Good Showbiz

★ ★ ★ ½

3.5 Stars

Good Showbiz mixes vaudeville and stand up with a dash of Shakespeare and a splash of Yiddish theater. It is a show about Jewish stereotypes that refuses to be one. It is performed at The Actors Temple which is a working synagogue that counted Jack Benny,  Milton Berle, Bert Lahr, and Shelley Winters among its members, and before the lights even come up their legendary ghosts are already in the room. 

Eli Leonard co-wrote the piece with director Theodore Bressman (both are Curb Your  Enthusiasm alumni), he looks and acts eerily like a younger Larry David with a touch of Mel  Brooks around the edges. That is a lot of comic baggage and the show makes it part of the act.  As the evening’s host, Sandy Synagoguenstein Leonard becomes a loud, exaggerated minstrel, wandering through a century of showbiz in every mask the industry ever handed its Jewish performers. He pushes each mask to such an absurd extreme that it starts to crack. 

The road is winding and strange, and the audience keeps getting pulled into the act. Hitler shows up, played by Sarah Shtern with ridiculous comic conviction and announces he wants to kill himself because he can’t make it as an artist. Sandy talks him out of it then turns to the house to  ask whether anyone feels a little like a Nazi now. He made me feel like I should raise my hand.  Later, a woman from the audience controls a shock collar on Leonard while he dances for his life  with a bottle balanced on his head—an ordeal Jews were actually forced to endure in  concentration camps. All the while, he throws money at audience members to laugh and play  along. These bargains land harder the longer you sit with them;  approval bought with pieces of  yourself. 

Then Leonard steps into a Shakespearean Shylock monologue played without so much as a  wink and all clowning falls away. That scene gives the evening its most serious note, confronting a trope of the villainous  money-loving Jew that has existed for centuries. Both  Leonard and Shtern trained with Philippe Gaulier, whose brand of clowning is designed to strip  away ego until the performer’s real, flawed self is exposed. Here, that raw exposure rubs directly  against the stereotypes the show lampoons—and the friction turns out to be the point. It is  designed to make you laugh, and then make you squirm for laughing. 

It took me a day to see the piece as a whole. Some of the genuinely funny one-liners kept coming back and with them the realization that this is really an identity piece. Jewish comedians, like  many other comics have long turned stereotypes into material, taking away their sting and  exposing the absurdity of believing them. Leonard goes a step further: he uses satire not just to  dismantle a stereotype, but to build his identity as a performer. As the old clichés fall away, he makes room for a kind of theater and a "brand" that belongs only to him. 

Good Showbiz is not for everyone, but fans of Larry David and Mel Brooks will recognize  something familiar in Eli Leonard and find that he turns it into something uniquely his own. By  building a show entirely out of prefabricated tropes he has made himself impossible to 

stereotype or replicate. Originality may be the endangered species of the AI era. Good Showbiz is proof it isn’t extinct yet. Bravo, and mazel tov! 

Good Showbiz (through November 21, 2026)

Starring: Eli Leonard

The Actors Temple, 339 West 47th Street, in Manhattan

Thursdays and Saturdays at 7pm, Sundays at 3:30pm. 

For tickets, visit www.telecharge.com/Good-Showbiz-Tickets

Running time: 75 minutes with no intermission

Reviewer: Emily Lansbury