A classic story of immigrant Jews returns to New York — this time as a musical

In ‘The Imported Bridegroom,’ a century-old story still feels relevant

The cast of <i>The Imported Bridegroom</i>
rehearse a scene.

The cast of The Imported Bridegroom rehearse a scene. Photo by Laila Gerstmann

By PJ Grisar June 6, 2023

When Pamela Berger’s downstairs tenant moved out in the late 1980s, rather than renting the room, she made the empty apartment the set of her directorial debut: a film adaptation of Abraham Cahan’s novella The Imported Bridegroom. Decades later, the project still hits close to home.

Berger’s house provided the interiors for the Boston of 1900, where an immigrant landlord named Asriel Stroon, who, worried for his stake in the world to come, arranges for his assimilated daughter, Flora, to marry an Talmud scholar named Shaya. (Flora resents this, much preferring to marry a doctor, but comes around when she realizes Shaya’s intellectual gifts could transfer to secular scholarship as well.)

In the 1989 film, Shaya was played by Avi Hoffman. Now, Hoffman has stepped into the older role of Asriel in a musical version of The Imported Bridegroom, with a book and lyrics by Berger and a score by Hankus Netsky debuting June 8 at the 14th Street Y in Manhattan, not far from Cahan’s original New York setting. Hoffman, who is also directing, says in the three decades, or even over 100 years since Cahan wrote his story about the culture clashes of the Old World and the New, not enough has changed.

“In the year 1900, we had problems with immigrants — only the immigrants came from different countries,” said Hoffman, who also played the title role in an Off-Broadway musical of Cahan’s The Rise of David Levinsky, said in a break from rehearsals. “Back then it was the Jews and the Italians and the Irish that were looked down upon and spat upon. Today, it’s the South Americans and the Central Americans, but the issue is the same issue.”

Berger, a professor of art history at Boston College who co-wrote the 1987 French-language cult classic Sorceress, began setting the Cahan story to music shortly after the film wrapped. A neighbor, Joanne Baker, wrote original music and, in recent years, Netsky, co-chair of New England Conservatory’s Contemporary Improvisation Department, took over.

Rehearsing at the Workman’s Circle Friday, Netsky — once Berger’s neighbor himself — drifted into the rehearsal space with an an accordion, but the music for The Imported Bridegroom is not so quite as steeped in a klezmer as one might expect from Netsky, who founded the Klezmer Conservatory Band. Netsky cites Richard Rodgers and Victor Herbert, and even sings a snatch of “’Til Tomorrow” from Fiorello in explaining the show’s influences.

Berger says that, while some scenes in the film — in which the preserved Puritan Plymouth village stood in for a Polish shtetl — were written in Yiddish, the musical is almost entirely in English. But even if Cahan’s language has been changed, his message, as well as his story’s early feminism, is underscored.

In Cahan’s story, a group of diverse scholars meet with Shaya in a salon and read from sociologist Auguste Comte. Cahan notes the translation by Harriet Martineau, and Berger made a point of having Flora introduce philosophical concepts to the men, defying their expectations.

The production has changed with the times — on Friday an intimacy coordinator came in to help the actors playing Shaya and Flora with a love scene — but the story remains the same.

“Part of what I love about this piece is it’s not just a fluffy musical,” said Hoffman, noting the story’s concerns with immigrant rights, the marriage of the spiritual and secular and, finally, Flora’s choice to take over her father’s business and advocate for immigrant children.

“She has a vision of a world that is more free and more honest and more caring,” Hoffman said. “Unfortunately, we’re still trying to learn these lessons.”

More information and tickets for The Imported Bridegroom can be found here.

PJ Grisar is a Forward culture reporter. He can be reached at [email protected] and @pjgrisar on Twitter.

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