tappable, Dylan. And I’m still very old-school: I don’t play CDs [in classes]. I teach to my singing.

Watch a clip from the companion DVD to Shoot Me While I’m Happy

“I gotta tell you, Rabbi, when you’re a geek, it’s the loneliest thing in the world,” sings Evan, the teenage protagonist of composer and lyricist Jason Robert Brown’s new musical, 13. Transplanted from New York City to Indiana in the wake of his parents’ divorce, 13-year-old Evan is anxious to establish a new identity. He’s the only Jew in school, and as far as he’s concerned, the most important detail of his approaching bar mitzvah is whether the popular kids will attend his party.

For the 36-year-old Brown, who created the musical with children’s book author Dan Elish, the themes of 13—the adolescent struggle for self-definition and the competing desire for popularity—were all too easy to recall. “The sense of feeling dislocated, the sense of feeling like I don’t belong…that turns out to be very close and very real,” Brown said in a phone interview from Los Angeles, where 13 is playing at the Center Theatre Group/Mark Taper Forum. “And not just from when I was 13—my sense of being dissociated from whatever the larger community is, the ‘popular kids,’ turns out to be very close to what I feel a lot of my life.”

If there are any “popular kids” in the musical theater world, it seems like Brown ought to be one of them. Hailed as a musical theater wunderkind, he won his first Tony, for the Broadway musical Parade, while still in his twenties. With his poppy yet sophisticated music and smart, conversational lyrics, he was one of a handful of composers considered to be heirs to Stephen Sondheim. But in 2003, after a string of his productions succumbed to chilly reviews and quick closings, Brown left New York determined to give up writing for the theater. 13 marks his return to the stage, his first full-length musical in five years.

13 did not start out as an autobiographical project for Brown, who grew up in Rockland County, New York—where Jews are far from exotic—with parents who never divorced. He recalls in his program notes that he skipped ahead a grade when he was ten, “and the social fallout from that was absolutely toxic.” After a few years studying at Eastman School of Music, he left without his degree for New York City, where he performed in piano bars, arranged other composers’ work, and established himself as an up-and-coming composer at a time when musical theater was particularly hungry for new voices. He also developed a reputation for egotism and arrogance among theater insiders, perhaps fueled by his rapid professional rise.

In 1995, an off-Broadway revue of Brown’s work, Songs for a New World—a loosely constructed sequence of ballads, comedy songs and rousing gospel numbers—brought him to the attention of legendary Broadway producer and director Hal Prince, whose daughter, Daisy, had directed the show. Prince was developing a musical for Lincoln Center about the 1913 trial and lynching of Leo Frank in Atlanta. Longtime collaborator Stephen Sondheim had been slated to compose the score, but when Sondheim changed his mind, Prince chose the 25-year-old Brown as his replacement—the professional equivalent of skipping a grade.

Brown’s score for Parade is sophisticated and tuneful, drawing on traditional American song forms and featuring his signature piano-driven arrangements. Both lyrics and music establish Leo’s alienation by playing up his Jewish identity: “God—all the noise, and on Yontiff yet,” he grumbles when his work is interrupted by the Confederate Memorial Day parade that gives the show its name. At the musical’s conclusion, noose around his neck, Frank sings a mournful a cappella Shema. “Even popular song of the 20s was very much Jewish/vaudeville-oriented,” Brown points out, explaining why the Jewish content in Parade came easily for him. “Trying to find a sound that was authentically Southern was the harder task.”

Brent Carver (foreground) in the Lincoln Center Theater production of Parade. (Photo: Joan Marcus).

The show had a promising pedigree. Its book was by Alfred Uhry, making Parade the third, after the non-musicals Driving Miss Daisy and The Last Night of Ballyhoo, in his loose trilogy of shows about Atlanta Jews. But the expensive, ambitious “book musicals” (such as Follies, Sweeney Todd, and Evita) Prince was famous for bringing to Broadway were a dying breed by the time Parade opened in 1998. With a large, pricey production and a less-than-cheerful premise, Parade needed serious critical and popular support to survive. The major reviewers were complimentary but unenthusiastic; many complained that the show was too preachy, and the central character of Leo too slow to come alive. Parade‘s handful of awards—including the Tony recognizing Brown’s richly dramatic score—came months after its 84th and final performance.

Brown’s follow-up project, The Last Five Years, an intricately constructed, almost entirely sung-through portrait of a failed marriage, premiered in New York in 2002. With a two-person cast, a contemporary setting and sound, and an intimate off-Broadway production, this solo effort was different from Parade in every way. Cathy and Jamie, the protagonists, tell their stories in opposite directions; Jamie journeys from first date to divorce, while Cathy follows a reverse chronology. During the final number, while Jamie lists his reasons for ending the marriage, Cathy reflects hopefully on their first date. The Last Five Years was inspired by Brown’s own divorce and Jamie, a suburban New York Jew who finds professional and artistic success in his early 20s, is plainly a rough self-portrait of the artist. Originally Jamie is thrilled to have found a “shiksa goddess” in Cathy, but as time passes, the couple’s differences drive them apart. “Don’t we get to be happy, Cathy?” Jamie asks. “Don’t we get to relax / Without some new tsuris / To push me yet further from you?”

Critical response to The Last Five Years was again respectful but lukewarm. Ben Brantley of The New York Times praised Brown’s “sparkling facility as a composer,” but had trouble cozying up to the characters; other critics found the show dull. Brown’s ex-wife, meanwhile, felt the project was too inspired by real events, and threatened to sue to prevent its performance. The show ran for only two months.

In 2003 Brown composed a few songs for the widely ridiculed Broadway flop Urban Cowboy, for which he also served as musical director and orchestrator. Brown had no illusions about the overall quality of the show—”One of the main reasons I signed on to Urban Cowboy, The Musical was the opportunity to work with Jenn Colella,” he writes on his website, before adding gleefully, “(The other main reason was the money.)” After that show closed, with no awards and few laments, Brown left New York and announced that he would no longer write for the theater. “I didn’t know how to say what I wanted to say in this form anymore,” he recalls in his program notes for 13. “And I wasn’t sure anyone wanted to hear it.”

Jason Robert Brown at the piano. (Courtesy of Center Theatre Group)

Brown headed off to Europe for nearly a year, and on his return resettled in Southern California. He worked on an assortment of musical projects—from composing industrial shows for State Farm Insurance Company, to recording a solo album (Wearing Someone Else’s Clothes) to creating the choral composition “Chanukah Suite,” a Broadway-style setting of traditional holiday songs.

Meanwhile, his fan base continued to grow. Musical-theater enthusiasts cherished the original cast recordings of Songs for a New World, Parade, and The Last Five Years, finding, in close study of the scores, emotional depth and insight. The shows also found new life and new audiences in regional productions around the country, and individual songs began popping up in cabarets.

Brown was pulled back to the theater by librettist Elish, who approached him with the idea for 13. “There is a huge demographic of kids that age who love musicals,” Brown says, “I wanted to create something that they could feel like they owned.”

Since its January 7 opening in L.A., 13 has met with little resistance from critics, an unusual experience for Brown. A few have been disappointed by its lightweight approach—Charles McNulty of the Los Angeles Times compared it to an “after-school special” and dismissed Brown’s music as “bubblegum rock.” But many reviewers have embraced and endorsed the show (“13 is sheer bliss,” Variety gushed), and performances have been selling out. The show runs through February 18; its life thereafter is still up in the air, but Brown hopes it will eventually be recorded, and perhaps even bring him back to the New York stage. Still, he no longer views theater, or his role in it, with the same intensity he once did: “I’m not sure that I can ever just do theater writing,” he says. “Maybe this show will change it and maybe it won’t, but I’ve always felt that my relationship to the community was very tenuous—that I wasn’t one of the ‘in crowd.’ You know, I keep playing that story throughout my life.”

Hal Linden as Mayer Rothschild

In contrast with the Tin Pan Alley sound of Fiddler‘s beloved tunes, Bock gave The Rothschilds a stately score (listen to samples here) reminiscent of Haydn in its occasional hints of German and Austrian folksongs. But it’s an ominous clanging—the signal that Frankfurt’s ghetto is closing—that motivates Rothschild and Sons. It rings for the first time at the end of the opening number, set in a lush court ballroom, full of beautiful people dancing the minuet. This is “the world of pleasure and privilege,” sings Prince William of Hesse, “exclusive and elect, wary of outsiders, as you might suspect.” But as the song concludes, that chiming fades in, announcing the gulf between the palace opulence to which the Rothschilds aspire and the Judenstrasse squalor to which they have been relegated.

That minor-key tolling runs throughout the score, a peal of resentment echoing even in songs that celebrate the Rothschilds’ mounting achievements, and a reminder, right up to the end, that anti-Semitism is never far from the surface of the plot. That knowledge, subliminally sounded again and again, is key to the sympathies the show aims to evoke. As Julius Novick wrote in a passionate review of the original production in the Village Voice, “Every time the Rothschilds were insulted, I felt a rush of solidarity with the ultimately triumphant victims.” He added, “I have never felt so clearly that a yarmulke is a badge of honor.”

The power to produce such a giddy sense of identification and justification should have assured The Rothschilds a place alongside Fiddler as an enduring Jewish musical. Indeed, in one of the only pans of the original production, the New Yorker‘s Brendan Gill disparaged it as “one of those precious gems known to the Broadway trade as Hadassah musicals, capable of running for years, with continuously changing casts, on the strength of their warm and homely Jewishness.”

But Gill was wrong. With most reviews mixed to very favorable, The Rothschilds achieved respectable, if not blockbuster, success. It ran a little over a year, and two cast members won Tony Awards: best leading actor in a musical for Hal Linden, who played Mayer, and best supporting actor for Keene Curtis, who played several rulers and functionaries—decidedly not part of the Rothschild clan.

In the decades since, as Fiddler has seen several Broadway revivals, a major film adaptation, and a steady stream of community and high school productions, The Rothschilds has largely been forgotten. Fiddler caught fire in part because it was so in tune with its times—grabbing hold of the ethnic-roots craze and underscoring the tolerance demanded by the civil rights movement. The Rothschilds, on the other hand, was out of sync both socially and formally. The days of the big, integrated-story, happy-ending musical were on the wane by 1970. The plot-busting experiments of the burgeoning downtown theater scene were already trickling up to Broadway—the rock revue Hair had transferred from the Public Theater in 1968—and a new, more psychologically complex and scenically spare musical comedy form was taking shape—Stephen Sondheim’s Company premiered just six months before The Rothschilds.

Bock and Harnick’s musical was based on Frederic Morton’s biography, The Rothschilds. Hugely popular when it was published in 1962, the book’s exuberant tone reflected the post-war excitement of American prosperity, along with a cheery sense of come-uppance for its elaborately and conspicuously consuming Jewish heroes, anti-Semitic stereotypes be damned!

But the national mood had shifted considerably by the time the musical adaptation hit the boards. By 1970, America was not just being forced to face up to the extreme poverty in its ghettos but feminism was exposing the inequities in its families. Bock and Harnick’s uncritical presentation of Mayer’s obsession with having sons (his real-life daughters were not included in the musical), not to mention their giving his long-suffering wife lines such as, “you to clean for and cook for, as mother and wife, is all that I look for in life,” didn’t sit well with audiences soaking up Kate Millett’s bestselling Sexual Politics.

Morton himself wrote a preview essay for the New York Times Arts & Leisure section on the eve of the premiere, contorting contemporary events to draw an analogy between the 18th-century ghetto-dwellers who never gave up their identity and the African Americans asserting themselves in America’s burning cities. (Alluding to the Black Power slogan, Morton’s essay was titled “Jewish is Beautiful.”) The Rothschilds, Morton wrote in the Times—rather missing the structural inequities that urban unrest was unmasking—”served to supplant the era of title and pedigree with the era of money and ability.”

Not even Jews were buying this interpretation. In the same Village Voice review in which he described the show’s irresistible appeal to his Jewish pride, Julius Novick wrote of his “exasperation and contempt” at its depiction of money-making as “not a selfish act, but a noble one.”

Just as important, Jewish audiences had already crowned Bock and Harnick’s Fiddler on the Roof as their quintessential origin story. The Rothschilds seemed to come from a different planet. Though the duo had collaborated on several musicals—from The Body Beautiful in 1958 to The Apple Tree in 1966 (a revival starring Kristin Chenoweth just opened at the Roundabout)—by the time The Rothschilds premiered, the duo was accused of trying to capitalize on Fiddler‘s record-breaking success by writing another Jewish show. One reviewer described the musical as “Fiddler with money.” In fact, Bock and Harnick had been offered the Frederic Morton material before they embarked on adapting Sholem Aleichem, and had been waiting for a good libretto. (It was eventually supplied by Sherman Yellen.) Besides, structurally and temperamentally The Rothschilds has more in common with their earlier hit, Fiorello!, a charming bio-musical that traces the rise of New York mayor LaGuardia, with the verse of one song in Yiddish, the mamaloshen of the crusading politician’s mother. Yet for all The Rothschilds‘ texture, sumptuousness and cleverness, after embracing Fiddler, Jewish audiences simply could not clasp The Rothschilds so closely to their bosoms.

In the American context, Tevye the Dairyman’s fantasy, “If I were a rich man,” makes for a more comfortable ancestral slogan than the gloating assertion of Mayer Rothschild and his sons, “We’re superior agents of the Court. International finance is our forte.” It’s not just that statistically, American Jews are far more likely to descend from Eastern Europeans than from the assimilated, prosperous families of the West; Fiddler also meshes more easily with American ideals of immigrant ingenuity and bootstrap determination. Upwardly mobile Jews of the 1960s—and beyond—can identify within Fiddler a sense of both ethnic and national belonging, and through it, they can align themselves with history’s underdogs.

The genius of Fiddler was, as the Yiddish literary critic Seth Wolitz has argued, this fusing of Jewish and American values. Changing key aspects of the Sholem Aleichem stories on which it was based, Fiddler figures Tevye as a Jewish pilgrim who could flee religious persecution in the old country to find fulfillment in the United States. This is a far cry from the “Jews of the kings and kings of the Jews” (as the Rothschilds were known), who amassed their fortune and built their palaces in Europe, never even opening a bank in New York. They never needed to engage the promise of America and they did not leave behind a murdered world for which their grandchildren could be nostalgic.

Worst of all, unlike humble and honest Tevye, the Rothschilds groveled, schemed and even lied; they made their fortunes in large part by financing the Napoleonic wars. Even if they did so for the greater good of their people (a motivation the musical rather exaggerates), and even if the show’s lyrics take pains to cast the family’s greed as no different from that of gentiles—”we want everything, everything, just like other men do,” the sons sing—their conniving and their appetite feel unseemly, even embarrassing. War profiteers make ambivalent ancestral heroes at best, and in 1970, at the height of the movement against the Vietnam war, the Rothschilds must have struck audiences as especially alien to reigning Jewish liberalism.

Perhaps, in this era of the “ownership society,” the show is ripe for a revival. Nonetheless, European nobility will never replace shtetl innocence as a comforting, usable past. The Rothschilds is a good show. That’s never been enough for American Jews to claim themselves in it.

Now on Broadway, Crystal drops the bitterness and returns to what he does best—total inoffensiveness. At intermission, I asked the heavy-set blond man next to me, who’d laughed his way through Act One, how he was liking it. “Billy Crystal and I don’t have the same cultural background,” he said, looking intently to make sure I got the euphemism, “but we sort of have the same family”—a sentiment which, judging by the ersatz chorus of amens after every mawkish thought, indicated they’re members of a very large brood.

Crystal’s appeal has eluded me ever since he stopped playing Jody, in the closet and spry, on Soap. Though the part itself was pioneering, Crystal played it for laughs—congenially, unthreateningly—as he has nearly every role he has ever taken. Appearing on Saturday Night Live lent him hip by association, as have repeated reminders of his link to the Commodore Music Shop and various jazz greats. But the characters he developed—Fernando, Lou Goldman the “Weatherman,” the masochist who nasally intoned “I hate when I do that”—lacked bite from the get-go, and subsequent film roles affirmed he was choosing an untroubling path, coming to embody a new kind of everyman, as seen by the all-too decent—ultimately vanilla—New Yorker he plays in When Harry Met Sally.

But blandness sells. It’s the key to hosting the Oscars, and to selling out on Broadway. Crystal recycles himself—and the predictable bits offer comfort, never confrontation, with a gee-whiz air. His put-on of modesty in 700 Sundays is surprising given that, as he concedes in his program notes, he has spent his life chasing and winning applause. Crystal’s still a tap-dancing child, after all these years. But he’s a grandfather now too, and the boychik routine has worn impossibly thin.