Jews on Broadway: An Historical Survey of Performers, Playwrights, Composers, Lyricists and Producers

by Stewart F. Lane

  Along with Bock and Harnish winning Tony Awards for best composer and lyricist, Fiddler won for best musical of 1965. The show was such a box office success that it is estimated that if someone had invested $1,000 at the onset of the original Broadway production, they would have walked away with over $1.5 million.

  In 1967, the play opened in London, lasting for over 2,000 perform -

  ances starring Chaim Topol, who would then star in the 1971 film version, which also included Yiddish theater star Molly Picon as the village matchmaker. Broadway revivals brought the show back in 1976 and 1990. Then, in 2004, knowing my own daughters had never seen Fiddler, I decided it was time to once again bring Fiddler on the Roof to Broadway, for the fourth time. It had been 14 years since the previous production and was now time for a new generation to see this classic musical on stage. It took some time to get the rights and bring everyone together, but with new and innovative sets and Alfred Molina starring as Tevye (later replaced by Harvey Fierstein), we were able to bring the show back again for two years and 781 performances. We even replaced Yente’s song The Rumour with a new song called Topsy-Turvy. Sure enough, my daughters 122

  6. Jewish Themes, Legends and Life in the 1960s and 1970s laughed and cried and took in this marvelous show, much as I had done many years before.

  More Than Fiddler

  It took more than Fiddler to infuse Jewish culture and characters into the fabric of Broadway. Three years prior to Fiddler, a musical opened featuring music and lyrics by Broadway newcomer Jerry Herman.

  The 1961 show, Milk and Honey, was the first Broadway musical set in Israel. A romantic tale of a man traveling without his wife, who meets a widow also visiting Israel, provided the impetus to introduce Jewish characters to a mainstream audience. The show also featured an older widow seeking a husband, played comically by Molly Picon. Milk and Honey, originally titled Shalom, opened at the Martin Beck Theater and ran for 543 performances.

  In 1965, six months before Fiddler opened, two legends became one onstage as Barbra Streisand stepped into her first (and only) starring role as Fanny Brice in Funny Girl, also directed by Jerome Robbins, with music by Jule Styne and lyrics by Bob Merrill. Streisand’s only previous Broadway appearance was in I Can Get It for You Wholesale, in which she had a much smaller role, but generated immediate attention from both critics and audiences.

  The musical, I Can Get It for You Wholesale, featured words and music by Harold Rome, another Jewish contributor to Broadway who gave up a more stable career in architecture to venture into theater in the 1930s. Rome hit Broadway with music and lyrics for the revue Pins and Needles in 1937, but later became well known for the shows Call Me Mister, Wish You Were Here and Fanny, all prior to I Can Get It for You Whole sale.

  The Funny Girl writing team of Styne and Merrill had not teamed on a Broadway musical before. Styne, however, had been writing for Broadway for some 20 years, while Merrill had debuted in 1957, writing both music and lyrics for a musical called New Girl in Town, based on Eugene O’Neill’s 1921 play Anna Christie, followed by Carnival in 1960.

  Merrill had grown up on the East Coast, first in Atlantic City and later in Philadelphia. After fighting in World War II, he returned to the United States and settled in Hollywood. He had a talent for writing upbeat 123

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  songs, even novelty tunes, such as “If I Knew You Were Coming I’d’ve Baked a Cake” and “(How Much Is) That Doggie in the Window?” Merrill would proceed from Funny Girl to a number of other Broadway hits including Breakfast at Tiffany’s in 1966 and Sugar in 1972, once again with Jule Styne. Like many others, Merrill shifted his attention to Hollywood and enjoyed a successful career writing film scores including one for the Academy Award–winning American Beauty.

  Meanwhile, Funny Girl depicted the life and comic mastery of Brice, whose career extended from vaudeville and the Ziegfeld Follies to radio and film success, to the stage. The show served to introduce a largely forgotten Jewish icon to an entirely new generation. It was also an important work for Isobel Lennart, the Jewish screenwriter and playwright who wrote the book for Funny Girl. Lennart, after writing several films, had been blacklisted by the House Un-American Activities Committee for having joined the Communist Party for several years back in 1939. She had managed to resume her career, but this was her first, last and only Broadway show.

  Ironically, it would be the last Broadway show (to date) for Streisand, whose musical career had taken off in 1962 and had already enjoyed a major hit with the song “People .” The song, written for the production, was released before the show actually opened. There were numerous delays while trying to get Funny Girl to Broadway, with rewrites and dis gruntled creative team members coming and going ... and in some cases, such as that of Jerome Robbins, returning again. Opening night was actually postponed several times. In fact, even the young Streisand was not the first choice for the role. Supposedly Mary Martin, Anne Ban croft and Carol Burnett had all turned down the lead role before it was given to Barbra.

  Once Funny Girl finally opened, in March of 1964 at the Winter Garden Theater, it was met with terrific reviews and continued with a run of over 1,300 performances. Not only would Streisand go on to shine in the role, but she would enjoy success with the soundtrack and star in the movie version of the musical, as well as the sequel, Funny Lady. A Tony Award, however, was not to come for Streisand, who was nominated, but lost to Carol Channing who starred in Hello, Dolly!

  For the Brooklyn-born Streisand, whose unprecedented singing career has resulted in roughly 150 million records sold worldwide, Broad-124

  6. Jewish Themes, Legends and Life in the 1960s and 1970s way has always been near and dear to her heart. Her first several hit albums included Broadway favorites, something she would return to a number of times throughout her career. Funny Girl was a major step in launching her acting career that would result in numerous hit films.

  Another show with a Jewish theme was The Rothschilds, a musical that would open six years after Fiddler, featuring the same musical team of Bock and Harnick. This was also a story about a poor European family, with five sons rather than five daughters. The Rothschilds, however, was the story of a family that not only escaped poverty but rose to great wealth in Germany in the banking industry between the 1770s and early 1800s. In fact, they became one of the most influential families in all of Europe. Adapted from the Frederic Morton book chronicling the family’s history, the show drew comparisons to Fiddler. However, it fell short in such assessments. Nonetheless, the show was successful, starring Hal Linden and running for 507 performances.

  One more show of significance made it to Broadway a little later on, in 1975, and was based on the noted Polish-American Jewish short story writer Isaac Bashevis Singer’s work entitled Yentl the Yeshiva Boy.

  The story centered on a girl who was disguised as a boy in order to study the torah, which was forbidden at the time for females. This short story would evolve into the 1975 drama Yentl, which opened at the Eugene O’Neill Theater where it ran for over 200 performances. While there was some difficulty in building a full-fledged show from a story of less than 25 pages, Yentl enlightened audiences to male and female roles in the Jewish religion while bringing back the question of tradition, as presented a decade earlier in Fiddler. Led by Barbra Streisand’s steadfast determination to bring Yentl to the screen, the movie would follow several years later, based on a film treatment written by Streisand herself.

  Considering that great composers, lyricists and playwrights led the Jewish influence on Broadway for decades, such Jewish-themed shows were long overdue. The anti–Semitism of the ’30s, the war years of the

  ’40s and the anti–Communism witch hunts of the ’50s delayed such stories and Jewish characters from making a definitive statement and enjoying mass audience acceptance. But with directors like Jerome Robbins and the determination of people like Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick, Joseph Stein and Jerry Herman, the Jewish influence on Broadwa
y had finally come on to the stage.

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  Doc Simon Takes Over the Great White Way

  Born on the 4th of July in 1927, Marvin Neil Simon grew up in the Bronx and after the divorce of his parents, moved to Forest Hills, Queens with his mother. One story is told that his penchant for playing doctor as a child and carrying around a toy stethoscope earned him the nickname of “Doc” which he still holds today. The more commonly known reason for the nickname is that Simon was often called in during his early years as a writer to serve as a script doctor to mend shows in need of wittier dia logue.

  Simon’s knack for taking the stories of real people into relatable, dra matic situations and adding the appropriate humor made him one of the most successful and best known playwrights in Broadway history.

  Not unlike Woody Allen as a screenwriter, Simon would emerge from the 1960s as one of the most prolific playwrights of the 20th century.

  Also like Woody Allen, much of the inspiration for his commercially suc cessful storylines came from his own life experiences. And while his plays rarely touched upon Jewish themes, his Jewish family, friends and culture were evident in his works. And finally, like Allen, Neil Simon would start out writing for early television comedies of the 1950s.

  Together with his brother Danny, Neil Simon would write for television shows including The Jackie Gleason Show, Sergeant Bilko starring Phil Silvers and Your Show of Shows with Sid Caesar. Although they enjoyed great success together in the 1950s, by the ’60s, Neil and Danny Simon would go their separate ways. Danny wanted to remain in television as a director, while Neil preferred to try his hand at writing for Broadway.

  Simon’s run of over 30 Broadway shows began with a comedy called Come Blow Your Horn pairing a 30-ish swinging playboy with his younger, far less sophisticated brother. Many years before the popular sitcom Two and a Half Men, the show was a hit, running for 675 performances.

  Being quite familiar with Sid Caesar’s comedic genius from writing for Your Show of Shows, Simon would then pen the musical Little Me, a vehicle in which Caesar got to portray his many characters on Broadway.

  With two hit shows under his belt, Simon felt more confident about bringing aspects of his own life to the stage and did so with Barefoot in the Park, in which he turned the trials and tribulations of his early years 126

  6. Jewish Themes, Legends and Life in the 1960s and 1970s of marriage, such as struggling to make ends meet in a small apartment, into a delightful comedic romance.

  Simon’s characters remained genuine, and if the stories were not about his own life, they were based largely on those of people he knew, whom he portrayed complete with their foibles and insecurities. The 1965

  comedy classic The Odd Couple puts a beer-drinking, cigar-smoking slob and an obsessively neurotic neat-freak under one roof. The show was not only a hit, on Broadway for nearly 1,000 performance, but it spawned a movie and a long-running television series. It also gained Simon his first Tony Award. But The Odd Couple was more than that. The show introduced Oscar Madison and Felix Unger to the American public, and they would go on to symbolize sloppy and neat in American culture.

  Following Sweet Charity, The Star-Spangled Girl and Plaza Suite, Neil Simon would collaborate on a musical with one of the hottest songwriting teams of the era, Burt Bacharach and Hal David. The show, Promises, Promises, based on the 1960 film The Apartment, opened in late 1968 and ran for 1,281 performances. The cast album went on to win a Grammy Award for best cast recording, and the musical returned to Broad way for a 2010 revival.

  Simon moved from the 1960s into the ’70s with one hit after another, introducing a variety of leading characters in which audience mem bers often saw a glimpse of themselves. The Last of the Red Hot Lov -

  ers was about middle-age crisis, and The Prisoner of Second Avenue wove humor into the realities of a couple losing their jobs and grips with their sanity. Among the other Neil Simon hit shows of the ’70s was The Sunshine Boys about a once-famous vaudeville team whose bitter breakup years earlier was now interfering with an attempted reunion for a television special honoring them, some 40 years later. Trying to get the unreasonable pair in the same room, much less on the same page, became the challenge from which humor ensued. Inspired by a couple of actual vaudeville teams, The Sunshine Boys ran for 538 performances and, as was usually the case with Simon’s works, became a popular film.

  The 1970s also proved to be an introspective time for Simon as he coped with the death of his first wife. The play Chapter Two focused on a man starting the second chapter of his life following the death of his wife. The highly acclaimed show was touching, funny, poignant and successful, moving from the Imperial to the Eugene O’ Neill Theater, and 127

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  playing a total of 857 performances. Chapter Two won a Tony Award for best play of 1978.

  Always looking to diversify, Simon would follow with a musical.

  Not unlike working with Bacharach and David in the ’60s, he joined forces with one of the most significant songwriting teams of the ’70s, Marvin Hamlisch and Carole Bayer Sager. The show, They’re Playing Our Song, was based on the musical team’s relationship which starts out rocky and ends with them falling in love. Essentially a two-person show, with no major musical production numbers, it gave Simon the opportunity to do what he does best: move a story along with sharp, witty dialogue. Comedian Robert Klein and actress Lucie Arnaz opened in the leading roles, and the show was an instant hit, playing for nearly 1,100

  performances. The Jewish-born Klein was not entirely new to Broadway having been in the Bock Harnish musical The Apple Tree, while Arnaz made her Broadway debut.

  Small casts, moderate set design and linear story lines that related easily to the human experience helped facilitate Simon’s worldwide presence. In fact, They’re Playing Our Song was seen not only on the stages of London, but also in Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Budapest, the Phil -

  ip pines, Singapore and in other parts of the globe.

  By the 1980s, with more than 20 years of success, Neil Simon earned the unprecedented opportunity to write, and stage, a trilogy about his own life, using the character Eugene to portray himself. Brighton Beach Memoirs, Biloxi Blues and Broadway Bound took Simon from his youth through his military service to his start on Broadway. All three parts of the Eugene trilogy were very well received. They brought events from Simon’s own life, including friends and family members, to the stage and showcased his ability to siphon out humor and make challenging life events, such as military training in Biloxi, Mississippi, more bearable.

  But what good is a trilogy if you don’t add to it? Following hits such as the Tony and Pulitzer Prize Award–winning Lost in Yonkers in 1991 and the stage adaptation of his own movie, The Goodbye Girl in 1993, Simon took on one more autobiographical story with Laughter on the 23rd Floor, also in 1993. The show brought Simon full circle, returning him to his days as a television writer by recreating the atmosphere of the famous 1950s writing team behind Your Show of Shows, featuring 128

  6. Jewish Themes, Legends and Life in the 1960s and 1970s actors playing Woody Allen, Carl Reiner, Mel Brooks, Selma Diamond and Larry Gelbart. The show saw only marginal success.

  Through his many works, Simon always maintained the ability to create or recreate characters experiencing familiar life events, whether it’s in a small walk-up first apartment ( Barefoot in the Park), military training ( Biloxi Blues) or trying to cope with deeply embedded stubborn behavior among elderly relatives ( The Sunshine Boys). Some characters had a Jewishness about them, while others specifically did not, allowing his work to be both reflective and mainstream.

  One such Neil Simon character, the Jewish mother Kate in Broadway Bound, was played by Linda Lavin, who won a Tony Award for the role. Lavin, a Jewish actress originally from Portland, Maine, made a name for herself in the 1960s first Off Broadway and then on Broadway in the show It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane, It’s S
uperman. She was later featured in the comedy Last of the Red Hot Lovers before taking the starring role in the popular television sitcom Alice. By the time Lavin took on the role of Eugene’s mom in Broadway Bound, she had firmly established her self as an accomplished stage performer.

  Directing for Neil Simon ... and Many Others:

  Mike Nichols

  Michael Igor Peschkowsky was born in 1931, in Berlin, Germany, to German/Russian Jews. His father, a known anarchist, would flee Nazi Germany to the United States and then send for his two sons, Michael (age seven) and his younger brother Robert (age three) in 1938. Their mother would soon follow.

  The young Nichols grew up in New York City but went to college in Chicago, where he took up improvisation. It was while doing improv that he would meet Elaine May, another aspiring actress/comic who had first set foot on stage as a young child with her father, a Yiddish theater actor. Before long, Mike Nichols and Elaine May had formed a comedy team that would gain notoriety in the late 1950s at nightclubs and from television appearances. They would finally make their way to Broadway with a show simply entitled An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine May, which opened in late 1960 and ran for over 300 performances.

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  Unfortunately, disagreements would cause a split not long after their initial Broadway success. Both, however, would go on to successful careers, and they would reunite years later. Nichols would emerge as a Broadway director working with Neil Simon, directing Barefoot in the Park, The Odd Couple, Plaza Suite and The Prisoner of Second Avenue.