Hal's Deli: The Musical

The camp play provided more drama than she wanted

I was 12 when my parents sent me away from the wet-velvet heat of New Orleans to the cool green woods of the Northeast. The camp was a Conservative Jewish utopia, an eight-week retreat for suburban synagogue youth. There was canoeing and swimming and archery; there were Hebrew lessons and Jewish culture classes, kosher food, Israeli dancing, Shabbat services on benches by the lake. Everything had a Hebrew name. We didn't have counselors, we had madrichim; we ate at the hadar ochel, and we lived in tzrifim. We groused about having to pray every morning and say the Birkat Hamazon after meals. We complained to our counselors about not being able to use our radios or write letters or take showers on Shabbat.

But mostly we had a good time. By the end of the summer, I believed I would be one of those campers who came back every year until they were too old to attend.

As it turned out, I wouldn't return until the summer after my sophomore year at Cornell, when circumstances conspired to land me a job I didn't want. That year, I'd been seeing a 31-year-old grad student named Paul. I suppose he seemed like the antidote to my parents' comfortable, suburban way of thinking. He was opposed to organized religion and didn't believe in "exclusive relationships." Under his influence, I changed from premed to an English major and took my first writing workshop. The professor offered me a summer job as a research assistant, and Paul invited me to move in with him. But when I told my parents about how I intended to spend the summer, they responded with stunned silence. When they recovered, they suggested that if I wanted them to continue sending me to college, I might consider a summer job at the Jewish camp instead.

I was 19 years old, still dependent upon my parents for many things. Mostly, I didn't want to upset my mother -- she'd had breast cancer for nearly a decade, and things had recently taken a turn for the worse. I knew it wasn't a good time to make trouble. So I applied for the job at camp, and, to my dismay, I was hired.

I would be one of five counselors for 20 kids with learning disabilities. And because I'd been in lots of plays in high school, I would be in charge of directing the musical. I liked being in charge of things, but I knew nothing about adapting the dramatic arts for kids with learning disabilities and developmental disorders. I'd studied autism, Down syndrome, dyslexia and ADD in my premed classes, but none of that had left me feeling prepared. I didn't know how the campers would learn songs and memorize lines, or how to teach them their blocking. Nor did I know what play we could do. Robyn, my supervisor, had told me that the musical had to have a Jewish theme but that it couldn't be "Fiddler on the Roof"; the kids had done that play for three years running.

The week I got home from school, I scoured the public library for an appropriate play. But as far as I could tell, the only Jewish-themed musical in existence was "Fiddler on the Roof." There was only one way out of this problem: I would have to write a piece of Jewish musical theater. After all, I had just changed my major to English and declared myself a writer; here was a chance to prove what I was worth.

My mother collected musicals on vinyl. "Oliver" and "The Sound of Music" and "A Chorus Line" were the companions of my rainy childhood afternoons. I'd also studied violin for 10 years. So, without fear, I gathered my materials: the fiddle, a sheaf of staff paper and a fresh notebook. I began with a preliminary sketch: Setting: 1992, a deli in Brooklyn. The proprietor is Hal Golden, 65 years old, born in 1927 to Hungarian immigrants. It's the recession, and business is slow; Hal worries about having to close the deli down.

It was a start, at least. I'd never actually been to Brooklyn, nor did I know anything about the deli business -- much less about the minds of 65-year-old men. But what did that matter? This was theater. To compensate for my ignorance, I threw in a couple of problems I knew something about: Hal's wife had died of breast cancer, and Hal and his son disagreed about religion, relationships and work.

In the opening scene, we see Hal wiping the deli counter, grumbling to himself about his problems. Some of his friends come in and ask why he looks so down in the mouth, which provides an opportunity for that staple of musical theater, the First Act Expositional Song.

Of course, I didn't know how to write song lyrics, either, and so I sat for a long time staring at the blank page. Then an idea came, and I put pen to paper.

Song 1: "The Way It Used to Be" (Hal, espressivo)

"When I was a younger man