The Allen Street Yiddish Theatre Palace Presents: Cinderesther is a new musical comedy that celebrates the lives, struggles and triumphs of the large numbers of Jewish immigrants that landed in America and settled in the difficult, crowded, impoverished and often dangerous streets of New York City's Lower East Side. Strangers in a strange land, the Jewish people found new opportunities and freedoms; and out of poverty they emerged triumphant as writers, musicians, and labor leaders, and all but created the garment industry in the span of a generation. At the end of Fiddler on the Roof and Yentl we see the protagonist escape to America, but then what would face a Jewish person arriving in America with nothing but faith and family?

The story is told with a framing device of a struggling, third-rate Yiddish Theatre barely eking by. Run by the resourceful REBECCA, who is sometimes driven to near-madness by her diva-actress mother MARILYN, they put on shows in Yiddish with plenty of Klezmer music to give their homesick immigrant neighbors a taste of the shtetl life they left behind. They tell the familiar tale of Cinderella, but with a new twist: it is told through the prism of Jewish immigrant life (this sort of adaptation was very common in the Yiddish Theatre of the era, where even Shakespeare was served up with a side of schmaltz). In this world, ESTHER (re-named Cinderesther by her stepsisters) struggles in a dingy, walk-up tenement with a hallway toilet shared by multiple families and is forced to do all the housework while also maintaining a job. She finds cruelty from her wicked STEPMOTHER and stepsisters ROSE and HILDA, but finds hope from her kind neighbor SOPHIE and from JERUSHA and LEAH, two girls who work with her at a garment factory in deplorable conditions for low wages. Enter DAVID PRINCE, a wealthy Tin Pan Alley songwriter who is enamored of Esther's ability to sing the catchy rhythms of a new kind of music he is introducing to his neighbors: Jazz. Of course we know how the story will turn out, but it has never been told quite like this.

The music includes the sounds of classic Klezmer, but also evokes the sounds of Tin Pan Alley, as the music of Jewish songwriters (such as Irving Berlin) would fill the streets of New York and eventually take the world by storm. And as the story unfolds, the sounds of Jazz start to mix in with the Klezmer… setting the stage for how composers such as Gershwin would use their Jewish heritage to put their own spin on a new kind of American music.

The Yiddish language is also used as a device in the storytelling. Though the show is written primarily in English, we are expected to suspend disbelief and assume that the characters are all speaking in their native Yiddish. However, Yiddish words and phrases are interspersed throughout the dialogue for flavor and authenticity, used in context so they can be easily understood.