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

by Stewart F. Lane

  He also took on a comedy called Luv, written by Elliott Baker and Murray Schisgal. Luv ran for over 900 performances on Broadway, and the movie version would include Elaine May.

  From his improvisational days and his years on stage touring with Elaine May, Nichols simply knew comedy. He knew the timing, the pac-ing and the nuances that made a comedy work on stage, and an audience laugh. He also knew how to direct for the silver screen, and starting with Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in 1966, he would go on to direct numerous films including The Graduate, Catch-22, Working Girl and The Birdcage among others.

  But for Nichols, there was always a love of theater, and he never strayed far from the Broadway stage. In fact, it was a few years after direct ing Annie that Nichols would take a chance and bring young comic/

  actress Karen Johnson, better known as Whoopi Goldberg, to Broadway in 1984 and essentially introduce her to the world in her own one-woman show, which drew critical acclaim and launched Goldberg’s career.

  Nichols would continue directing through five decades with the comedy Spamalot in 2005, receiving a Tony Award for his efforts. In fact, Nichols holds the rare distinction of winning an Oscar, Emmy, Grammy and Tony. Now in decade number six, as of the writing of this book, Nichols is working on bringing a new version of a 1963 Japanese film, High and Low, to the American audience. If you consider that Nichols is a comedic genius, it may be because genius runs in the family.

  Supposedly, Albert Einstein was a cousin on his mother’s side.

  David Merrick’s Broadway Magic

  While Neil Simon was the most prolific playwright of the 1960s and

  ’70s, David Merrick was the producer with the most Broadway credits.

  Yet, Simon and Merrick only teamed up on one Broadway hit. Unlike Simon, who took a low-key, understated approach with smaller shows, Merrick was a producer with a flare for the dramatic. In fact, along with 130

  6. Jewish Themes, Legends and Life in the 1960s and 1970s more than 80 productions, he often garnered media attention for his off-stage activities in the form of publicity stunts. For example, when his show Fanny met with unfavorable reviews, he drew attention to the production by erecting a statue of the show’s belly dancer in Central Park.

  For another show that generated negative reviews, Subways Are for Sleeping, Merrick hired seven namesakes of major New York critics to provides quotes in newspaper ads praising the show. And then there was the time he had a woman run onstage during Look Back in Anger and slap one of the actors. While Merrick’s many hit shows drew their share of press, he also had writers, reporters and theatergoers wondering what stunt he would do next in an attempt to salvage a sinking show.

  Merrick was born in 1912 to Jewish parents living in St. Louis, Missouri. His birth name was David Lee Margulois, but like many Jewish celebrities he would change his name to something less ethnic. After graduating from Washington University, he went on to law school and actually began a legal career. However, after only a few years in the profession, he grew tired of law and pursued a career in theater production.

  It took several years until he had his first play produced, and a few more years until he had his first of 27 Broadway shows, entitled Fanny, which he co-produced with Joshua Logan, who also co-wrote the book and directed the musical. Based on a French film trilogy, Fanny was about one woman and two men who love her, one with whom she has a child and the other whom she marries. The show opened at the Majestic Theater and ran for 888 performances.

  Just four shows and three years later, Merrick would bring the sights, the sounds and the ambiance of Jamaica to Broadway for 558 performances starring Lena Horne and Ricardo Montalban. Merrick always had a knack for bringing major name stars, as well as soon-to-be stars, to the Broadway stage.

  Never one to be predictable, Merrick veered from the usual musical fare to bring Joan Osbourne’s 1956 hit London drama Look Back in Anger to Broadway, where it won a Tony Award for Best Play, and ran for over 400 performances, while infusing the term “angry young men” into Amer ican culture. Merrick would do comedy as well, bringing Woody Allen’s Don’t Drink the Water to Broadway in 1961. It was also in 1961

  that Merrick introduced a teenaged Barbra Streisand to Broadway in the musical I Can Get It for You Wholesale, perhaps Merrick’s most “Jewish”

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  show, based on a novel by Jerome Weidman. Merrick was constantly on the move seeking out new shows, while bringing in top performers. He was also seeking out new wives as he was married six times.

  Being that Merrick was producing numerous shows, it was not unusual for him to have several shows running at the same time and to compete against himself for Tony Awards. For example, in 1959 he was co-producing Gypsy, starring Ethel Merman and Jack Klugman at the Broadway Theater. Then, within five months, he had Jackie Gleason, Wal ter Pidgeon and a young Valerie Harper on Broadway in Take Me Along at the Shubert Theater. Both Gypsy and Take Me Along went up for Best Musical in 1960, but neither was able to grab the award from The Sound of Music. In 1963, he had Tchin-Tchin up for Best Play, as well as Stop the World — I Want to Get Off and Oliver! , both up for Best Musical. Again, he did not win in either category. In 1964, however, he won for both Best Play and Best Musical with Joan Osbourne’s Luther and with a show called Hello, Dolly!

  Yes, it was in 1964, when Merrick brought Hello, Dolly! to Broadway, with music by Jerry Herman. Prior to Dolly, Jerry Herman had written both the music and lyrics for Milk and Honey in 1961. Like most of Broadway’s Jewish musical legends, Herman grew up in a house with a piano.

  As Stella Adler’s daughter, Ellen, noted earlier, “Jewish families had pianos. Music was part of Jewish family life.”1

  Jerry Herman’s mom sang and played piano in Catskills hotels, and his parents owned and ran a summer camp in the Berkshire Mountains in Massachusetts. It was at the camp that they regularly staged theatrical pro ductions. Clearly, music was a major part of Jerry Herman’s early years.

  After graduating from the University of Miami, Herman settled in New York City where he produced an Off Broadway revue called I Feel Wonderful. Despite a limited run, it was the starting point of Herman’s theatrical career, which would bring him to Broadway in 1960 with a revue called From A to Z. However, it was his work on Milk and Honey that generated attention, and from there it was on to Hello, Dolly! , w hich featured Herman’s immensely popular title track, written in just one after noon. Much to the surprise and delight of Herman and Merrick, Louis Armstrong’s recording of Hello Dolly! became a huge chart-topping single. Petula Clark’s cover version in French resulted in a hit overseas.

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  6. Jewish Themes, Legends and Life in the 1960s and 1970s Adapted from Thornton Wilder’s story The Matchmaker (which was adapted from Johann Nestroy’s comedy The Merchant of Yonkers), Hello, Dolly! featured Dolly Gallagher Levi as the Yonkers-based matchmaker.

  Like many major musicals, Dolly was the result of many transformations in the long, arduous process of bringing a musical to Broadway. Ethel Mer man, whom Merrick had worked with in Gypsy, was asked to play Dolly, but turned the role down. Her lost opportunity gave Carol Channing the biggest break in her long career. It didn’t come easily, however, as director Gower Champion, and Merrick, asked Channing to audition for the role. She agreed to do an audition since she very much wanted the part. Channing had not been in a Broadway hit since Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, more than a decade earlier. A year after her audition, she would walk away clutching a Tony Award for her performance as Dolly.

  Hello, Dolly! would play for what was then a record 2,844 performances, broken less than a year later by Fiddler. The musical would win ten Tony Awards in 1964, a record that would stand for 37 years until The Producers topped it with 12. During the long run of the show, there were even more Dollys than Merrick had wives. Following Channing, the list included Ginger Rogers, Martha Raye, Betty Grable, Pearl Bailey, Bibi Osterwald, Phyllis Dillar and finally Ethe
l Merman. It seemed that no matter who donned the magical Dolly headdress, she would enjoy the notoriety that came with being part of a show that epitomized the Broadway musical on a grand scale.

  Following Hello, Dolly! , Jerry Herman would help bring to Broadway another matchmaking widow with an infectious theme song when he introduced the musical Mame in 1966, based on the novel Auntie Mame, which had been a play in 1954.

  Meanwhile, Merrick’s next significant hit was a very small two-person musical spanning the life of a married couple called I Do! I Do! , starring Mary Martin and Robert Preston. The show ran for over 550

  per formances and proved, as Neil Simon had done with They’re Play ing Our Song, that musicals need not have large ensembles to be success ful.

  After bringing Robert Goulet to Broadway in the 1968 musical The Happy Time, based on a novel by Robert Fontaine, Merrick and Simon had their one Broadway moment together with Promises, Promises, which after a long Broadway run spent 14 months on tour.

  By the 1970s, Broadway was indeed changing, with Two by Two, 133

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  Godspell, Jesus Christ Superstar and Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat bringing the Bible and Christianity to the stage, albeit with the help of some Jewish writers, performers and producers. Merrick however, turned his attention to the 1959 film classic, Some Like It Hot for his latest venture, and by 1972, despite tremendous friction between almost everyone associated with the stage production, the musical Sugar was born. With Jule Styne writing the music and Merrick’s usual director/choreographer Gower Champion on board, plus a cast that included Robert Morse and Tony Roberts, one would have expected Sugar to be a runaway hit. It was not. While it ran for over 500 performances, Sugar was not as sweet as expected at the box office.

  There would be one more mega hit in the long, impressive career of David Merrick. It was a musical that would pay tribute to the street from which the theater district grew to the north. The show, 42nd Street, with Gower Champion once again as director/choreographer, was based on the 1933 film about life behind the scenes in show business. A simple story about a chorus girl who gets her big break, literally, when the star breaks an ankle, and then goes on to stardom, was enough to carry the show with plenty of songs and excellent dance numbers. Sadly, director/choreographer Champion never saw the success of his significant efforts in making this show a hit as he died on opening night. Merrick announced the news to a stunned cast and audience after the opening performance. The musical went on to run for 3,486 performances.

  In his long career, Merrick was able to take dramas, small musicals and major extravaganzas and make them work with star power, dynamic staging and even promotional gimmicks when necessary. He was indeed one of the most significant producers of the century.

  And the Music Played On: Strouse, Schwartz

  and Marvin

  Berlin, the Gershwins, Bernstein, Rodgers and Hammerstein ... the lineage of Jewish composers and lyricists continued. Along with Jerry Herman, Stephen Sondheim and the team of Bock and Harnish, Charles Strouse would come into prominence in the 1960s, and Stephen Schwartz would follow in the ’70s, along with Marvin Hamlisch.

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  6. Jewish Themes, Legends and Life in the 1960s and 1970s Strouse was born to Jewish parents, Ira and Ethel Strouse, in New York City in 1928. His mom played a straddling piano in their home and had a feel for swing and jazz. His dad was in the tobacco industry. Strouse recalls some of the anti–Semitism while growing up during the 1930s.

  “We were living on a street with a Parochial School and they bullied us, threw things at us and stomped us,” says Strouse. “We were never really hurt but it was very real,” he adds. “I also remember anti–Semitism when working on a farm in Massachusetts. The locals were not happy about hav ing Jews in their town, so they beat up my brother and tied me to a tree and lit a fire under me. Fortunately I was rescued,” recalls Strouse of the horrifying experience that resulted from the fact that he was Jewish.2

  Strouse went on to attend the Eastman Conservatory in Rochester.

  He would become an accomplished piano player by his early teens and study with Aaron Copland. Later he would write music for newsreels and early television programs before heading to Paris to study music abroad. Strouse recalls, while abroad, seeing the grand opera houses existing within a world of royalty, which was not open to Jews. The Jews as he saw it, in parts of Europe, had to make their own theater, which they did.

  Upon returning to the United States, he began writing music for Movietone News, which played before films at the movie theaters. “It was canned music that they could use in films, but I didn’t care, I just wanted to make beautiful music,” he adds.3

  In 1949, Strouse met lyricist Lee Adams at a party. Adams, a Jewish lyricist from Mansfield, Ohio, who had earned a master’s degree from Columbia University, would team with Strouse on some major musicals, starting with Bye Bye Birdie in 1960.

  Birdie was the breakthrough hit Strouse and Adams were seeking.

  The musical, which was similar to the story of Elvis Presley, focused atten tion on a young fictional pop icon, Conrad Birdie who, much like Elvis, was being drafted into the military. In this case, the news wreaked havoc on a small town in Ohio where teenage girls were overwhelmed at the thought of their hero going off to the army. It might be noted that Conrad Birdie was supposed to be called Conrad Twitty until the real Conrad Twitty (who later went on to become a popular counrty singer known as Conway Twitty), stepped out of the woodwork and threatened to sue the producers.

  The uplifting score by Strouse and Adams, coupled with the book 135

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  by Michael Bennett and direction and choreography from Gower Champion, created a pop-culture classic that would open the door for other teen-based musicals such as Grease and Hairspray years later. Birdie ran for 607 performances and became a major hit film in 1963. The show won a Tony Award for Best Musical, while charming audiences young and old. Dick Van Dyke, Michael Bennett and Gower Champion also won Tony Awards (Champion actually won two for both directing and choreography).

  Following the success of Birdie, Strouse and Adams worked with Broad way newcomer Mel Brooks on the unsuccessful football-themed show All American, which came and went in a couple of months. From foot ball, Strouse and Adams turned their attention to boxing and created a musical version of Clifford Odets’ 1937 drama, Golden Boy. Changing the theme from the struggles of an Italian American to those of an African American boxer, played by a Jewish actor, Sammy Davis, Jr., Golden Boy was well-timed, at the onset of the growing civil rights movement. As a result it ran for more than 500 performances. Then, in a complete turn-about, Strouse and Adams brought the comic strip hero Superman to life with It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane, It’s Superman. Unfortunately, theatergoers were not taken in by the man of steel on stage, and the play had a short run. It is, however, being revived. “We’ve written four new songs for it,”

  says Strouse, who at the age of 81 hopes the new version of the show will fly.4

  It was the 1970 show Applaus e, at the Palace Theater, that brought Strouse and Adams back to prominence. With a book by Comden and Green, Applause brought a musical version of the 1950 film classic All About Eve to the Broadway stage and ran for nearly 900 performances, making it the biggest hit for Strouse and Adams to date. It was also the breakthrough for actress Lauren Bacall (discussed later) who starred as fictional theater star Margo Channing. In the story, Channing falls prey to a ruthless newcomer named Eve who plots to steal her career and her man. Applause brought Strouse his second Tony Award.

  While the popular theme song for the classic sitcom All in the Family was also attributed to Strouse and Adams, the next major Broadway musical for Strouse was based on the comic strip Little Orphan Annie.

  This time, Strouse teamed with director/lyricist Martin Charnin. Another New Yorker, Charnin was one of the gang members in the original West 136

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, Legends and Life in the 1960s and 1970s Side Story. Besides working with Strouse, Charnin also collaborated on musicals with Richard Rodgers.

  Annie was set in a New York City orphanage in the depression era, and it promoted courage and optimism in the face of hard times. Unlike Superman , Annie was successful at bringing a comic strip character to Broadway as the young orphan girl won the hearts of theatergoers and the song “Tomorrow” became a modern standard.

  Following Annie, which ran for a whopping 2,377 performances, Strouse wrote music for a number of major motion pictures plus several other Broadway shows. One particular show, Rags, was about an immigrant Jewish mother who escapes Europe with her children, settles on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and falls in love with a Jewish labor union leader. Despite being a box office bust, Rags drew high critical acclaim and was nominated for a Tony Award for best musical in 1987.

  Rags was probably the most “Jewish” show Strouse ever wrote. Yet, Strouse feels that his religion was reflected in much of his work, as was the case with most of the Jewish composers, especially “Lenny” (Bernstein), as Strouse calls him. “I feel the Jewish heritage in me, but I am an Atheist,” explains Strouse. “There’s a cynicism among Jews that enables them to appreciate the vulgarity of the world. It seems to me that there’s a kind of worldliness and acceptance of the ‘crap’ that’s in the world and that’s where musical theater grew, not out of the royalty of the opera but out of being oppressed,” says Strouse, claiming that musicals are the bastard of the arts.5

  Rags was later revised and revived in 1991 by the Jewish American Theater, and then again in Florida in 1999. Rags also brought Strouse together with lyricist Stephen Lawrence Schwartz, whose career, like that of Strouse, also took off in the ’60s, although for Schwartz it was the late

  ’60s. The son of Sheila and Stanley Schwartz, a teacher and businessman, respectively, Stephen was born in 1948 and grew up in the Jewish community of Minneola on Long Island. His musical prowess, which began at an early age, landed him in the prestigious The Juilliard School of Music while he was still in high school. After college, Schwartz had a short career as a record producer before trying his hand at writing lyrics for musicals. His first success came at the age of 21, with the 1969 hit musical Butterflies Are Free, which opened at the Booth Theater and ran for over 1,100 performances before becoming a film in 1972.