From the New York Times:

The Actors’ Temple, a Manhattan synagogue, is turning to theatre to help make ends meet. “Recently — say, oh, during the last half-century — this temple, with a declining membership and a vanishing budget, has not been doing so well. So starting with an official opening night tomorrow, the Actors’ Temple, for the first time in its 89-year history, will be moonlighting as an Off Broadway theater. … The first show, ‘The Big Voice: God or Merman?,’ is about a Roman Catholic from Brooklyn and a Baptist from Arkansas who find spiritual solace in musical theater and each other.”

The Actors’ Temple, formally known as Congregation Ezrath Israel, was started in 1917 by a group of shop owners in Hell’s Kitchen. In 1923 it moved into its current building at 339 West 47th Street, near Eighth Avenue, and soon began attracting stage and vaudeville actors, who were viewed with suspicion by other synagogues.