Word: skulnik
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Uncle Willie (by Julie Berns and Irving Elman) is Comedian Menasha Skulnik, long a favorite with Yiddish-speaking audiences and lately also on Broadway (The Fifth Season, The Flowering Peach). In Uncle Willie his extraordinary appeal does what it can to offset a miserably sleazy play. Cast as a turn-of-the-century do-gooder who deals in everything from pins to cemetery lots, he marries off immigrant cousins, assumes family mortgages and is good to little children. But above all he gradually converts a feuding two-family house, half Irish and half Jewish, into a bower of sweetness...
...sorriest aspect of Uncle Willie is not that its story makes Abie's Irish Rose seem positively avantgarde; it is not even its stale and stupid quips, but rather its greasy benevolence. Fairly often, to be sure. Actor Skulnik shakes himself free from it: with a demonstration of how to walk so that shoes will not wear out, with a tale of how each month his landlord pays him rent, with a mere shrug or grunt or monosyllable, he can be a delight. But oftener he struggles, like a boxer, to outpoint his material, or like a magician...
...love of spirited Pat Roe. Kraft TV Theater took the edge off any social satire that remained in its adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Diamond as Big as the Ritz by playing the script as farce; U.S. Steel introduced the TV audience to Broadway Comic Menasha Skulnik with a Runyonesque comedy about a genial barber who outwits a combine of gangsters and horseplayers: Lux Video Theater, with an updating of Sir Arthur Wing Pinero's classic The Enchanted Cottage, proved without question that there can be as much happiness in ears and disfigurement as in girlish...
...play has its pleasant, kindly and vigorous scenes. On occasion, too, there is a certain piquancy to its childlike scramblings of time and place. As Noah, Menasha Skulnik (The Fifth Season) is not only engaging and funny, but touching and dignified; and Berta Gersten can be funny and touching as his sour-sweet wife...
When he was 39, Menasha Skulnik was settled in Manhattan, playing Yiddish musicomedy roles in the Second Avenue Theater. At last he saved enough money to bring, his mother to New York from Poland, and one night bought her a front-row seat. It was her first reckoning with show business since her son ran away from home at eight to become an actor. After the performance, Menasha took his mother to one side. "Well, Mama, what do you think?" Said Mama, with hushed astonishment: "From this you make a living...