Gary Waldman & Jamison Troutman presented MEET ME AT THE PITKIN, a musical by Gary Waldman at the Atlantis Playhouse, W. Palm Beach, FL (2004) ... the following is a review published in The Palm Beach Post ...
'PITKIN' REVIVAL SPRY, CLEVER NOSTALGIA
Palm Beach Post, Feb 14, 2004 | by HAP ERSTEIN Palm Beach Post Theater Writer
Do you break into applause when someone onstage mentions Brooklyn? Have you ever been to, or at least heard of, the long- gone Loew's Pitkin Theatre? Do you yearn for those bygone days and the sound of a good old schmaltzy Yiddish ballad?
If so, then walk, do not run, to the Atlantis Playhouse where artistic director Gary Waldman is serving up another helping of one of his signature shows, Meet Me At The Pitkin. First produced at West Palm Beach's Kaplan Jewish Community Center seven years ago and revived a few times since at theaters across South Florida, the show is cannily geared to entertain the Atlantis' target senior ethnic market.
After a brief, but too long, prologue reminiscent of Waldman's condo comedy Snow Birds, in which two married South Florida couples recall their pre-retirement lives as musical performers, they hear a radio report about the imminent razing of the Pitkin, where they got their starts. The news is enough to jolt them into a major flashback, in which they revert to their former, younger selves and relive the climb - from movie theater ushers to a fill-in act when the headliner keels over dead to stars in their own right on the Catskills circuit to international tour fixtures.
The fictional Pitkin Four - sounds like a group of political dissidents, doesn't it? - are played by a quartet of adept singers who sell hard a string of traditional Yiddish tunes and period standards, often rewritten by Waldman with his own English translation or parody lyrics.
A latter-day Allan Sherman, Waldman does have an ear for spoofery, as demonstrated in the movie theme song Three Cohens in the Mountains and the Fats Waller take-off, This Joint Is Kosher, for example. And when the Pitkins see rock music taking over the industry in the '60s, they get with this new sound, dressing like a California close harmony group, the Mamas and the Tatehs, offering their own version of Creeque Alley, called - what else? - Alligator Alley. Waldman's lyrics can be quite clever, though the acoustics at the Atlantis and the unbalanced sound between the musicians and the singers at Wednesday's opening night performance made too many of the words muddy at best, unintelligible at worst.
Mark Harmon, veteran of several Atlantis shows, leads the quartet as Marty, the originator of the Pitkin Four. He plays well off Don Febbraio as Phil, asked to join the group chiefly because he owns a piano and can double as the act's rehearsal pianist.
They are partnered by Sarah Wolter as Marty's longtime, long- suffering wife, Elly, and the bubbly Elizabeth King as Phil's Molly, an Irish-Catholic lass who learns to master the mouth-contorting sounds of Yiddish.
It helps considerably if you too understand and have a nostalgic love for the mamaloshen - the mother tongue - of Yiddish. But even if you do not, you will probably appreciate how these four performers knock themselves out trying to entertain the Atlantis audience.
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