Music, memories carry one-man 'Brooklyn'

Scratch a South Florida audience and you are bound to find a few folks from Brooklyn, not to mention plenty of people of the Jewish faith. So it is no wonder that Jake Ehrenreich has brought his nostalgic one-man memoir, A Jew Grows in Brooklyn, down here for the winter season.

At the Cuillo Centre, Ehrenreich capitalizes on that built-in audience and its identification with his roots in an amiable scrapbook of memories of his East Flatbush neighborhood in the 1960s.

Part stand-up comedy act, part musical and part tribute to his family - both Holocaust survivors and victims - the evening is at its best when it sticks to the personal. Halfway through the intermissionless hour-and-three-quarters, Ehrenreich takes a tangent to the Catskills that is too much like so many other Jewish nostalgia shows, but he eventually leaves the generic behind for a satisfying wrap-up.

As with any solo show, the audience needs to be the second performer, and Ehrenreich takes that principle literally - encouraging the crowd to shout out what parts of Brooklyn they are from, conversing with individual theatergoers, making his show as interactive as possible.

On a wall of the brownstone residence set by Joseph Egan, Ehrenreich projects slides and videos of his family, inviting us to laugh along at his sister's trendy teased hairdo, his father's dubious fashion sense and his own awkward growth pangs. Note to all future performers: Save your family snapshots. There could be a show in them.

What makes A Jew Grows in Brooklyn stand out from the numerous, though dwindling, Yiddishkeit shows is Ehrenreich's ingratiating personality and his considerable talent. Tapping into his days in a rock band, as well as in several Broadway shows, he fills the evening with music, from a rousing rendition of Meet the Mets in Yiddish to a medley of familiar Christmas carols, all written by Jews.

In that Catskills interlude, he shows off on trumpet and trombone, as well as sitting in at the drums for a furious, accomplished solo. In an homage to the tireless "tummlers" who would emcee and perform nightly at the mountain resorts, Ehrenreich tells a string of wheezy old jokes and launches into the inevitable triple-time crowd-pleaser, Romania, Romania.

But like the Jewish tradition of injecting a bit of sadness into even the happiest of occasions, Ehrenreich takes a break from the light entertainment to talk about his parents' experiences in a World War II work camp and his many relatives who perished in the Holocaust. Deftly, he makes the transitions in and out of the show's darker sections, which lend the evening its weight.

There are enough universal recollections in A Jew Grows in Brooklyn for the show to appeal to those without ethnic or geographic ties to Ehrenreich's heritage. But even if he drew only Jewish Brooklynites, he could fill the Cuillo Centre for months to come.