Passion, sadness, wit pervade staged bio of conductor Leonard Bernstein

Woody’s [rating:3.5]

Genius.

It’s defined as a person with exceptional creativity, originality or intellectual ability, especially in the arts or sciences.

Triple-threat American conductor-composer-pianist Leonard Bernstein certainly met that standard.

Over and over.

But Hershey Felder, a Canadian triple-threat himself (pianist, actor, director), depicts Bernstein in a new one-man show at the Berkeley Rep as a self-branded failure because he couldn’t compose music that might equal Beethoven’s.

Bernstein was in his own mind merely someone who’d be remembered for trivial melodies from Broadway’s “West Side Story.”

Felder approximates him, but doesn’t impersonate his finishing school speech patterns.

That’s good, because many in the audience — I, for one — recall boyish Lenny images from TV’s “Omnibus” and his Young People’s Concerts.

Felder instead fills the stage throughout his inelegantly titled mini-bio, “Hershey Felder as Leonard Bernstein in Maestro,” with larger-than-life passion.

Plus equal doses of sadness and wit.

He smoothly ping-pongs between triumph and tragedy while honing the essences of multiple characters — including Bernstein’s ultra-Jewish parents and his Chilean actress wife (Felicia Cohn Montealegre, whom the bisexual Harvard grad deserted for a man, though he returned to comfort her when she was dying).

He shines while posing as American composer Aaron Copland, Bernstein friend and benefactor, and a string of European conductors who influenced him.

Felder also injects ooh-aah nuggets, like this recounting of a mentor’s instructions: “It was like watching God sculpt the Garden of Eden.”

The play’s a tour de force, for sure, likely to wring some wetness from your tear ducts — as it did from mine.

I saw Bernstein only once, with New York’s philharmonic, and Felder’s no Bernstein.

But he is a virtuoso pianist and a moving entertainer.

Poignantly lovely is his rendition of Bernstein’s “Somewhere,” which contrasts vividly with slivers of “Emperor Concerto” and other percussive Beethoven works.

Felder also mines brilliance from Copland’s “Piano Variations” and Bernstein compositions ranging from his derivative “Piano Sonata” to the raucous “I Hate Music” to the ethnically inspired “Symphony No. 1: Jeremiah.”

Stunning is a projected image of an operatic excerpt from Wagner’s “Liebestod” synchronized with Felder’s playing of the piece.

Accented by Bernstein’s words defending his acceptance of the German’s anti-Semitism.

But the show isn’t seamless.

The 100-minute, mostly chronological musical drama occasionally becomes a preachy master class not unlike one of Bernstein’s own teaching moments.

Too detailed. Too intricate. Definitely too pedantic.

It also has holes.

It gives short shrift, for instance, to Bernstein’s longtime leftist political activism (though it does capsulize the “radical chic” flap about his civil liberties fundraiser for Black Panther Party members).

Absent completely are Bernstein’s cigarettes (almost as omnipresent as his baton in real life), which led to his demise in 1990 at age 72.

After having battled emphysema for two decades.

No reference, either, to Bernstein founding the Pacific Music Festival in Sapporo, Japan, with Michael Tilson Thomas — a training school for musicians modeled on Tanglewood and still going strong (it’ll hold a 25th anniversary celebration from mid-July to mid-August).

But Felder, who previously tackled Chopin, Liszt and Beethoven in solo shows, exquisitely captures Bernstein’s arrogance.

And his insecurities.

And his scornful dismissal of George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue.”

Judicious editing might help Felder jump-start the show, though.

It’s advantageous he doesn’t shy from the conductor’s gay meanderings or his lifelong immersion in Jewishness, but the over-emphasis on the latter heritage at the get-go is problematic — especially the massive infusion of Yiddish and Hebrew.

That said, it should also be noted that director Joel Zwick, helmsman of “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” who’s collaborated on Felder’s earlier shows, skillfully guides the single-act play toward the standing ovation it warrants.

In rendering Bernstein, Felder, who’s married to an ex-Canadian prime minister 21 years his senior, Kim Campbell, isn’t as entertaining as he’d been in “George Gershwin Alone.”

Nor is his performance as riveting as the one by Mona Golabek in “The Pianist of Willesden Lane” that he directed.

But his hard work researching, writing and acting pays big dividends on Berkeley Rep’s Thrust Stage.

Thomas Edison defined genius as “one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration.”

When I use that yardstick, Felder’s evidently a genius.

“Hershey Felder as Leonard Bernstein in Maestro” plays at the Berkeley Rep, 2025 Addison St., Berkeley, through June 22.  Tickets: $14.50 to $87, subject to change, (510) 647-2949 or www.berkeleyrep.org.