Why is To Life 4 different from all other previous editions, asks director/writer/narrator Shari Upbin in a phrasing that brings to mind a Passover seder. The answer is that it isn’t at all different and that seems to please the show’s fans just fine.
The revue celebrating Jewish songwriters and performers, currently playing at the Willow Theatre in Boca Raton’s Sugar Sand Park, has its flaws, but it is received like comfort food to its target senior audience. They eagerly clap, sing along and respond to Upbin’s questions like they are talking to an old friend.
The production is not as polished as it could be, but its four-member ensemble is in very good voice. Each scores with his opportunities to shine on some two dozen musical numbers ranging from John Kander and Fred Ebb’s salute to The Big Apple (“New York, New York”) to — what else? — a closing medley from Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick’s enduring Fiddler on the Roof.
There is no logical flow to the song sequence that I could perceive, but along the way in the 90-minute, intermissionless evening we get a tribute to Bette Midler by Shelley Kellor (the driving “Before the Parade Passes By” and the languorous “Do You Wanna Dance”); a medley of Neil Diamond hits from Shane Tanner (get ready to sing along to “Sweet Caroline”); Jinon Deeb’s powerful torch song rendition of Jerry Herman’s “If He Walked Into My Life” from Mame; and Ben Sandomir’s haunting “Bring Him Home” from Les Misérables.
For most of the numbers, the cast members stand still and sing — the show really could use a choreographer — but a few evoke the show scenes they come from. Tanner and Sandomir are particularly effective as Bialystock and Bloom in “We Can Do It” from The Producers and Sandomir fills Tevye’s shoes nicely on that perennial showstopper from Fiddler, “If I Were a Rich Man.”
All of this is accompanied by nimble pianist, arranger and music director Elliot Weiss, who gets his own solo spotlight on Kander and Ebb’s “Razzle Dazzle” from Chicago.
Upbin’s rambling narration could really use an editor or at least a fact checker. Julie Taymor was not the first female director of a Broadway musical. That was Susan H. Schulman on 1991’s The Secret Garden. Neither Dorothy Fields nor Betty Comden was a composer. They were lyricist and book writers. And no, Whoopi Goldberg never won a Pulitzer Prize.
Still, if To Life 4 comes up short as education, it is a pleasant evening of entertainment. And judging from the enthusiasm it receives from its loyal following, there is bound to be a To Life 5.
TO LIFE 4, Willow Theatre, Sugar Sand Park, 300 S. Military Trail, Boca Raton. Through Sunday, Feb. 4. $45. 561-347-3948.