Broadway Review: People in a blurry picture

I try not to eat schmaltz because it's bad for me. After all, it's rendered chicken fat, with onion and chicken skin sautéed in its bubbly breakdown to add flavor to the cholesterol. My Eastern European grandparents ate it all the time and lived to ripe ages, but I don't walk up and down tenement stairs during hard days or hike a field to milk the cows.

Which doesn't mean I don't want schmaltz. It's nirvana on a piece of matzoh, and I longed for a little spread of schmaltz just once, all during the Passover holiday that ended this week. Then, moments after the holiday was over, I overdosed on it on Broadway.

It's not the sort of schmaltz that delights your tongue before heading straight for your heart, but the kind that tries to tear up your heart, then goes straight for your brain. The kind you might get in the theater.

And, oy, do you get ever it in The People in the Picture, a new musical with a book dipped in the stuff by Iris Rainer Dart, who also wrote the mostly uninspired lyrics to the show's generic tunes by Mike Stoller and Artie Butler. Dart is notable for having written the best-seller Beaches.

When The People in the Picture, a world premiere production by Roundabout Theatre Company that stars the estimable Donna Murphy, isn't falling under the weight of heart-clogging sentimentality, it's offering a spate of lackluster numbers that suggest what the Fiddler on the roof would be like were he relegated to the basement - it's the difference between kosher and kosher-style.

The show is a series of flashbacks in Poland that take us through the destruction of Eastern European Jewry in World War II by focusing on a troupe of Yiddish actors in Poland. These are juxtaposed with action two generations later in New York City. By the end of it all, the dead talk to the living.

I know - that's supposed to be a metaphor for a celebrated idea central to Judaism, handing down tradition from generation to generation. Call me literal, or linear, or what you like, but this particular metaphor that mingles the dead and living becomes less believable as the two acts of The People in the Picture progress, directed by Leonard Foglia.

The musical begins with a grandmother (Murphy makes a believable stereotypical bubbie even though she's far younger than the age she plays) explaining to her grade-school granddaughter (Rachel Resheff in a lovely performance) that the people in a pre-war picture are The Warsaw Gang, a Yiddish-theater troupe in which grandmom was the star. The people in the picture come alive, and bubbie shares the group's stories with her grandchild, who's eager to learn about them.

Bubbie's daughter - the little girl's mother - is a single-mom TV comedy writer by vocation and a scoffer at her mother by lifelong habit, a character drawn so one-dimensionally that when we finally learn the source of her snarling, it's hard to care. She's played by Nicole Parker, who has some of the best songs and delivers them with passion - especially in the most realistic part of the show, when she considers placing her increasingly forgetful and confused mom in assisted living.

The People in the Picture drops rich and valid issues into a pedestrian script, where adoptive parenting, selfishness versus deep love and mother-daughter battling never really become much more than a list. Mortality and the ties between generations fare better in this story set up to make us teary by the end. I couldn't oblige. By that time, my ducts were clogged with schmaltz.