Jeffrey Barg '98, Author of the ‘Angry Grammarian,’ a Column-Turned-Stage-Musical

By Stephen Silver for Jewish Exponent

Jeffrey Barg has lived in the Philadelphia region since arriving with his family when he was eight. And through Jewish education at Har Zion Temple in Penn Valley, school at Merion Elementary School and The Haverford School and college at Penn, he’s always been really into words and grammar.

The 44-year-old Barg now lives in the city with his family, which includes two young children. He went from college in the early 2000s to Philadelphia Weekly during the tail end of the heyday of the city’s alt-weekly newspaper scene. In 2007, he launched the original “Angry Grammarian” column.

Following a break for grad school and a stint as an urban planner at the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society, Barg revived the Grammarian column for the Philadelphia Inquirer’s op-ed page in 2018 and kept it going until earlier this year, when it moved to Substack.

“I came up with this idea for a character that would be worked up about grammar and sort of have some attitude about it,” Barg told the Exponent. “I remember pitching it to my editors there, and they were like, ‘That is a terrible idea; no one will read that,’ but the column went ahead anyway. And it’s continued in various forms ever since, including on stage.”

In 2014, Barg, who had enjoyed working on a Philadelphia Fringe Festival stage show, began working on a stage musical version of the column.

A decade later, “The Angry Grammarian: The Musical” premiered in March at Theater Exile in Center City. After selling out its entire run, the musical returns for a nine-show run at the larger Arden Theatre Company’s Arcadia Stage from September 20-29.

“The story is a fairly straightforward romantic comedy, but grammar and language, and punctuation are the themes running through it,” Barg said of the musical. “We wanted a relatively straightforward story, but then this kind of niche hook. And it turns out there is a bigger audience for that kind of hook than one might have thought.”

The musical’s songs lean toward grammatical puns: “Like Subject and Verb,” “Lie With Me and Lay Me,” “The Effect of Your Affect” and “Preposition Proposition.”

Barg sees a connection between what he’s chosen to write about and his Jewish background.

“It didn’t occur to me until later, the Jewish connection with the grammar column and my fascination with language,” Barg said. He grew up listening to his father’s old LPs, especially Allan Sherman’s 1962 album “Allan Sherman’s Mother Presents My Son, the Folk Singer,” which he described as “classic Jewish comedy.”

On long car trips, they would also listen to his father’s Yiddish humor and klezmer tapes, even remembering one trip when the family car was broken into, and everything was taken except for the Yiddish tapes.

“That sort of got me into language and helped me kind of understand the power of language, and eventually contributed to my desire to write about language,” he said.

Barg wrote the play with David Lee White, with White writing the script parts and Barg composing the songs.

Jewish artists also inspired Barg’s love of musical theater. His favorites include “Little Shop of Horrors,” written by the Jewish composers Alan Menken and Howard Ashman, and “Rent,” by the late Jewish composer Jonathan Larson. He’s also a fan of “Les Miserables,” “Phantom of the Opera” and “Hamilton.”

Barg combined his love of grammar and musical theater in a 2019 Inquirer column about “Hamilton,” which referenced the “My Dearest Angelica” line in the show, which he called “comma sexting.”

The show’s composer, Lin-Manuel Miranda, approvingly tweeted the column, which Barg called “one of my professional highlights.”

Also in 2019, Barg wrote an Inquirer column about a New Jersey elected official who drew fire for using the phrase “Jew her down.” He explained the grammatical reasons why using the word “Jew” as a verb rather than a noun gives it a much more offensive meaning.
After the Arden run, Barg hopes to mount the musical again.

“I would love for the show to have a life beyond Philadelphia,” Barg said. “Anybody who wants to come produce it, we’re open to that. I could see it having an existence in community theaters around the country. It feels like a good community theater kind of show.”

Stephen Silver is a Broomall-based freelance writer.

Read more from Jewish Exponent