For six years, singer and actor Ari Axelrod has been performing a one-man musical show about Jews and Broadway in front of sold-out audiences around the country.
It is a remarkable accomplishment, especially considering that Axelrod — who grew up in a Conservative Jewish home and has fostered a deep love of musicals since high school — had to be coerced into doing it.
“I said no one would come,” Axelrod said in a recent Zoom interview, explaining that the idea for the show was first pitched to him in 2018 by his friend Marty Schichtman, a Jewish studies professor at Eastern Michigan University.
Axelrod, of course, was wrong. Audiences have flocked to “A Place For Us: A Celebration of Jewish Broadway,” a show that celebrates Jewish contributions to Broadway music and history. Axelrod sings Broadway standards from famous Jewish composers, including “Cool” from “West Side Story” (Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim) and “Some Enchanted Evening” from “South Pacific” (by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein). He intersperses singing with stories about the songs and the composers, and he also talks about Jewish resilience.
And now, six years after his first performance at the Birdland Jazz Club in Midtown in early 2019, Axelrod is releasing a studio recording of songs in the show, sans the narration. “A Place for Us” will be released on Friday through PS Classics, a label that puts out Broadway soundtracks. Axelrod will celebrate the album’s release with a performance at the 54 Below cabaret club Midtown.
Axelrod, who grew up in Ann Arbor, Michigan and now lives on the Upper West Side, sees his new album as a companion piece to his show. “The album should invite people to the show, and the show should invite people to the album,” he said. “So there are songs on the album that are in the show, and there are songs in the show that didn’t make it onto the album.”
Axelrod said that even before Hamas’ attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023 — sparking the deadly war and leading to a rise in antisemitism across the globe — people have told him that “A Place for Us” has changed their lives or given them more confidence to live Jewishly.
“The art of solo performance, the art of being yourself on purpose, can change lives, can heal lives,” said Axelrod, who was named one of the New York Jewish Week’s 36 to Watch in 2021. He cites a Talmud passage about the value and dignity of individual human lives. “That became very appealing to me… I’ll never know the impact that I have on people, but I can guarantee that there will be some impact, through that sort of cultivating of empathy through art and storytelling and music.”
“We live in a world where when people hear ‘Judaism’ or ‘Jewish,’ the first thing people think of is antisemitism,” he added. “Antisemitism is not a Jewish thing. Judaism is a Jewish thing. While it’s important to know what we’re fighting against, I feel it is equally, if not more important, to know what we’re fighting for … This show highlights and celebrates the incredible contributions Jewish people have brought to the world. It is a celebration of Jewish vitality.”
Not one to rest on his laurels, Axelrod continues to update and revise his show. “The hope is to kind of stop doing it as a concert piece and to do it really as a theater piece, kind of like Alex Edelman,” he said of the Jewish comedian whose one-man show earned him both an Emmy and a Tony. “If you think of ‘Just for Us’ as starting out in the comedy club, and then it grew and grew and grew, kind of like a crustacean having to shed its shell and grow — this started similarly with a [music] stand in an intimate room, and then it grew and grew and grew. So right now I’m working with Tony Award-winning director Lonnie Price, and we’re in the process of finding a book writer, but the hope is to expand the book.”
While he continues to update and refine “A Place for Us,” Axelrod is also working on a new Jewish show, something he describes as a “love letter to ‘Fiddler.’”
“It’s about me doing three productions [of ‘Fiddler on the Roof’] in three states, playing five roles in one year in Anatevka,” he said of his work-in-progress, which is tentatively called “My Year in Anatevka.” “But also the fact that I got the call about the first production of ‘Fiddler’ on Oct. 3, 2023, so all of these productions were happening within this huge global landscape.”
“A Place for Us: A Celebration of Jewish Broadway” will be performed by Ari Axelrod at 54 Below (254 West 54th St.) on Saturday, Jan. 18 at 7 p.m. Get tickets and info here.
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