«You won’t succeed without Jews»

Broadway. On the map it’s a diagonal rebuke to Manhattan’s (mostly) neat grid, stretching from Bowling Green all the way to the Bronx, where it continues north before abandoning the city altogether. To tourists it’s the congested, glitzy theatre district in the West 40s and 50s, with its 40 theatres that light up for five nights and two afternoons a week, drawing lovers of drama, spectacle, and celebrity from around the world.
For Jews it has long been a place to pass as American, to become American, and to create new visions of America in the process. A glimpse at the names of those ornate Broadway theatres, many of which are as much of a portal to another time and place as the plays performed on their stages, hints at this. The Gershwin, the Shubert, the Richard Rogers, the Stephen Sondheim. It is a lie that the Jews control the banks and run the media, but it could be – and has been – argued that the Jews built Broadway.



Fight between lower and upper class

Of course, they didn’t build it alone, and it helped that they built it on an island with an already rich theatrical landscape. Dramatic performances of various types had been going on in New York – and other Colonial American cities – since long before the Revolutionary War. In the 19th and early 20th centuries a New Yorker seeking entertainment could choose between vaudeville, which brought singing, dancing, comedy, magic, and other acts to one stage; burlesque, which was comic as well as racy; musical revues, with dancing and singing; dramas; and minstrel shows, among others.
In 1849 a fight broke out between lower and upper class theatre-goers over simmering resentments and rival performances of Macbeth. In the chaos, called the Astor Place Riot, at least 22 people were killed when police sent to quell the uprising opened fire. Afterwards, New York audiences were temporarily split into three social stratum. The well-heeled attended the opera, melodramas and minstrel shows were reserved for the middle classes, and working people went to variety shows. This would begin to change when more theatres moved uptown in the 1900s, and the «Broadway show» became acceptable entertainment for all.
First, however, the form of entertainment with which Broadway is now synonymous, the American musical, had to be invented. It happened almost by accident in 1866, when a theatre manager sought to spice up a dull, nonsensical melodrama. The Black Crook combined bits of Goethe’s Faust and other popular works to tell a convoluted story involving an evil Count, a pretty girl, and the titular crook-backed practitioner of black magic. When a fire at another theatre displaced a French ballet company and their elaborate stage sets, the manager saw a unique opportunity, like many young characters in the musicals his invention would come to inspire, to put on a show.

Yiddish theatre

And there was another element to the New York stage, existing parallel to these tumultuous on- and off-stage theatrical developments: the Yiddish theatre. Its venues were located on Second Avenue, on what is now Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Here, Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe were eager consumers and accomplished performers of material that ranged from dramatic to comedic, musical to satirical. Their plays blended the religious and the secular, and drew from Jewish culture as well as the cultures (and great dramatic traditions) of European countries in which the Jews had lived. A dozen theatres and troupes presented performances of a quality to rival or surpass those in other parts of the city, including Broadway.
But the two worlds were not entirely separate. Yiddish stars like Molly Picon and Jacob Adler crossed between the two, performing on Broadway and Lower East Side stages. Impresarios Boris and Bessie Tomashevsky were a force not only in their own careers on Second Avenue but in their wider legacy, personally (they knew the Gershwins) and stylistically – the sound they helped bring to America and develop here went on to be associated with Broadway musicals and the prolific songwriters of New York’s Tin Pan Alley. By the time of Broadway’s Golden Age, beginning in the 1940s, the district was an almost entirely Jewish world of almost impossibly talented musicians and lyricists. Pick just a sample of the famous names on the list of Broadway greats of this time – Leonard Bernstein, Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin, George and Ira Gershwin, Richard Rogers, Adolph Green, Oscar Hammerstein, Lorenz Hart – and they’ll be Jewish ones. Pick those which seem like they’re not Jewish – like Harold Arlen, Jerome Robbins, Betty Comden, and Yip Harburg, and you’ll be wrong; they were originally Hyman Arluck, Jerome Rabinowitz, Basya Cohen, and Isidore Hochberg.
But although they were almost all Jews (Cole Porter being one very notable exception) these writers did not share a monolithic experience or background. Rogers, Hammerstein, and Hart, for example, were raised in privilege in New York. All three attended Columbia University. Irving Berlin (Israel Isidore Beilin) was one of eight children of a cantor in Russia; he remembered his family’s house burning in the pogrom which forced them to flee to America. Kurt Weill escaped the Nazis as an already successful European composer, adapting to American musical ways as an adult.

Outsiders and underdogs

The stories they told through their words and music were often set in quintessentially American milieus. But they were not all about prosperity and easy assimilation. In them, outsiders and underdogs confront the hardships that come with being different, or being powerless. Though perhaps not intentionally, and certainly not openly, Broadway’s early Jewish writers told Jewish tales.
The itinerant peddler who introduces a bit of ambiguous foreignness to the farmers and cowmen of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! is – or claims to be – a Persian. The American and European characters living and fighting far from home their South Pacific face a thicket of racial complexities, in which mere association with a man’s bi-racial children can taint his would-be girlfriend and even the more well-meaning characters have to confront their own prejudices. The outwardly white actress married to a white man in the Deep South in Show Boat, by Hammerstein and Kern, must keep her African-American blood a secret. When her identity is revealed, tragedy slowly unfolds – a new direction in musical theatre, which until then was usually light entertainment. The much later, and also tragic, West Side Story, involves immigrant characters originally intended to include Jews. But though the ethnicities were changed, Robbins, Sondheim, Bernstein, and Arthur Laurents’s show remains a harsh look at the dangers those seen as too foreign face in America, especially when their attempts at assimilation come too fast, or go away. 
As their characters sometimes struggled to fit in, the Jews of Broadway found assimilation difficult in other, more subtle ways. They could change their names, and they could, and did, write songs for a Christian American audience like White Christmas and Easter Parade. But though the tunes have become American classics, the audience did not always approve of the origin of the music. The Ku Klux Klan and some Christian leaders protested Irving Berlin’s God Bless America because a Jew had written it. The real life version of the America these Jewish composers were creating in the theaters did not yet entirely accept them. And it was still not ready to see Jewish characters onstage.

Breakthrough

Then finally, in 1964, came Fiddler on the Roof. Written by Jerry Bock, Sheldon Harnick, and Joseph Stein, and based on the stories of Sholem Aleichem, it was not the first overtly Jewish Broadway musical (the romantic comedy Milk and Honey, set in Israel, had opened a few years before) but it was the first Jewish-themed record-breaking smash. No longer were Jewish notes humbly stowing away in the songs’ minor keys. These characters sang of Jewish life in their small Russian village, and experienced anti-Semitism and expulsion as the play went on. Fiddler’s universality made the story not only acceptable, but beloved.
In the years that followed, Cabaret, with its Nazi symbols and provocative dance numbers, explored even darker Jewish experiences in edgier ways, and other aspects of the Jewish experience – along with that of other minority groups in America – became unremarkable topics in popular entertainment.
Today, Broadway shows are likely to send up their Jewish heritage. The Producers, which opened in 2001, skewers Hitler, unscrupulous Jewish theatre types, and little old ladies, among others. (It also has lead character Max Bialystock boast that he was a protégé of Boris Tomashevsky.) Audiences seem get it too: 2005’s Spamalot boldly proclaims, «You won’t succeed on Broadway if you don’t have any Jews,» and one hopes the roar of laughter comes from an appreciation of theatre history and nothing more sinister.
An updated list of Broadway’s Jews would include Sondheim, Stephen Schwartz (Godspell and Wicked) Marc Shaiman (Hairspray), and many others. A glance at current the Broadway listings turns up Harvey Fierstein (Kinky Boots) and Alan Menken (Aladdin), just to name a couple. Modern Broadway shows, too, often deal with differences, with overcoming and embracing them, and with issues of social justice and acceptance. But if their music is still identifiably Jewish, inflected with those sad notes a cantor might once have sung, then perhaps it is officially American, now, too.    ●

Johnna Kaplan writes on travel, history, Jewish and other topics. She blogs on www.thesizeofconnecticut.com and is on Twitter at @johnnamaurie.