Theater: Israeli Stomp

Milk and Honey (book by Don Appell; music and lyrics by Jerry Herman; choreography by Donald Saddler) takes a troupe of middle-aged U.S. widows on a tour of Israel in an open search for second love. Making her Broadway musical debut, thimble-sized Molly Picon, 63, is cast as a wily matchmaker who never forgets to bait her own hook. Comedienne Picon mock-droops an eyelid, smacks her lips together as if they were their own best friends, and in the archly mingled inflections of Cupid and cupidity queries each promising male: “What line are you in?” Robert Weede and Mimi Benzell play the romantic leads, and their rich, Met-seasoned voices carry an uncommonly melodic score. Grey-haired Songster Weede is a spigot of ageless charm, and he is turned on all the way.

But what really steals the scene is the scene: Israel, with its ethnic freshness and vitality. In Independence Day Hora, the company swirls up a cyclone in a hand-holding folk dance, then explodes in Kazachok-styled kicks and leaps. Here, and in a muscle-throbbing stomp set in the Negev, Choreographer Saddler rises above the dance-for-dance-sake motives of most musicals to salute the pioneer spirit. An artful change of pace from the robust to the exotic brings a Yemenite wedding ceremony, in which the color of spectacle—cloth-of-gold gowns, jeweled headdresses, a pinpricked panoply of tiny candles—is matched with the mystery of ancient ritual. The Broadwayward book relies heavily on soap operatics for the matrons’ matinee trade, but much of the time Milk and Honey flows exuberantly and lyrically out of its native soil.