At Tanglewood's packed Ozawa Hall Wednesday night, the multi-talented Michael Tilson Thomas gave the enthusiastic audience his Russian immigrant grandmother's strudel recipe: go into the kitchen, put on your apron, wash your hands and make the strudel.

Musically, that's what the conductor/creator/narrator/pianist/singer/borscht belt-comic did, in a down-and-dirty depiction of the tumultuous, audacious lives of Boris and Bessie Thomashefsky, Ukrainian immigrants who as teenagers launched and led Yiddish theater on Manhattan's Lower East Side. They starred, produced, founded advocacy groups and wrote newspaper columns -- even after they noisily separated and competed with each other.

No other show has the format of this family album, in which Yiddish singing actors dance, change costumes and recreate stages of the Thomashefskys' lives, while translations are projected on a rear screen that looks like a proscenium. Thomas conducts a Klezmer-like orchestra -- in this case 30 members of the Boston Symphony, the whole of which he is to lead in Beethoven's Ninth Symphony Sunday. He occasionally joins a song, directs the audience to clap along, and moves into the spotlight with Yiddish-inflected anecdotes.

Boris died in 1939, but Bessie, a Molly Picon-type pistol played by Judy Blazer (Click HERE), moved to California, so the 64-year-old Thomas knew her till her death, when he was 17. He's taken his show around for about five years, nipping and tucking, making cast changes, changing the narrative -- his parents have vanished from it -- and at two hours and 40 minutes it's relatively streamlined. Another 10 minutes out? Wouldn't be a scandal.

Thomas showed a clip from one of Boris' last films, singing a song giving life hints to a bar-mitzvah boy. He described the film as a generous, affectionate performance. So was his.

"The Thomashefskys" must have pulled out half the Jews in the Berkshires. The other half will probably catch tonight's repeat.