Penguin Rep Theatre presents “A Jew Grows in Brooklyn” for one performance only, Saturday, September 26 at RCC

SUNY Rockland Community College’s Cultural Arts Theatre in Suffern, New York is the venue on Saturday, September 26 for a very specialPenguin Rep Theatre event: Jake Ehrenreich’s comedy musical “A Jew Grows in Brooklyn.”

A hit Off Broadway where it played for a more than a year and a half, “A Jew Grows in Brooklyn” is an engaging, poignant and hilarious comedy musical about the search for identity and meaning. The highly acclaimed show is “a delightful journey that speaks to anyone hoping to live out the American Dream” (ABC TV).

When Jake Ehrenreich was growing up in Brooklyn in the 1960s, he wanted nothing more than to be an American. But his Yiddish-speaking parents, who failed to understand the game of baseball or make sense of rock music, made it difficult for him to feel part of the mainstream culture. In AJGIB, Ehrenreich, who has appeared on Broadway in Dancin’, Barnum and They’re Playing Our Song, and performed Yiddish music in Songs of Paradiseand The Golden Land, gives a “tour de force performance” (Las Vegas Journal Review) as he explores how his family history, dominated by the shadow of the Holocaust, shaped the man he turned out to be.

The New York Times called the show “funny, touching and beautiful …. You don’t have to be Jewish or Brooklynish …. Jake Ehrenreich is dazzling!” The Philadelphia Inquirer raved that this is an “uplifting treasure with universal appeal – in the same elevated company as Billy Crystal’s “700 Sundays”, and Chaz Palminteri’s “A Bronx Tale”.

The show is generously underwritten by Barry and Helene Lewis. Curtain time for the performance is 8 p.m. SUNY R.C.C.’s Cultural Arts Theatre is located at 145 College Road in Suffern. Tickets are $40 ($35 for Penguin Rep subscribers).

A limited number of seats are still available and can be ordered online at www.penguinrep.org or by calling the box office at (845) 786-2873.