THE CAST OF "A GIRL LIKE YOU"
1932-1933 Season
 

The cast of this production includes: Louis Birnbaum, Celia and Misha Boodkin, Izzie Goldstein, Rose Greenfield, Henrietta and brother Hymie Jacobson, Miriam Kressyn, author Isidore Lash, Rebecca Lash, Benjamin Schoenfeld, Leon Seidenberg and Abe Sincoff.

Miriam Kressyn and Hymie Jacobson are seated in the front row, center, behind the open script.  Misha Boodkin is standing in the back row, third from the right. Rose Greenfield is seated, third from the right, next to Hymie. Celia Boodkin is to the left of Rose Greenfield. Isaac Arco is standing on the far right. Henrietta is seated, second from the left.

Review from the Yiddish Forward, Friday, October 7, 1932, by L. Fogelman.

"A GIRL LIKE YOU" -- A MUSICAL DRAMA IN THE LYRIC THEATRE

A New Play by Isidore Lash, with Music by Sholom Secunda

Everything sounds like a well-known thing, not yet seen nor even heard,  in Isidore Lash's new play, "A Girl Like You," which today will be performed in the Lyric Theatre, in Brooklyn. Even the name by itself also sounds so old and known.

This means, God forbid, not that Lash has imitated, borrowed and taken. It is completely inaccurate to say, with whom it borrows and takes in this Yiddish theatre, because the average plays that have been played for us for the last few years look so similar to each other, just as one mother would have born them. If there is anything new in Lash's play, it is perhaps, what we do not find in is the ever-deceiving girl, the orphan, with her brutal deceiver. And if you want, this is also new, that the operetta is performed without choristers, only with several choristers in a kind of prologue, but it is still a big question whether you like this kind of news.

In all other respects, the content goes the old-fashioned way. We see there before us an elder for the people, with their children and stepchildren, and, of course, also for love between the youth. The main drama revolves around a stepchild, of whom the girl comes from Texas and the boy comes all  the way from Lekhevich, a small town in Minsk Gubernia.

Among the cheerful girl from Texas, and the Lekhevicher yeshiva student, burns a love that ends as God would call it, with a wedding. It has, thank God, married also the second pair, and so the young hearts are finally healed after all the hardships that the stepchildren lived through in their cold home.

The main virtue of Lash's play is that, what we do not hear in you is the constant greed, cynicism as ten and proverbs, which accompanies many of the Yiddish plays of the same kind. They cab sit in the theatre with children and not shy away. It was not in vain that their own children came to the theatre with their wives; and it was a bitter pity to see how the little children tormented themselves until late at night, and tormented the surrounding neighbors because of this "pleasure" of their parents.

The music, in my opinion, is the best part of the new offering. Sholom Secunda has well utilized both the Yiddish folk nigunim (religious melodies), as well as the American "jazz" motifs, which he enters into a series of pleasures, rhythms, singing numbers. In Secunda's music there is a mood.

The most pleasant surprise to me was the new actress, Miriam Kressyn, who played the main role of the young girl from Texas. We came out to see her act during the probes (auditions for membership) some time ago in the Actors' Union [building], and already then, in her couple of numbers, had made an entirely good impression. However, here she had the opportunity to prove brighter, both with her musical, as well as her dramatic abilities. And the formerly good impression had grown stronger in me.

She has in herself, it seems, the possibility of becoming a perfectly prominent force on the Yiddish stage. She is young, beautiful and slim; she possesses a pleasant, fine voice, a lively temperament, and especially (which is important for everyone) a personal grace. She also has very nice manners on the stage, and plays in a natural, intelligent way.

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