New York State of Mind

It’s about time someone made something of the fact that many of the best-known Christmas songs were written by Jewish composers, and no one who knows anything about his career is surprised that it was Jake Ehrenreich who finally did it.

A Jew Grows in Brooklyn, the actor’s almost-one-man show (he’s joined onstage by musicians and singers), is New York-centric, so references to “Spal-deens” and the significance of certain NYC boroughs may be lost on desert rats. But people from everywhere will love his intro shtick — singing “Meet the Mets” in Yiddish — and much of what follows, as well. The Mets bit sets the tone for an atypically pleasant trip down a pretty standard musical memory lane, this one about a Brooklyn kid whose immigrant family survived the Holocaust, who wound up on Broadway, and who — lucky for us — wrote a lively entertainment about it. (A caveat: The pre-show announcement about how it’s okay to make and accept cell-phone calls throughout the show is a joke. Don’t do it.)