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The Jazz Singer was Hollywood's first talking picture. Edna Ferber's stage play, which starred George Jessel and catapulted Al Jolson to cinematic fame, was about a cantor's son who wanted to become a jazz singer.

But Meester Amerika, brainchild of librettist Jennifer Berman, which opens Feb. 12 at the Garage Theatre in Teaneck, does the opposite by introducing the audience to a prominent family of the Yiddish Theatre in its heyday whose promising son instead wants to become a -- gasp! -- cantor. The birth of such an idea started in a backstage costume lab with great acoustics, where librettist Jennifer Berman costumed Broadway productions.

Berman remembered, "I was costuming for Ragtime when I got the idea backstage. I was there every night listening to Judy Kaye singing the part of Emma Goldman. And I got to thinking, ‘Gee, the lower East Side, what a great place to set a musical.' And after a while Emma Goldman morphed into Yetta, the main character. I got to thinking about the Yiddish theatre. I always thought of Edward G. Robinson, The Jazz Singer and Paul Muni. The Jazz Singer was about a cantor's son who wanted to become a jazz singer. So what if a jazz singer wanted to become a cantor? How would that work? If it were in the theater we could get even more play out of it. So I started researching."

Slowly but surely she developed a storyline using classic songs in the Yiddish theater format -- a show within a show; male actors playing female characters and vice versa -- then realized the need for a composer/lyricist team who could tie the songs into the storyline by providing accessible translations to already-existing Yiddish lyrics and create new songs where needed.

Their most subtle task was to infuse all musical numbers with the power to tie together the onstage action with the parallel offstage current events.

Enter Michael Colby, a prolific composer and librettist from Metuchen. His best-known work off-Broadway was Charlotte Sweet, about a high-voiced soprano in Victorian England who becomes addicted to helium balloons in order to maintain the high notes of her vocal range. A great deal of his work involved revitalizing the English translations of standard Yiddish songs and adding new lyrics. Occasionally, this involved using a beautiful standard -- such as Pappirosen -- whose words were completely irrelevant to the show. According to Berman, "Michael was able to recreate the English to bring out the Yiddish flavor in a way that people can understand."

Jeff Keller plays the father figure who hopes that his son will make it to Broadway with an even greater impact than he himself has cast. Keller was Michael Crawford's understudy in the original Broadway cast and production of Phantom of the Opera, and enjoyed his own performance run in the title role. Berman appreciates the range of support such as Keller's, from the Broadway end of the spectrum, and other actors from the Yiddish Folksbiene from the Yiddish theater end. "We use a lot of stock figures from the Yiddish theater -- ingenue, juvenile, colorful different characters, a yeshiva student who harbors secret desires -- fun and fanciful characters. Yiddish theater has been an endangered species for quite some time. We hope to make it more accessible to general audiences and yet give everyone a real kaleidoscopic view of what it was like, and what it could be for a modern audience."

Berman gratefully counts as mentors Zalman and Hana Mlotek; Yiddish musical specialists at YIVO. "They guided me. It took me about a year to come up with the plot. I worked with Artie Bressler, our composer, who kept some of the old Yiddish songs but substituted original songs for some of the others. Although I didn't know the language -- because our parents deliberately spoke Yiddish around us to keep us from knowing what they were saying -- I knew this material was what I grew up with: Danny Kaye, Jerry Lewis, even though I didn't know they were from Yiddish theater."

The more Berman studied with the Mloteks, the more she began to understand how the Yiddish material evolved into American comedy.

"Yiddish theater is a world that doesn't really exist anymore except for the Folksbiene," she said. "It happened right under our nosed in New York City. It was this vibrant culture. It's not extinct, because just as dinosaurs evolved into birds, Yiddish theater evolved into sitcoms. So I felt that if I, a person who had no background in Yiddish -- we felt a real connection to it, I knew that Jews and Gentiles alike could identify with it because it's so American. That's why I wanted to put it in the theater so I could have the actors performing the old songs.

"It's like a big, steaming bowl of matza ball soup -- it's something to make you feel better even if you didn't know you needed to feel better."