The Shoemaker with Danny Aiello: The "Heeling" Arts

The Shoemaker, a play in two acts by Susan Charlotte at the Cause Celebre in the Acorn Theater on Theater Row, stars Danny Aiello and is an ambitious and extremely striving piece of theater art, seeking to mine and intertwine deep emotions and powerful threads of history and contemporary memory. It may fall a little short in its reach but it certainly can't be faulted for trying.Theater needs more original works and especially those that feature actors not regularly appearing in the NY theater scene. And when that actor is Danny Aiello, full of authentic passion and gruff personality, who has the courage as an actor to reach out, even at the risk of not quite grasping the gold ring,  it is even more rewarding. The fact that Mr. Aiello,at  78, gives a strong performance, all storms and shouts and whispers and tears,  through Ms. Charlotte's play (which itself attempts to weave, perhaps a little too preciously,  9/11 and the  Holocaust into a complicated tale), is amazing inasmuch as Mr. Aiello's authenticity and sincere Italian-American soul seems to cast just the right magical spell needed to untangle the play's gordian knot. When you get down to the heart of the matter, it is Giuseppi, the Italian Jewish shoemaker in Hell's Kitchen ,who strives to "heal" as he heels, ministering to the needs, both in terms of footwear and life's mysteries and conundrums, of his family and customers, while never quite finding solace in his own life.

In the end, I kept thinking of that line from Bob Dylan's "I and I" from the album INFIDELS: "I make shoes, for everyone, even you, and I still go barefoot." The Shoemaker, directed by Antony Marsellis, with Lucy DeVito and Alma Cuevo, and starring Mr. Aiello, is in an extremely limited engagement through August 14.  

-- Tony Napoli - Deep in the Heart of Brooklyn