Hard to believe, but the heavyweight boxing title once meant something — something larger than mere sports.
Joe Louis and Max Schmeling's two bouts in the 1930s became potent symbolic events between America and Germany. And in the middle of those fights was a scrappy little promoter who himself was part of the metaphor.
Actor Tovah Feldshuh portrays Joe ("Yussel the Muscle") Jacobs, Schmeling's manager in "Dancing With Giants," which had its world premiere Thursday at Illusion Theater in Minneapolis. Feldshuh's brother, David, who debuted his Pulitzer-nominated "Miss Evers' Boys" at Illusion many years ago, wrote and directed this new work.
Jacobs, a yappy New Yorker, made his reputation through colorful language, a gift for publicity and a keen sense of the sport. Jewish, he and the German Schmeling made an odd couple in a fraught era.
Their relationship was close — even as the national tension of the second Schmeling-Louis fight in 1938 must have created enormous pressure on Jacobs to transcend personal friendship and show loyalty to his country.
David Feldshuh initially spun his play on the axis of that curious friendship. He expanded it, to draw in Schmeling's relationship with Louis and the Nazi leadership's heavy-handed interest in their champion.
The result is that "Dancing With Giants" is both too much and too little — not enough flesh and bone in the dance between Jacobs and Schmeling and too much flab in the political message. The play flattens out into a historical document rather than a sharp three-dimensional insight into human nature.
Most people will attend this show because of Tovah Feldshuh, a brilliant actor who leapt to international attention in the 1978 TV miniseries "Holocaust." Her performance here raises another question about her brother's intentions with this piece. Tovah keeps an eye on the audience and her meticulous energy has the stylized physicality and the wink of a cabaret.
