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

by Stewart F. Lane

  Three years after his brother’s death, Ira Gershwin would once again begin writing lyrics. He would collaborate with Kurt Weill and Jerome Kern and then in 1954 with Harold Arlen on A Star Is Born.

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  SIGNIFICANT WRITERS

  Musicals need storylines and plays need to be about something.

  With that in mind, various writers would contribute to the Broadway stage in the 1920s and ’30s. Along with the many Jewish composers and lyricists, there were also a number of important Jewish playwrights during the 1920s. Two of the most significant of the era were George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart.

  Kaufman, born in Pittsburgh to a Jewish family in 1889, was an avid reader, with a great wit. He enjoyed reading plays and in an era long before blogs, began putting his own witty remarks on paper. After moving to New York at the age of 20, Kaufman would utilize his writing skills to land jobs as a drama desk reporter for the New York Tribune and eventually as the drama reporter for the New York Times. In this capacity, Kaufman would not only build a significant following, based on his humorous observations, but would become part of what was known as the Algonquin Round Table. Meeting at the restaurant in the Algonquin Hotel in midtown Manhattan, the group, which included writers Doro -

  thy Parker and Robert Benchley, playwrights Robert E. Sherwood and Edna Ferber, plus Harpo Marx, Irving Berlin and Tallulah Bankhead, among others, became known for their endless stream of ongoing droll banter, while playing various games and unleashing inventive practical jokes upon one another. They became an unofficial club of sorts, including only the sharpest and wittiest participants. The Algonquin Round Table also established a bond that drew them into working together on occasion. In fact, in one instance, in 1922, they teamed up to stage a one-night parody of the popular European revue Le Chauve-Souris, calling their show No Siree! The satire received raves from those lucky enough to see it. Having enjoyed the process of “putting on a show,” they would attempt another satirical revue called The Forty-Niners for the public later that year, but it lasted for only two weeks on Broadway. The Algonquin Round Table, however, lasted nearly a decade, through the 1920s up until the stock market crash of ’29. After the crash, although many lifelong friendships had formed, they no longer met at their own table.

  One member reportedly knew it was over when she went to the customary table in the Rose Room of the hotel in 1932 and found a family from Kansas sitting there.

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  From their many hours spent at the infamous round table, Kaufman and writer Marc Connelly would collaborate on several shows in the early 1920s, including Dulcy, To the Ladies starring Helen Hayes, and Merton at the Movies, Kaufman’s first parody of Hollywood. Producing more than two shows a year, the duo enjoyed great success. However, in 1925, two other round-tablers, Irving Berlin and Harpo Marx (along with his famous brothers), would team up with Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind on a hit musical, The Cocoanuts, which would later become one of the Marx Brothers’ classic films. Kaufman would work once more with the Marx Brothers, writing the book for Animal Crackers, while Ryskind would go on to write with the Marx Brothers on other movies, including A Night at the Opera, one of the Brothers’ biggest hits.

  Much like Kaufman, Ryskind was also quite politically minded.

  After being booted from Columbia University for referring to the dean as Czar Nick in a humor publication (essentially because the dean would not let the nephew of Leo Tolstoy speak at the college), the Brooklyn-born Ryskind would go on to write political sketches for Garrick Gaieties in 1925 and subsequent revues prior to teaming with Kaufman. While Ryskind would later get more deeply involved in politics, eventually swinging from the left in his younger years to the right in his later years, he made his mark as a writer with Kaufman. He would also earn one of two Academy Award nominations by writing a film adaptation of a Kaufman collaboration with Edna Ferber called Stage Door, starring Katherine Hepburn and Ginger Rogers and featuring Lucille Ball, Eve Arden and Anne Miller.

  By the 1930s Kaufman had hit his stride, with help from Ryskind, who was asked to tone down Kaufman’s satirical anti-war play Strike Up the Band to make it more mainstream. The addition of music and lyrics by the Gershwin brothers helped make the edgy satirical show about war more appealing to the mainstream market. Theatergoers were seeking out more upbeat entertainment during the depression years. Considered ahead of its time, the humor, and the music, played by an orchestra that included Glenn Miller, Benny Goodman and Jimmy Dorsey in the pit, made Strike Up the Band one of Kaufman’s most significant early Broadway accomplishments. Meanwhile, the always-prolific Kaufman was also contributing to revues by providing sketches, such as those he wrote for Max Gordon’s show The Band Wagon in 1930, a show that ran for 260

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  performances starting in 1931, featured Fred and Adele Astaire, and was very highly acclaimed.

  Since success is known to breed success, Kaufman would team again with the Gershwins and Ryskind the following year for another satirical musical comedy entitled Of Thee I Sing. Compared by Stanley Green, in his book Broadway Musicals Show by Show, to a Gilbert and Sullivan opera in its construction and style, the show outlasted Strike Up the Band, posting 441 performances at the Music Box Theater. This time Kaufman broadened his range from political satire, which was still the impetus of the show, to also poke fun at the institutions of marriage, beauty pageants and motherhood. Of Thee I Sing, which later went on tour for several years, won a Pulitzer Prize. It also sparked yet a third musical in the same style called Let ’Em Eat Cake, featuring the same creative team. This time, however, it might have been better to quit while they were ahead.

  Kauf man’s humor was a bit too acerbic, and the show was less mainstream than its predecessors . As a result, Cake grew stale quickly and closed in just three months.

  Prior to the third satirical sequel with Ryskind, Kaufman had also co-directed a show written by Moss Hart entitled Face the Music, with music and lyrics by Berlin. Unlike many of the early Jewish theatrical talents, Moss Hart was not born in a tenement on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, but was instead born in an Upper East Side tenement on 105th Street, another immigrant neighborhood.

  It was Hart’s Aunt Kate who first introduced him to theater as a young boy, and he would forever owe her his gratitude, as it would become his life’s ambition. While honing his skills as an actor and director, and working with theater troupes, Hart began writing plays throughout the 1920s, with minimal success at best. Finally, at the end of the decade, his play Once in a Lifetime drew the attention of a Broadway pro ducer who introduced him to George S. Kaufman, who was already established. Together they would turn Once in a Lifetime, a spoof about the new era of talkies in Hollywood, into their first collaborative Broadway hit comedy.

  While both were city boys, born in Pittsburgh and New York City, respectively, Kaufman and Hart each owned farmhouses in an area known as Bucks County, Pennsylvania. The rural enclave, which also became a retreat for Oscar Hammerstein II, Steven Sondheim, James Michener, 67

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  Dorothy Parker, Pearl Buck and S. J. Perlman, served as a quiet locale for Kaufman and Hart to write. It was there that they penned one hit show after another throughout the 1930s. It was also at the now-famous Bucks County Playhouse that the duo could have their works staged, often directing or even performing in the shows, which helped them hone their final drafts. Occasionally celebrity friends, such as Harpo Marx, would join them.

  The off beat comical 1936 Kaufman-Hart hit, You Can’t Take It with You, played for almost 850 Broadway performances and won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. It was also during that same year that they teamed with the other Hart, Lorenz, and Richard Rodgers on the musical I’d Rather Be Right, featuring George M. Cohan playing President Franklin D. Roosevelt. A “light” plotline served as a structure in which to satirize everything from the fir
eside chats and presidential conferences to FDR’s seek ing a third term. The comedy hit The Man Who Came to Dinner would follow shortly thereafter. This time the focus was on a dinner guest who, in the weeks prior to Christmas, falls and injures his hip just outside the home where he is about to dine. He then proceeds to be attended to by a confused small-town physician, while driving everyone in the house crazy. The concept for the show was reportedly based on the behavior of Sheridan Whitehead, a drama critic and radio star whose temperament made him an unappreciated house guest. The Man Who Came to Dinner not only went on to Broadway success but became a standard, staged time and time again in local theater companies and universities for many years.

  Through eight collaborations, the wit of George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart set a standard for comedy on stage, whether in a musical or straight play. Although their final collaboration, George Washington Slept Here, was not very successful, the two remained friends as they continued their individual careers.

  While Hart and Kaufman enjoyed their greatest success together, Kaufman collaborated with several other playwrights including his second wife, Leueen MacGrath, a beautiful, much younger actress who had enjoyed success on the stages of London. They teamed on a couple of shows that went to Broadway, but were essentially flops.

  Kaufman would move from theater and journalism to Hollywood where he would direct films and appear on television. He was forever 68

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  known as one of America’s greatest humorists and satirists, poking fun at politics, American culture and the idiosyncrasies that made up daily life. He was one of the few writers that the Marx Brothers, Groucho in particular, truly respected and admired. Thus, Kaufman became a part of American folklore.

  “At his best, he was the best of playwrights, and more. He was part of a good time Americans were once able to enjoy — when they dared to laugh at themselves, rather than yield that privilege to others,” wrote Robert Gottlieb in his 2004 New Yorker magazine article “The Hitmaker”

  about Kaufman’s career and personal life, which included two wives, a reputation as a womanizer, a Hollywood scandal and a daughter named Anne from his first wife, Beatrice Bakrow. George was married to Beatrice, who had penned an unsuccessful Broadway show called Divided by Three, for 28 years until her sudden death in 1945. According to Gottlieb’s article, after her death Kaufman thought he’d never write again, but he did.

  Moss Hart, meanwhile, would go on to enjoy Broadway success with Lady in the Dark in 1941. The show evolved into a musical comedy with Ira Gershwin writing the lyrics. It ran for 305 performances and starred Gertrude Lawrence, Victor Mature and Danny Kaye. Hart would later go on to success as a director, winning a Tony Award for his direction of My Fair Lady, which ran on Broadway for years starring Julie Andrews and Rex Harrison. Hart was also known for marrying actress Kitty Carlisle in 1941. Both Kaufman and Hart died in 1961.

  SIGNIFICANT STORIES AND SATIRES

  Along with Irving Berlin’s patriotism, the Jewish composers and lyricists were not strictly thinking musically, but were challenging themselves to broaden the horizons of what was traditionally thought of as the Broadway musical. Just as Gordin and Jacob P. Adler had introduced more sophisticated works to the Yiddish stage, Rodgers, George Gershwin and others were seeking material from books of substance with stories that evoked thought and sometimes even controversy. Show Boat, Oklahoma and Porg y and Bess were among the most significant works of the

  ’30s and early ’40s, and the most substantive. These shows remain classics.

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  Jewish humor, especially political satire and humor about both domes tic and world news, was also offering a broader, more thought-provoking theater experience to audiences. From the Broadway stage to the late-night television talk shows, political humor would outgrow its origins in newspaper columns and become a staple of American humor thanks largely to the work of George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, who were among the forerunners of the genre.

  CHANGING TIMES

  The composers, lyricists and satirists of this era were the sons of immigrants who were clearly not interested in learning or speaking Yiddish and had instead quickly assimilated into American culture.

  After the doors were essentially closed to immigration in 1924, the immigrant culture was no longer sustained by a steady influx of “greenhorns,” a term that referred to each new wave of immigrants. Native-born Jews soon outnumbered their first-generation ancestors. The new generation was now part of middle class respectability, while retaining a strong Jewish identity. In the mid– to late–1930s, as news from overseas continued to generate fear among Americans, especially Jews, assimilation became less of a cultural shift and more of a means of self-preservation.

  Few lyrics or even books were written about Jews, and the Broadway hits, featuring the music of the Jewish composers and lyricists, had few to no Jewish characters or references. There was no Shylock spouting Yid dish or Fannie Brice parodying Sadie with a Yiddish accent. Anti-Semitic groups became visible, and some even voiced their support of Hit ler. As a result, many Jewish composers and lyricists, while not nec-essarily hiding their identities, were not bringing their Jewishness into the open for fear of repercussions. Yet, many supported Jewish causes, and most Jews in theater, like those throughout America, had their concerns regarding the frightful situation in Europe.

  While this chapter focused on the musical legends of the era (and beyond), the next chapter will focus on the dramatists of the time and the growing political involvement of many Jewish performers and writers as World War II grew near.

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  4

  Group Theater, Acting Teachers

  and Life During Wartime

  While the depression era and pre-war years of the 1930s brought together many of the legendary composers and lyricists of the century, as featured in the previous chapter, it was also a time for great dramatic works and a period in which the innovative concept of group theater was born. The depression years caused many Americans to re-think their views on politics and question their belief in the security of the nation.

  After all, the nation had let the banks collapse, and with it the hopes and dreams of many Americans. While the upbeat song and dance musicals were still a source of entertainment, escapism and optimism, many writers, particularly those who were Jewish, explored the effects of the great depression upon American life. Theater could be a source for calling attention to current social issues and conflicts, and not only those from history or from the stories found in classic literature. Playwrights were now putting down on paper stories that reflected the pulse of the American people.

  In 1931, three young Jewish idealists, determined to invigorate the American theater and present shows of significant social and cultural impact, joined forces. Their concept was to stage original plays that reflected contemporary American life during this difficult time period.

  They wanted American theater to not only provide entertainment, but also be used as a powerful form of expression, as was the case for centuries in other parts of the world. The result of their efforts was called Group Theater, which was founded by Harold Clurman, Cheryl Crawford and Lee Strasberg.

  Clurman had grown up in an immigrant Jewish family on the Lower 71

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  East Side where he was exposed to Yiddish theater as a child. The passion and vitality of the shows featuring performers the likes of Jacob Adler (whose daughter Stella he would later marry) inspired Clurman to become an actor, while the community atmosphere of Yiddish theater inspired the communal concept of Group Theater. Clurman would go on to study acting in France before returning to New York, where he found small parts in shows while also serving as a stage manager and reader for the Theater Guild.

  Lee Strasberg, also of Jewish descent, came to New York in 1909

  when his family immigrated to America and, like Clurman, settled on the Lower East Side. His first
acting experience was in a Yiddish theater production staged by a drama club. He would later enroll in the Clare Tree Major School of Acting. But it was upon seeing Constantin Stani -

  slavski’s Moscow Art Theatre in 1923 that his life would change. Strasberg was so impressed by the performers and their commitment to their craft that he would go on to study with Stanislavski and in time create his own “method” of acting. In 1925, Strasberg would make his first professional appearance in a show called Processional produced by the Theater Guild. It was also through the Theater Guild that he would begin to teach his method-acting techniques while also directing plays.

  Cheryl Crawford, meanwhile, was born in 1902 in Akron, Ohio, where she grew up. She later attended Smith College and majored in drama. Despite performing in many college plays and taking acting classes in New York City after graduation, her dream was not to perform, but instead become a theatrical producer. With that in mind, she took a job as an assistant director at the Theater Guild prior to being one of the three co-founders of Group Theater.

  Years later, after the era of Group Theater, Crawford would be the co-founder of the American Repertory Theater and one of the founders of The Actors Studio. She would also emerge as a very successful Broadway producer, bringing Brigadoon, Paint Your Wagon, Sweet Bird of Youth and Mother Courage and Her Children to the stage.

  It was this trio — Clurman, Strasberg and Crawford — that was deter mined to go beyond the limitations of the Theater Guild and form their own complete theater ensemble, including actors and crew. Based on the Moscow Art Theater, such an ensemble would create, perform and grow together as one single theatrical entity. The relationships within 72

  4. Group Theater, Acting Teachers and Life During Wartime the group would flourish, and the hope was that the familiarity would extend to the stage, resulting in more convincing, real, onstage interac-tions than those typically found in most theatrical productions. There were no individual stars, but instead a group of actors, writers, directors and so on. Thus the concept of Group Theater was born. The next step was to find the performers who understood this new concept and embraced it. Pooling their resources and reaching out to many talents whom they knew individually, Clurman, Strasberg and Crawford brought together 28 actors who understood the idea of a collective entity and wanted to be part of plays that presented social issues on stage. Among the performers in the group were Stella Adler, Louis Adler (Stella’s brother and son of Jacob), Harry Bratsburg (who later rose to acting fame as Harry Morgan), Lee J. Cobb, John Garfield and Elia Kazan. The group also included writer Clifford Odets and composer Kurt Weill.