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

by Stewart F. Lane

  Nonetheless, the classic venue would return in the 1990s as the New Victory Theater, a full-time performing theater for children and their families created by a non-profit organization dedicated to cleaning up 42nd Street. While this major renovation and reopening of the classic 161

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  theater had no connection with Disney, it certainly indicated that changes to the area could be achieved.

  Another classic old 42nd Street theater, the New Amsterdam, sat right across from the old Republic, and it would serve as the anchor for Disney’s redevelopment plan. Much like the senior Oscar Hammerstein had built up the theater district at the turn of the 20th century, Eisner and his associates were determined to transform the theater district on the verge of the 21st century.

  The New Amsterdam Theater was built in 1903 with a seating capac ity topping 1,700. The lavish theater was opened with Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which played for a couple of weeks before giving way to the theater’s first original play called Her Own Way, by Clyde Fitch. From Mother Goose to Ivan the Terrible, musicals, revues and serious plays called the New Amsterdam Theater home over the com ing years. Then, starting in 1913 and continuing through the late 1920s, the numerous renditions of Ziegfeld’s Follies became the most not able tenants of the New Amsterdam. However, the depression years took their toll, and in 1937, following the Sigmund Romberg and Otto Harbach musical comedy Forbidden Melody, the theater would close, just as it had opened, with a Shakespearian classic. This time it was Othello.

  Of course, a transformation of the theater district by Disney meant more than just rebuilding and renovating a theater and cleaning up the area. Along with a signature Disney Store, it meant staging productions that would draw an audience and bring family entertainment to the street which had gone from Follies and frenzied revues to down and dirty. During this same time, Disney was enjoying a rebirth of their animation excellence. Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty and Snow White had given way to Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King and Aladdin. The new generation of baby-boomer children were delighted by these animated films. The question was: Would these movie mega hits work on stage with real act -

  ors? Would they generate the same excitement from a young audience?

  Only time would tell. But the brass at Disney were not taking any chances. They opened Beauty and the Beast out of town, in Houston, and followed the results closely before moving it to my own Palace Theater in 1994. And they were very pleased with what they saw as the show played for over 5,000 performances, making it into the all-time top-ten for performances by a Broadway musical. Needless to say, I was very 162

  7. Young Playwrights with a Message, Inflation, Disney and Me pleased as well. Yes, Disney’s second wave of classic children’s favorites would indeed provide the new entertainment on 42nd Street.

  After the major three-year, multi-million-dollar renovation project, the New Amsterdam would open once again some 60 years after the Ziegfeld Follies with The Lion King, in 1997. Disney had signed a 99-year lease and now had their own Broadway Theater and, along with Beauty and the Beast, their second smash-hit Broadway musical, with others lined up to follow.

  Eisner would eventually fall victim to the old executive adage :

  “What have you done for us lately?” His miraculous run of animated film hits slowed, and there were no more city streets in Manhattan to transform. Nonetheless, he led the way for Disney to make their imprint on Broadway, and with shows continuing to open, such as The Little Mermaid and Mary Poppins, he apparently left his mark.

  Meanwhile, one of the foremost creators of the era, and part of the reason for Disney’s unprecedented success, was Alan Menken, who joined the long line of successful Jewish Broadway composers after establishing himself as the musical force behind several of Disney’s major animated classics.

  ALAN MENKEN

  Menken, like many Jewish composers before him, hailed from New York City. He was born in 1949 in Manhattan, but as was the case with many families of the era, his parents opted to move to the burgeoning suburbs. Thus, Menken grew up on Long Island, New Rochelle to be exact. He took to piano and violin at an early age and was weaned on Broadway musicals as his family frequented the theater often, enjoying classics, such as My Fair Lady and The Sound of Music among other favorites of the ’50s and early ’60s.

  While Menken enjoyed playing piano, he also enjoyed making up his own versions of the songs he was told to practice, and hence his composing career began. After graduating from New York University, Menken took to writing jingles, while performing his own material in small clubs, in hopes of becoming the next major singer-songwriter. While that did not happen, he did soon discover that he had a knack for writing musical theater.

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  His first official theater writing job came when he was asked by Harold Ashman to write music for an adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut’s 1965 play God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. He was then asked by Ashman to write the music for what would become an Off Broadway cult favorite, Little Shop of Horrors. The quirky comedy featuring Audrey II, an outspoken Venus flytrap, would later become a film and eventually land on Broadway in 2003 for 372 performances.

  But once Disney got hold of Menken, they would not let go. It was indeed a match made in heaven. Menken would proceed to write the family-friendly, light and spirited music for one animated Disney hit after another, including Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, Pocahontas and The Little Mermaid.

  When Disney decided to make 42nd Street their new theatrical version of Main Street USA, it was Menken’s music that was played in Beauty and the Beast. And when The Little Mermaid moved to Broadway, once again Menken’s music was featured. The show ran for 685 performances. While several of his Disney favorites may follow suit and enjoy Broadway runs, Menken has moved on to other endeavors which have included writing the music for the stage presentation of the classic A Christmas Carol now performed at Madison Square Garden each holiday season.

  I recall my own interaction with Alan Menken in 1987, during his pre–Disney days. We were working on the musical adaptation of The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, which I was going to produce at the American Theater Festival in Philadelphia. Alan was great, an amazing talent, and we had a terrific relationship. We were working on the book for the show and trying to get other producers interested as backers. I wanted Jimmy Nederlander to hear the score because I thought it was going to be a big hit. In those days you would sit down and play the music for potential producers or backers during an audition; this was before using CD cuts or anything like that. Songs were played in the offices of the producers. It was a throwback to the days of Tin Pan Alley.

  So, we decided to play half a dozen songs from the show for Jimmy. The problem was that there was one song that could be considered a little anti–Semitic, so I asked if we could change the lyric. David Spencer was the lyricist and the song included the line, “that’s the way we feed Jews.”

  I suggested, “that’s the way we amuse Jews” or something that’s not so 164

  7. Young Playwrights with a Message, Inflation, Disney and Me offensive. But they came back and told me that David did not want to change it. While I was not in a position to rewrite a lyric, I was in the position to decide that we should skip that song in the upcoming Tuesday meeting.

  It was Mother’s Day weekend and upon returning to work on Monday, after visiting my own mom, I received a phone call from Alan Men -

  ken. “Hi, Stewart, we’re going to change the lyric,” was Alan’s opening remark. So I asked him what happened. “Well, I was at my mother’s house and I played the song for her. She looked at me and said ‘Alan, that’s so anti–Semitic, you can’t use that song,’” explained Menken. I told him to please thank his mom for me.

  Much of Menken’s success was with Howard Ashman, a lyricist whose words complemented the music of Menken perfectly. The two were a marvelous team, from God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater through many
of the Disney favorites. Sadly, Ashman would become another of Broadway’s list of casualties to HIV. He died at age 40 in 1991.

  Prior to Menken and Ashman, when it came to writing music for Disney films, there were the Sherman Brothers. Born to Russian-Jewish immigrants in the 1920s, Robert and Richard Sherman began their long and esteemed songwriting careers in the early 1950s, following in the musical footsteps of their father, Tin Pan Alley songwriter Al Sherman.

  Their lineage reportedly dates back to Franz Joseph, the emperor of Austria in the late 19th century, and King of Hungary.

  It was in the late 1950s that the Sherman Brothers would team up as staff writers for Disney, writing everything from music for Annette Funacello of The Mickey Mouse Club to “It’s a Small World After All,”

  which first appeared at the 1964 World’s Fair in New York, before becoming a staple at both U.S. Disney theme parks. They also wrote the songs for the Disney movies Mary Poppins, The Jungle Book and The Aristocats.

  They would later take time off from Disney to pen music and lyrics for the 1968 kid-favorite film, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, which made it to Broadway many years later, without great success. They also wrote the Andrews Sisters’ Broadway tribute, Over There. It was, however, when Disney brought Mary Poppins to Broadway that the Sherman Brothers would enjoy their greatest theatrical success with music they had written more than 40 years earlier.

  Another of the Disney “alumni” to enjoy great success on Broadway 165

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  is David Zippel, an Easton, Pennsylvania, native who graduated from Harvard Law School but opted to be a lyricist rather than a lawyer. In a career that has now spanned more than 20 years, Zippel had been teamed with a wide range of musical talents on Broadway and in Disney films.

  His Broadway debut came in 1989, when he teamed with Cy Coleman and Larry Gelbart on the musical comedy City of Angels. Zippel received a Tony Award for his work on the show, which ran just over two years (879 performances). In 1993, Zippel worked with Marvin Hamlisch to create the musical comedy The Goodbye Girl, based on the 1977 Neil Simon film. The Woman in White painted Zippel with Andrew Lloyd Web ber in 2005. Unfortunately the musical only played for 109 performances.

  Zippel’s Disney credits include lyrics for the animated film Hercules on which he teamed with Alan Menken, for Mulan with Matthew Wilder providing the music and then for Tarzan with music by Phil Collins.

  With songs recorded by a wide range of talents from Ricky Martin to Mel Tormé to Stevie Wonder, Zippel has established himself as a premiere lyricist for both stage and screen.

  It was also thanks to the Decade of Disney that Jewish director Julie Taymor made her Broadway breakthrough as director of The Lion King.

  In fact, thanks to The Lion King, she became the first woman to win a Tony Award for directing. However, Taymor was not at all a newcomer to theater, only to Broadway.

  Born and raised in a suburb of Boston, Taymor began her theatrical journey in children’s theater at the age of ten. But it was years later, from travels to the Far East and years spent living in Indonesia, that she would discover and develop her passion for puppetry. Upon returning to the United States in the early 1980s and on into the 1990s, Taymor would utilize puppets along with masked and unmasked actors as well as film and stage devices to create unique imagery in her own works. Meanwhile, she would also continue directing plays for the New York Shakespeare Festival, the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and elsewhere. But it was in 1997, after some 25 years of creating and directing internationally, that Taymor’s amazing talents were recognized.

  She brought together the magnificent fusion of people and puppets in Disney’s spectacular stage version of The Lion King, by leaving the puppet 166

  7. Young Playwrights with a Message, Inflation, Disney and Me handler’s faces visible so that the theater audience could see the performances of both the actors and the puppets. This also served to diffuse any fear younger children might have when seeing these larger-than-life puppets in the theatrical performance. Still running, The Lion King is now among the all-time top-ten longest running musicals. It is also now being staged in more than a dozen countries.

  Following her work on The Lion King, Taymor ventured into films and directing opera, including The Magic Flute for the 2005/2006 season of the Metropolitan Opera. Taymor then took on the arduous task of co-writing the book, and directing, the upcoming Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark.

  Broadway Veterans Thrive

  Neither Cy Coleman nor Stephen Sondheim were newcomers to Broadway in the ’80s or ’90s, yet both would see resurgence and enjoy some of their greatest successes during these decades. Coleman, born Sey mour Kaufman to Eastern European–Jewish immigrants in 1929, grew up in the Bronx, where he took to music as a child. He was, in fact, so proficient that he appeared in piano recitals at New York’s Town Hall and the famous Carnegie Hall before the age of ten.

  By age 17, Coleman was playing jazz at New York City nightspots and by 19 he had formed the Cy Coleman Trio, while attending the New York College of Music. The trio enjoyed some success with their recordings in the early 1950s. Coleman also wrote a couple of songs that became hits for Frank Sinatra, “Why Try to Change Me Now?” and “Witchcraft”

  as well as the hit “Firefly” for Tony Bennett.

  His first Broadway show, Wildcat, was in 1960 and starred Lucille Ball making her Broadway debut. Unfortunately, Ball took ill during the run of the show, and since she was the reason people were coming to see it, the show was closed until she recovered. The musicians union insisted that the show’s musicians be paid during the nine weeks the show would be closed. Since this was not feasible, the show was ultimately doomed after only 171 performances. Coleman, however, would go on to success with Little Me, Sweet Charity and other hit musicals throughout the ’60s and ’70s.

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  In 1980, at the age of 51, Coleman would enjoy one of his biggest hits, the musical focusing on the life of circus impresario P.T. Barnum, simply called Barnum. The circus-themed musical would run for over 850 performances, bringing the magic and excitement of the big top to the Broadway stage. Then in 1989, Coleman would compose the music for City of Angels, which brought cinema and Broadway together in a comedic detective musical, which topped Barnum, running for 879 performances. Coleman would continue into his fourth decade of writing for Broadway when he collaborated with Comden and Greene on Will Rogers Follies in 1991. This time Coleman enjoyed 981 performances of his latest musical hit. Coleman won Tony Awards for best score for both City of Angels and Will Rogers Follies.

  Like Coleman, Stephen Sondheim had certainly enjoyed his share of Broadway credits by the start of the 1980s with shows including A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and Gypsy. Nonetheless, Sondheim had a resurgence of sorts in the 1980s and ’90s. Actually, the resurgence began in 1979 with the grisly musical hit Sweeney Todd, about the fictional demon barber of Fleet Street, who slit the throats of his customers then had them turned into meat pies. The slashing barber ran amuck on Broadway for 557 performances and became a film star some 30 years later.

  In 1981, Sondheim attempted a remake of the 1934 Moss Hart, George S. Kaufman show called Merrily We Roll Along. The play was unsuccessful the first time around, despite critical acclaim. This did not stop Sondheim from bringing it back in 1981 as a musical. After some 52 previews the show finally opened, but lasted only 16 performances.

  Nonetheless, the musical score spawned a soundtrack that took on a life of its own, with covers of the songs recorded by both Frank Sinatra and Carly Simon. As a result of the score, the musical was reincarnated on numerous occasions in various cities around the country as well as Off Broadway. It would not be a surprise if Merrily somehow managed to roll its way back to Broadway yet again.

  Despite the box office woes of Merrily We Roll Along, Sondheim would rebound in 1984 with lyricist James Lapine and the hit Sunday in t
he Park with George, which ran for over 600 performances. With two scenes some one hundred years apart, the avant-garde show, based in part on a painting of artist Georges Seurat, explores the drive of an artist, 168

  7. Young Playwrights with a Message, Inflation, Disney and Me and later that of his great grandson. Mandy Patinkin, the Chicago-born son of Russian- and Polish-Jewish parents, starred in the show. Patinkin’s upbringing included attending religious school and, like many Jewish families, he was introduced to music as a youngster. Then, as a teenager, he would sing in the choir at his synagogue.

  Prior to his success in Sunday in the Park with George, Patinkin had won a Tony Award for his performance in Evita in 1979. He would later go on to star in The Secret Garden, a Tony Award–winning show. It was in 1998, however, that he would return to his Jewish roots with a project called Mamaloshen. The show was actually a concert by Patinkin, which consisted of classic and contemporary songs sung in Yiddish and was presented Off Broadway and on tour to critical acclaim.

  Meanwhile, Sondheim would team with James Lapine again on Into the Woods. Bringing the “darker” side of fairy tales to the stage in 1987, as a testament to the messages such tales are really giving our children, the show was a success and ran for 764 performances. The team of Sondheim and Lapine would also join forces on Passion in 1994, which, despite a limited run, won the Tony Award for Best Musical.

  Sondheim’s impact on Broadway was celebrated in the 2001 musical, Side by Side by Sondheim. A musical revue, the show chronicled his many years as a composer, featuring his various styles and tunes from many of his shows.

  Along with Stephen Sondheim, there was his director James Lapine, also Jewish. Born and raised in Mansfield, Ohio, Lapine and his family moved to Stamford, Connecticut, during his teen years. His interest in school and throughout college was in photography and design. It wasn’t until he was working as a designer for the Yale School of Drama, and taught design courses for the university, that he was cajoled by his students into directing a version of Gertrude Stein’s play Photograph. The show was first produced in New Haven and later Off Broadway. For his efforts, Lapine won an Obie Award. Lapine took to his sudden new career quickly and dipped into his own Jewish background to direct the comedy Table Settings, which focuses on an off beat Jewish family.