Tom Lehrer’s lyrics reverberate again
Zalmen Mlotek and Bobby Underwood celebrate the polymath
When you think of Zalmen Mlotek of Teaneck, you think Yiddish. You also think of music. Yiddish music.
It makes sense. He’s the artistic director of the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene. He’s the impresario who created the Yiddish-language version of “Fiddler on the Roof,” uncovering the depth of feeling and undercurrent of history that was there all along but had become fashionable to overlook, and in the process making us cry. He’s the son of Yiddish musical and linguistic legends Eleanor and Joseph Mlotek. So Yiddish music. Of course.
But it turns out that Mr. Mlotek’s interests are wider than that. When he was young, he said, he and his family “listened to Yiddish and Broadway and classical music, but also Tom Lehrer. He was the soundtrack to my growing up. When we just let our hair down, it was playing and singing Tom Lehrer.”
Now, Mr. Mlotek is going to celebrate Mr. Lehrer’s 97th birthday by throwing a concert in his honor on Wednesday, April 9, at the Triad Theater in Manhattan. Mr. Lehrer won’t be there in person — he retired and withdrew from public life, somewhat mysteriously, a few decades ago — but his music is both so hilarious and so brilliant and so deeply specific that it could have been written by no one other than him. And that means that he’ll be there in spirit.
No doubt we have readers who don’t know who Tom Lehrer was, so here are some tidbits. He was born, of course, in 1928, to a wealthy Jewish family on the Upper East Side. He was brilliant — when you write about Lehrer, or about his music, the word brilliant comes up so often that you feel that you might as well have a keyboard shortcut for it, but it truly is unavoidable. He was a mathematical prodigy, went to Horace Mann, matriculated at Harvard when he was 15 and graduated at 19, was drafted into the army and sent to the National Security Agency. Afterward, he wrote and performed his songs, and accompanied himself on his piano, to the further accompaniment of his audience’s laughter.
He stopped performing in the early 1970s, taught mathematics at Harvard and MIT before going to California, first to teach and then to retire; as far as we know he lives there still. His career was short and carefully curated — he released some albums, wrote for the satirical television show “That Was The Week That Was,” and also for public television’s Electric Company.
His earlier songs are often dark — it’s striking how frequently he uses the word “cyanide” — and then became increasingly political. He loved accents — prep school in “Fight Fiercely Harvard” (“fight fight fight, impress them with our prowess, do…”) cowboy in “The Wild West is Where I Want to Be,” Irish in the “Irish Ballad,” and, gloriously, Russian in “Lobachevsky,” an ode to plagiarism.
Later, they became more political. They were great fun — “The Elements” was just that, a faster and faster recitation of the chemical elements, to the tune (unsually for him, not original) of Gilbert and Sullivan’s beloved tongue-twisting patter song, “I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major General.” And you can tell that he had great fun writing them. You can hear the pleasure in the syllables of the rhymes.
(Once you have Tom Lehrer’s songs in your brain, it turns out, they’re there for life.)
Although his songs were not at all Jewish, there is one exception to that rule. “Chanukah in Santa Monica.” “I’m spending Chanukah in Santa Monica, wearing sandals lighting candles by the sea,” he croons, diving deeply enough into the Jewish calendar to mention Shavuos, which he spends in East Saint Louis.
Mr. Mlotek decided to take his passion for Tom Lehrer (no one ever talks about him as just plain Lehrer) and put it onstage. He’s a pianist, so he’ll play them, and knew exactly who should sing them.
Bobby Underwood first met Zalmen Mlotek when he auditioned for a part in a Folksbiene production, “Amerike: The Golden Land,” and got it. “We discovered that he was a Tom Lehrer fan and he knew all the lyrics.” (It’s not generational, because kids who become fans discover Tom Lehrer through their parents. Mr. Underwood in 38.)
“We were in a very long rehearsal, and Zalmen just started playing the ‘Vatican Rag,’” Mr. Underwood said. That’s the one with “genuflect, genuflect, genuflect,” he acknowledged. The two men realized they share a passion.
Mr. Mlotek had been thinking about performing the songs with Mr. Underwood since then — Mr. Underwood’s been in other Folksbiene productions, including the Yiddish “Fiddler” — “and we had some dates open, so we said, ‘Why don’t we just do it?” Mr. Mlotek said.
Mr. Underwood, like Mr. Mlotek, had Tom Lehrer’s songs in his ears as he grew up.
His mother, Barbara Underwood, is New York State’s solicitor general; she’s the first woman to hold that job. “‘Lobachevsky’ inspired my mother’s senior thesis,” he said. That was at Radcliffe, where she was an undergraduate. She majored in the history of math and science, and “she loves non-Euclidean geometry,” her son said, fondly but admittedly cluelessly. The verse in “Lobachevsky,” is patter-sung in a thick Russian accent using words that lapse into babble at the end:
“I am never forget the day I am given first original paper to write. It was on analytic and algebraic topology of locally Euclidean metrization of infinitely differentiable Riemannian manifold bozhe moi.
“This I know from nothing what I’m going to do…”
Mr. Underwood’s father, Martin Halpern, who died at the end of 2023, was a professor of playwriting and dramatic literature at Brandeis.
So he comes by his love of Tom Lehrer naturally.
“So many of his songs — not all of them, but many of them — despite their many topical references, sound like they could have been written yesterday,” he said. He cited “National Brotherhood Week” — whose lyrics include “Oh, the Protestants hate the Catholics / And the Catholics hate the Protestants / And the Hindus hate the Moslems / And everybody hates the Jews.” The only updating those lyrics need is in how we spell Muslim today.”
“Because of Tom Lehrer, and particularly because of ‘National Brotherhood Week,’ I thought that all songs about racism were satiric and ironic,” Mr. Underwood said. “My parents were big musical theater people, so I was exposed to it a lot. I remember playing the song ‘You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught’ from ‘South Pacific,’ and I played it fast.”
(That song was by Rodgers and Hammerstein. Its lyrics include “You’ve got to be taught to hate and fear / You’ve got to be taught from year to year / It’s got to be drummed in your dear little ear /You’ve got to be carefully taught.”)
“I thought that the song was supposed to be funny. And my mom was like, ‘No. This one’s not so funny.’”
Mr. Underwood and Mr. Mlotek will perform some of the songs of Tom Lehrer, just about all of them deeply funny, at 7 p.m. on April 9 at the Triad Theater at 158 W 72nd Street. Learn more at triadnyc.com
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