Jews on Broadway: An Historical Survey of Performers, Playwrights, Composers, Lyricists and Producers
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Wonderful Town, starring Rosalind Russell, ran for over 550 performances at the Winter Garden Theater. Among the subsequent Broadway musicals from the team of Comden and Green were Two on the Aisle, Peter Pan, Subways Are for Sleeping, and the huge 1956 hit Bells Are Ringing, in which they once again teamed with Robbins on a show set in New York City. Bells rang for over 900 performances at the Shubert Theater. Comden and Green will be discussed again in later chapters, as I had the honor of teaming with them on the 1991 musical Will Rogers Follies.
LEONARD BERNSTEIN
On the Town also brought a 27-year-old Leonard Bernstein to Broad -
way. The son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, Bernstein, born in 1918, learned to play piano in his early teens. Despite lack of encouragement from his father, who wanted his son to pursue other interests, Bernstein followed his dream and honed his musical talents, studying at Har vard and other universities. Encouraged by Aaron Copland among others, he wrote his first symphony, Jeremiah, in 1943. He would soon land a job at the New York Philharmonic as an assistant conductor. However, in late 1943, Bernstein got his break, filling in one evening for conductor Walter Bruno, who took ill. Conducting the New York Philharmonic orchestra over network radio in a critically acclaimed concert made Bernstein an overnight sensation.
Bernstein went on to become a legendary conductor, but also received his fair share of well-deserved critical acclaim for composing several Broadway musicals. Following On the Town, Bernstein wrote the music and lyrics for a musical version of J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan. Then came Wonderful Town for which he won a Tony Award, and a musical version of Voltaire’s satire Candide that came and went quickly in its initial run on Broadway before returning for a successful revival in 1974.
Of course West Side Story would immortalize Leonard Bernstein on Broadway and in film, rounding out what would be one of the most significant musical careers in American history.
Leonard Bernstein never lost touch with his Jewish identity that 89
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was instilled in him at an early age through his parents. His 1943 symphony, Jeremiah, was about the story of the Jewish prophet who wrote about the destruction of the first temple and the exile of the Jewish people into slavery. In 1945 he was commissioned by the Park Avenue Synagogue in New York City to write a liturgy for the Sabbath service, which was entitled Hashkiveinu, and in 1961 he wrote a symphony called Kaddish.
While he maintained a secular quality in most of his compositions, Bernstein’s work was influenced by Jewish history and stories from the Old Testament.
JEROME ROBBINS
The fourth of the luminaries to emerge from On the Town as a major Broadway force was Jerome Robbins, who today is considered by many as the first and foremost name associated with Broadway choreography.
Born Jerome Wilson Rabinowitz, he would move with his family at an early age to Weehawken, New Jersey, where his father and uncle opened a corset business. In a short time the corset business became known to the show business community, especially the vaudeville circuit. The young Jerome, however, was not interested in the family business but instead studied at the New Dance League, learning ballet, modern dance and Spanish dancing with the renowned Helen Veola, as well as dance composition and choreography under the great Bessie Schonberg.
In 1940, Robbins became part of the Ballet Theater, now known as the American Ballet Theater. This began a 12-year dance career in which he would join the New York City Ballet. It was also during this time that he would choreograph Fancy Free for Ballet Theatre and then make his foray onto Broadway with On the Town.
Robbins would go on to fuse classical ballet with the exuberance and energy of Broadway dance as he worked on a host of shows through the late ’40s including Billion Dollar Baby, High Button Shoes for which he won a Tony Award, Miss Liberty, Call Me Madam and Look Ma, I’m Dancing. In the ’50s, he would join forces with Rodgers and Hammerstein on The King and I and became known as the choreographer for some of Broadway’s all-time classic shows including West Side Story, Fiddler on the Roof, Gypsy and Funny Girl. He won critical acclaim time and time again for bringing a dynamic energy and something new to the 90
4. Group Theater, Acting Teachers and Life During Wartime dance sequences in each of these shows. “He was, as New York Times dance critic Anna Kisselgoff wrote, “the first major American-born classical choreographer.”5
Interestingly, while the name Rabinowitz translates to “son of a rabbi,” Jerome elected to change his name. Robbins felt that the name made him known as the son of an immigrant. From breaking down in tears at his Bar Mitzvah unable to finish, to entering into ballet, which was not a very Jewish world, Robbins was, according to his biographers, uncomfortable being Jewish. Like Bernstein and many other performers of the era, he was also at odds with his father over his choice of career, choosing dance over more “practical” options.
However, unlike Bernstein, Robbins spent years moving away from his Jewish heritage. For many years he struggled with his Jewish identity as well as with his own sexual orientation. In time, Robbins would eventually come to embrace his Jewish background, leading to his enthusiasm for bringing Fiddler on the Roof to the stage and embarking on Jewish works for the New York City Ballet. In fact, in his travels throughout the 1950s he went to Israel where he played an important role in strength-ening the nation’s dance scene. He also became comfortable with his sexuality and being openly gay.
Broadway After the War
The neighborhood around the theater district continued to change for the worse after World War II. Many young, naive American soldiers had returned with newfound sexual prowess having been in parts of Europe and Asia where young prostitutes were eager to please American servicemen. As a result, the area on and around 42nd Street became a haven for pornography and prostitution, which certainly did not help the legitimate theaters in the area. In addition, the newfound popularity of television gave potential theatergoers a form of no-cost home entertainment. The result was bleak for Broadway. Despite the enormous success of Annie Get Your Gun, which opened in 1946 and played for over 1,100 performances, the theater district was struggling. Shows were costly to stage, with a musical running up a bill of over $200,000 for a full-scale production. As a result, more theaters opted to show movies. By 91
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1948 there was an 80 percent unemployment rate for Broadway actors and the respective employees who worked in the theaters. By 1949, the number of new shows hit a three-decade low of 57.
One manner in which Broadway drew some attention was by establish ing the Tony Awards. Named for actress, director, producer and co-founder of the American Theater Wing, Antoinette Perry, who had recently died, the awards commenced in April of 1947 with a ceremony held at the Waldorf Astoria hotel, later to be moved to Radio City Music Hall. While the Tony Awards did not bring instant attention to a widespread audience, as they became a more prestigious annual event, they gave the Broadway community confidence that Broadway would be on the rebound very soon.
With South Pacific enjoying phenomenal success, the 1940s drew to a close. It was a devastating decade with a war the likes of which the world had never seen. The war did, however, bring America together in a united effort, which was unparalleled in the nation’s history. The patriotism of Irving Berlin, the Jewish performers rallying the country through their participation in the Bergson Group and by volunteering their time and effort during the war years, and of course the half-million Jewish-American soldiers, stemmed the tide of anti–Semitism that was growing in the 1930s. The children of Jewish immigrants had indeed assimilated into mainstream America. They had fought side by side with soldiers of all nationalities, while also helping with the war efforts on the home front. The “children of immigrants” label had finally disappeared.
Many second-generation American Jews had also made a major impact upon Broadway as composers, lyricists, writers and performers.
While many had changed their
names, most still embraced their Jewish heritage, and many continued, in the years after the war, to provide assistance to the millions of displaced families and veterans who served.
As Broadway ushered in the 1950s with the mega-hits Guys and Dolls and The King and I, another battle was emerging within America.
Despite being allies with the United States during the war, Communism once again took center stage as the ideology in the Soviet Union. As a result, anti–Communism moved to the ideological center of American politics.
As author Ellen Schrecker wrote, “The Cold War transformed domes tic Communism from a matter of political opinion to one of 92
4. Group Theater, Acting Teachers and Life During Wartime national security. As the United States’ hostility toward the Soviet Union intensified, members of the Communist party came increasingly to be viewed as potential enemy agents.”6 Such intense scrutiny would impact the careers of numerous celebrities, including many Jewish writers and performers whose liberal views came under attack. In the next chapter, we look more closely at the effects of McCarthyism and the anti–Communism crusade on the Broadway community.
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5
From Communism
to the Catskills
“Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist Party?” From politicians to performers to average Americans, people throughout the United States were being questioned and in some cases accused of being Communist sympathizers in a nation that had succumbed to a new wave of post–World War II paranoia. Despite being our allies in the war, the Soviet Union, in the early 1950s, was now emerging as a powerful rival in its quest to challenge the United States as an economic, military and political world leader. As the Soviet Union, and soon China, were both Communist nations, a rising fear in the late 1940s grew among American citizens and by the 1950s swept over the nation with the misguided belief that, like a disease, Communism could spread quickly and take over American ideology. The mere idea that anyone living amongst us could be a Communist sparked fear and panic.
Young Republican senator Joseph McCarthy, from Wisconsin, took it upon himself to lead a crusade to find and weed out those who were Communists. The result was a witch hunt in which anyone who was believed to have subversive ideas, or be associated with left-wing political organizations, was called in to testify before the anti–Communism committee. In fact, in 1951 Senator McCarthy even charged that President Truman was a Communist agent.
Caught in this frenzied hunt for Communism were both writers and performers primarily in Hollywood, but also in New York. Among them were many Jewish celebrities who had been outspoken in their criticism of the government, and some of whom were followers of Communist ideas, if not actually members of the Party. These were idealists, not 94
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extremists, who challenged the norms and spoke out, as the Jewish people had been known to do for centuries. They spoke out against intolerance and social injustice. Communism was initially a socioeconomic ideology, which was later used in foreign countries as a means of strict government control, such as in the Soviet Union. This was not part of the agenda of those who believed in the basic ideology. Nonetheless, many people were branded as Communists, and as a result they were blacklisted and unable to find work. Among the names listed as Communist sympathizers were Leonard Bernstein, composer Mark Blitzstein, John Garfield, Arthur Laurents, Arthur Miller, Zero Mostel, Edward G. Robinson, Lillian Hellman and several of the Group Theater members including both Luther and Stella Adler, Henry Morgan, Clifford Odets and Elia Kazan. In all, over 300 performers, writers, composers and others in show business were blacklisted. Some returned to their careers in a few years, while oth ers lost their careers entirely, some of whom died in poverty after resorting to alcohol.
It was Lillian Hellman, in particular, who attracted a great deal of attention from the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), which, although established in the late 1930s, had risen to great prominence in the early ’50s because of the widespread pursuit of Communists.
The committee took center stage with their hearings and their ongoing search for more and more names of possible Communists.
Today, Hellman’s body of work remains highly respected, and she maintains her place as one of the most significant playwrights of the 20th century. However, her strong liberal views made her a primary target in the Communist witch hunt. In fact, her FBI files, reportedly, consisted of 307 pages. As it turned out, Hellman was never officially tried, nor was there evidence that she ever posed a threat to the United States government in any manner. Nonetheless, prior to World War II, according to her FBI files, Hellman was under surveillance. What she read, what organizations she belonged to and whom she associated with were all being monitored. Obviously her plays were also dissected for their underlying social meaning. Watch on the Rhine, which enjoyed a run of 378
performances on Broadway, was among the plays most carefully scrutinized, as well as The Little Foxes and some of her screenplays. And, as was the case with the Communist pursuit of the time, phrases, nuances and even characters could be easily misconstrued in favor of the argument 95
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the FBI and “Red hunters” wished to make. Even her memoirs would infuriate the extreme anti–Communists, reporting on whom she talked to and the organizations she supported. To make matters worse, The Daily Worker, the Communist Party newspaper, gave a very favorable review to Watch on the Rhine. Of the numerous positive reviews the play and film received in newspapers coast to coast, this was the one that Edgar Hoover, the FBI and the Hellman haters would acknowledge.
Hell man made it clear in a letter to the House Un-American Activities Committee that she was not about to change who she was or what she believed, when she sent the Committee a letter in which she stated, “I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions.”1
Of course, it was more than just Hellman’s work being scrutinized.
There were some 50,000 members of the Communist Party in the United States in the 1940s. It was not illegal to join, nor was there great objection in the 1930s or during the war years of the ’40s when the United States and the Soviet Union were allies. Conservatives were distrustful of those who aligned with the Communist party, even if they were not members, but by and large, most Americans remained indifferent until McCarthy began his crusade.
In 1947, HUAC began calling witnesses from Hollywood, believing some to be planting the seeds of anti–American activities in their work.
The majority of those questioned refused to name names. Others who were summoned, such as Walt Disney, testified to HUAC that the threat of Communists in the film industry was indeed a serious one. Meanwhile, Danny Kaye was among several actors who started a group called the Com mittee for the First Amendment. The group protested in Washington against the attacks on the entertainment industry.
While McCarthyism and the paranoia that surrounded this dark period in American history would last only a short time in the early 1950s, the results would have lasting effects on many people in the entertainment industry. For playwright Arthur Miller, the Communist pursuit was very reminiscent of those that he recalled from American history classes. The Salem witch hunts of the 17th century were also spurred on by a growing paranoia and misguided beliefs that witches were actually living amongst the people of Salem, Massachusetts. Not unlike what was happening in Washington, D.C., the people of Salem were being found guilty on minimal evidence and hearsay. For Miller these similarities 96
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proved to be the impetus for the classic and very timely play, The Crucible, first brought to the Broadway stage in 1953. Of course the guise of the Salem witch hunts didn’t get past the devout anti–Communists. In 1956, Miller was called in for questioning by HUAC. He refused to go along with the modern-day witch hunt and was convicted of contempt of Congress for not giving the names of peers who were assumed
to be Communists.
Arthur Miller
Born in 1915 to Polish-Jewish immigrants in New York City, Arthur Miller grew up in East Harlem and later in Brooklyn before going off to the University of Michigan. It was in college that Miller wrote his first two plays, The Villain and Honors at Dawn, both of which garnered awards.
After college, Miller took on several jobs while writing his first Broadway play, The Man Who Had All the Luck, which opened and closed in 1944. While the play essentially bombed on Broadway, it did win a Theater Guild Award. It was Miller’s second play, All My Sons, that generated significant attention as his first Broadway hit. The play, based on a true story, focused on an imprisoned man who, along with his partner, had sold faulty cylinders to the United States Army, resulting in the crashing of 21 planes. The story illustrated how his family, partner and others in his life coped with his actions, including his son who killed himself rather than living with the knowledge of what his father had done. The dramatic/tragic play not only ran on Broadway for 328 performances, but also won a Tony Award. In addition, it drew the attention of HUAC, concerned about the story of a traitor to the American cause.
Miller’s next play, Death of a Salesman, emerged as one of the greatest American dramas ever written — if not the greatest. Opening in 1949, Death of a Salesman would not only enjoy an initial run of 742 performances on Broadway, but would also be performed at all levels, from major theatrical productions to high school presentations, for decades to come.
It was the first play to win a Tony Award, New York Drama Circle Critics’
Award and Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Willy Loman would become a house hold name as the tragic play later showed up on the reading lists 97
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of schools coast to coast. Miller even directed Death of a Salesman at the People’s Art Theatre in Beijing, China, in 1983.