Jews on Broadway: An Historical Survey of Performers, Playwrights, Composers, Lyricists and Producers (21 page)

Following an unsuccessful first show,
The Body Beautiful
, they had their first collaborative hit, celebrating the life of New York City Mayor, Fiorello La Guardia. The show,
Fiorello!
, ushered in the 1960s at the Broad hurst Theater with a run of 795 performances and earned them a Tony Award and a Pulitzer Prize. A few more collaborations followed over the next several years, none matching the success of
Fiorello
!. And then came
Fiddler
.

Based on stories written in Yiddish by Jewish writer Sholom Aleichem, including one entitled
Tevye and His Daughters,
the book evolved through the hard work of librettist Joseph Stein, who had started his career as a television writer before moving to theater. Stein had previously teamed with Carl Reiner on the hit comedy
Enter Laughing
, which had an all-star cast including José Ferrer, Shelley Winters, Elaine May, Jack Gilford and even legendary comedian Don Rickles. For
Fiddler
, Stein would win two Tony Awards. He would also win Tonys for collaborating on the book
Take Me Along
, as well as for
Zorba
and for
Rags
.

While Bock and Harnish were handling the music and lyrics for
Fiddler
, and Stein was writing the book, Harold Prince served as producer and brought in Jerome Robbins, whom he felt was the only director who could give the material the universal quality necessary to play successfully for the mass audience.

When
Fiddler
finally hit the stage, it rang true to the concerns of the broad audience, while having a special significance for Jewish theatergoers. The show focused on a dairyman living with his wife in Russia just after the turn of the 20th century and how he tried to cling to the old-world religious and family customs and traditions while raising five daughters in a world that was rapidly changing around them. The show ran, appropriately, through the 1960s, in which, as mentioned at the open ing of the chapter, social and political changes were challenging long-standing family and cultural traditions in America. The roles of women were changing, the war overseas in Vietnam was not attracting the same patriotic spirit of World War II, a sexual revolution was emerging and typically rebellious youths were now uniting as part of the anti-culture known as the hippie culture. Traditions were indeed hard to cling 121

Jews on Broadway

to. Jewish families were also dealing with a growing trend of interfaith marriages and changes in traditional home life. As the suburbs grew quickly, TV dinners, television, and other diversions were slowly replacing the Sabbath family meal, and fewer Jews were attending Friday night or Saturday morning temple services. Even Jewish traditions themselves were being questioned by the new generation of young Jews. As a result,
Fiddler
hit home, touching the hearts of theatergoers.

As is the case with many blockbuster musicals,
Fiddler
went through a number of changes en route to Broadway. The name changed several times until
Fiddler on the Roof
was pulled from a Chagall painting called
The Green Violinist
, which depicted a violinist hovering over the roofs of a village. The stars of
Fiddler
included Zero Mostel, who reportedly was not the first choice of Robbins. Initially Robbins wanted Danny Kaye. In the end, however, Mostel would take ownership of the role and walk away with a Tony Award for his work. Luther Adler and Herschel Ber nardi were among several others to take over the starring role of Tevye dur ing the long run. Bea Arthur, Bette Midler and Pia Zadora were among a number of actresses to take on some of the many significant female roles.

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

Jews on Broadway

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 Broadway had finally come on to the stage.

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Jews on Broadway

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.