SOME fascinating historical excavation has gone on with “Kleynkunst!” the latest production by the National Yiddish Theatre-Folksbiene. Subtitled “Warsaw’s Brave and Brilliant Yiddish Cabaret” (kleynkunst means “little art”), it celebrates a style of cabaret that existed in Poland between world wars.
Researched and created by Rebecca Joy Fletcher, who also co-stars with Broadway’s Stephen Mo Hanan (part of the original cast of “Cats”), it consists of songs and sketches in English and Yiddish, the latter translated via supertitles.
Except for a Yiddish rendition of “Mack the Knife,” most of the material is unfamiliar, and nearly all of it is funny and startling, especially when it comments on the prevailing anti-Semitism of the time.
In “Madagascar,” the Polish government solves the “Jewish problem” by relocating that population to Africa. “It’s like a shvitz, but out of doors,” goes a lyric that sounds like something Mel Brooks could have written.
In “The Last Jew,” adapted from a sketch written in 1938, the country finds itself adrift after the Jews have left. “They fled, and they took the economy with them,” a character moans.
Not everything’s political. In one number, a frustrated woman tries to get her bookish husband to dance; in another, an overworked housewife wails, “Love, who invented it?”
Fletcher, a cantor, sings beautifully, and Hanan, who once played Al Jolson in an off-Broadway musical, certainly knows how to sing and act with gusto.
KLEYNKUNST!
JCC in Manhattan, 334 Amsterdam Ave.; (212) 279-4200. Through Dec. 30.