Ari Axelrod
‘A Place For Us: A Celebration of Jewish Broadway’
PS Classics

Our appreciation and understanding of the great songs evolves with cultural context. “Somewhere,” for instance, was originally written by Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim as a love song for “West Side Story” and, to that end, was inevitably sung at every wedding my parents dragged me to in the 1970s. A decade later, the meaning changed, and it was heard at every funeral during the epidemics of the 1980s. More recently, it’s become essentially Broadway’s own secular national anthem for the state of Israel.

This is how baritone Ari Axelrod sings it on his new album, “A Place For Us,” and how he sang it during a recent album launch concert at 54 Below. Mr. Axelrod’s show had been on my calendar for months before this past weekend, but the news that an Israel-Hamas cease-fire was finally on the table made the entire show, and “Somewhere” in particular, even more poignant.

Mr. Axelrod’s album is subtitled “A Celebration of Jewish Broadway,” but it doesn’t focus on musical theater itself. Rather, it’s on how songs like “Somewhere” — whose opening line gives his show its title — have become signifiers of Jewish vitality and resilience. 

Where we might expect a cabaret show to open with a bright and optimistic number, Mr. Axelrod instead begins with two melancholy airs of guarded optimism, the first of which is the actual national anthem of Israel, “Hatikvah,” heard instrumentally as an intro into Jason Robert Brown’s “Hope.” That Mr. Axelrod is one of the more overtly serious-minded of musical theater and cabaret singers is illuminated by his singing “Miracle of Miracles” as his second number — anyone else would have made this fast, bright, triumphant “Fiddler on the Roof” standard the opener.

Mr. Alexrod’s show and album are distinguished by the carefully considered progression of songs from one to another: For instance, he makes the Hebrew concept of “l’dor v’dor” into something concrete. There’s also a sequence involving the only gentile composer in the lineup, Cole Porter, wherein Mr. Axelrod makes the point that Porter, by his own admission, was greatly influenced by the Jewish songwriters of Tin Pan Alley and Broadway.  

He demonstrates with the cantorial wails from “My Heart Belongs to Daddy,” and then reveals the melodic similarity between Herman Yablokoff’s 1922 Yiddish theater song “Papirosn” (“Cigarettes”) and Porter’s “You’d Be So Nice to Come Home To.” He also offered a very welcome mashup of songs from the 1961 “Milk and Honey,” complete with a personal message from composer Jerry Herman. 

Mr. Axelrod and his musical director, Mike Stapleton, further bring out the inherent Yiddishisms of George and Ira Gershwin’s “It Ain’t Necessarily So” by starting it with a few lines from a Torah prayer. Curiously, though, they leave out the most Jewish part — the nonverbal call-and-response “scat” sequence that anticipates the “deedle-diedles” of “If I Were a Rich Man.” Then he rejuvenated another song from “West Side Side,” namely “Cool,” not just singing it but featuring his own conga solo, Andy Kaufman style — probably a first for a headliner at 54 Below.  

Yet it was “Bring Him Home” from “Les Miserables” that gave us the most touching moment of recontextualization. He sang it mostly in Hebrew — truth be told, it sounds much better that way than in English or even the original French — as the club’s two video monitors offered pictures of the Israeli hostages and cameras panned over a long empty table. It was at that moment that he did something truly extraordinary: He looked at his watch, and then he crossed his fingers on both hands. Sholem aleichem.