Theater: Circle in the Square / 235 West 50th Street, New York, NY, 10019
Synopsis:
Soul Doctor: Journey of a Rock-Star Rabbi tells the story of the beloved yet controversial father of popular Jewish music, Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach and explores his unlikely friendship with the 'High Priestess of Soul' Nina Simone. Beginning with his childhood escape from Nazi Germany, the show takes us on a musical odyssey through the challenges and triumphs of this cultural phenomenon, as he becomes a rabbinical prodigy in America, discovers Gospel and Soul music during his unlikely friendship with Simone, and has a meteoric rise as a 'Rock Star Rabbi' in the 1960’s, performing with Bob Dylan, Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead.
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August 15, 2013: The Broadway season has barely begun to shake off its summer slumber, but I think I can guarantee that the months to come will bring no odder musical than “Soul Doctor,” the true-life tale of the folk-singing Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach, which opened on Thursday night at the Circle in the Square.
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August 15, 2013: The new Broadway musical "Soul Doctor" examines the life and times - and music - of Shlomo Carlebach in a unique, if plodding, study of a charismatic holy man who finds himself stuck between an unstoppable force and an immovable object. Carlebach, widely considered to be the modern era's father of Jewish popular music, makes for a fascinating biographical subject, even if the re-orchestrations of his staid, folksy compositions aren't quite lively or diverse enough to fill a two-hour, 30-minute musical
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August 15, 2013: Shlomo Carlebach may be the most charismatic guy you've never heard of. (If you have, bear with us.) The Brooklyn troubadour by way of Vienna tried to save the world by spreading God's word through what his Orthodox parents regarded as "devil's music."
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August 15, 2013: Lots of luck marketing “Soul Doctor” to a general audience. This worshipful musical biography of Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach, the so-called “Rock Star Rabbi” credited with infusing Jewish music with the musical idioms of 1960s pop culture, has obvious appeal for its core audience of fans. But there’s nothing transcendent about Daniel S. Wise’s plodding book or Rabbi Carlebach’s “soulful” but dated music to lift the show out of its narrow niche and give it the universal appeal of a latter-day “Fiddler on the Roof.”
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August 15, 2013: Oy gevalt. It's not that there's anything particularly terrible about Soul Doctor, the biographical musical about the late ''rock-star rabbi'' Shlomo Carlebach, but there isn't all that much to recommend either. Carlebach is certainly an interesting figure: An Orthodox Jew who embraced pop music and hippiedom over traditional scholasticism and rose to prominence in the 1960s, he served as a striking countercultural counterpoint. But director Daniel S. Wise's production — which consists mostly of a Judaic jukebox of Carlebach's popular melodies — fails to achieve anything beyond a standard, and occasionally cringeworthy, retelling of his life.
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