he did so with gusto, presenting one of the biggest musicals in the history of The Great White Way.
Brooks was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1926, the son of German and Russian Jews. Small and often picked on as a child, Brooks turned to comedy as a means of coping. At 18, he enlisted in the army and went on to see action in Germany during World War II. By the time he returned to Fort Dix in New Jersey, he had been promoted to corporal.
It was after the war that Mel Brooks decided to try his hand at stand up comedy. Like Woody Allen and Sid Caesar, he would hone his skills 178
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at the Catskills resorts. Also, like Allen, he would land a job as one of the staff writers on Caesar’s TV series, Your Show of Shows.
During the 1960s, Brooks would make his mark in several mediums, teaming with funnyman, and close friend Carl Reiner on the comedy rou tine The 2000 Year Old Man, which emerged from popular sketches to several hit comedy albums. He would also make his mark in television as co-creator (with Buck Henry) of the James Bond spoof sitcom Get Smart.
It was also during the 1960s that Brooks would venture into the movie business, first with a small animated film entitled The Critic and then with The Producers, which was initially rejected by one major studio after another. The storyline about two producers discovering that they could make more money on Broadway with an absolute flop was a marvelously original and unique idea. However, their creation of a mega-flop musical called Springtime for Hitler scared the hell out of studio heads, who wouldn’t touch the project. Eventually, an independent film company finally made The Producers and despite poor reviews and minimal box office numbers won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay.
Brooks would eventually go mainstream with several classic comedy film satires, poking fun at one film genre after another to the delight of audiences and studio execs. Blazing Saddles, High Anxiety, Young Frankenstein and Silent Movie were among the classics that secured Brooks’ place as a comic genius. Unknown to many, Brooks also did his share of serious films as well, such as The Elephant Man, for which he did little promotion. The thinking was that if Brooks lent his name to the film, audiences would have presumed it to be a comedy, rather than the serious dramatic work that it was.
The one area Brooks had not conquered, however, was theater, and Broadway in particular. Brooks had written sketches for New Faces of 1952 and served as co-writer for the 1957 musical Shinbone Alley, which had three lead cats as characters, singing and dancing for only 49 performances long before the mega-hit musical Cats. Although Shinbone Alley was later made into an animated film, it did not land Brooks a Broadway hit. All American, starring Ray Bolger in 1962, with music by Charles Strouse, faired only slightly better than Shinbone Alley, with 80
performances.
Nonetheless, Brooks would finally have his day on Broadway, some 179
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39 years later, with The Producers. It was the perfect choice. The quirky comedy had never quite been the mainstream hit that Brooks’ later films would become. However, those who knew the film loved it and told their friends about the ingenious plot line. By 2001, when the Broadway show opened, it had a cachet about it as a “cult” favorite. It didn’t hurt that Nathan Lane agreed to play one of the lead roles as fictional Broadway impresario Max Bialystock.
The absurdity of the show within the show, the off-beat characters and Matthew Broderick teaming with Nathan Lane made The Producers the talk of Broadway, first setting a box office record by amassing over $3 million in ticket sales in one day and then, 2,500 performances later, walking away with a record 12 Tony Awards including Best Musical.
Brooks even wrote the song lyrics and contributed to the music. In addition to the Broadway run, the show ran successfully in Great Britain and other parts of the globe, translated into Spanish, Japanese, Danish, Italian, Russian and Hebrew, among other languages. There was a 2005
film, but it was not as well received as the original, which grew in popu -
larity over the many years since its original release. The Producers was even spoofed by Larry David on his HBO television series Curb Your Enthusiasm, in an episode in which David was given a role in the show, essentially to cause the show to fail so that Brooks and his wife, Anne Bancroft, could get out of their endless commitment to it. The plan backfires, and just like Springtime for Hitler, Larry David in The Producers becomes an unlikely hit.
Brooks would later follow The Producers by bringing the 1974 film Young Frankenstein to Broadway in 2007. A modest hit, the show ran for nearly 500 performances. Whether more of Brooks’ films are on the way to Broadway remains to be seen. However, the standard he set for a musical comedy with The Producers will be very hard to surpass.
MARSHALL BRICKMAN
Not unlike Mel Brooks, Marshall Brickman proved that it is never too late to have a hit Broadway musical. Jewish on his father’s side, and per haps through his long collaborative career with Woody Allen, Brickman made his way to Broadway in 2005 with the box-office smash Jersey Boys.
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Brickman was born in Brazil in 1941. Following college, in the early 1960s, his enthusiasm for music led to him form a folk group with Eric Weissberg, who later went on to fame as one of the string-picking participants in “Dueling Banjos,” the popular song from the film Deliverance.
Brickman would move on to play in a band called the New Journeymen with John and Michelle Phillips, later of Mamas and Papas fame.
While Brickman loved folk music, he also had a knack for writing comedy and found his way into television writing for Candid Camera, The Tonight Show and The Dick Cavett Show from the mid– to late–’60s.
Shortly thereafter he would team up with Woody Allen on Allen’s first TV special and then as a co-screenwriter on Sleeper, Annie Hall, Manhattan, and years later, on Manhattan Murder Mystery.
However, Brickman had not yet ventured into writing for the theater until Jersey Boys. While more of a folk music enthusiast than a Four Seasons fan, Brickman, in his early 60s, decided to team with former actor and advertising writer Rick Elise on the book for Jersey Boys. The show hit Broadway in 2005, winning the Tony Award for Best Musical. It has been running ever since. While Brickman acknowledged in several interviews that in the process of writing the book for the musical he was learning a lot from those with more theatrical background than himself, he was also pleased with his ability to work his comedy into the dialogue as he wrote. “A laugh in the theater is not a superficial thing,” explained Brickman in an interview about co-writing Jersey Boys. “If you can get 1,500 people to all laugh at the same time about the same thing, then you’ve extracted some kind of basic truth about whatever it is that the laugh is,”1 adds Brickman.
Enjoying their newfound Broadway success, Brickman and Elise teamed up again on the 2010 musical The Addams Family. While Brickman is better known for his work with Woody Allen and his appearance in Annie Hall, he has, like Mel Brooks, added Broadway success to an already highly impressive resume.
MARC SHAIMAN
Another of the seasoned Broadway breakthroughs of the 2000s came from Marc Shaiman. While certainly younger than Brooks or Brick man, 181
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Shaiman had also amassed a significant list of major credits when he strolled onstage to collect his two Tony Awards for Hairspray in 2003.
Unlike many of the Jewish composers of the early 20th century who left college to pursue music, Shaiman actually left both high school and his life in New Jersey to move to New York City at the age of 16. Already an accomplished piano player, with a fixation on Bette Midler, Shaiman wrote and performed in many shows on the Lower East Side before finally meeting Midler and, in time, becoming her musical director. He would also go on to work with Midler as a co-producer on a number of her rec ords. In fact, it was thanks to the Divine Miss M that Shaiman would get his first taste of
Broadway working her show Divine Madness. He would also get to work on Peter Allen’s show Up in One. Both shows, however, would have short runs on Broadway.
It was in film that Shaiman would make a name for himself, writing music and/or film scores for Midler’s films Big Business and Beaches, as well as for Broadcast News, When Harry Met Sally... , City Slickers, George of the Jungle and The Wedding Planner to name a few.
But it wasn’t until 2002 that Shaiman, who always had a Broadway musical flair, would enjoy his first major box-office success, Hairspray, which topped 2,600 performances and became a favorite on film as well,
... with a less notable sequel. In 2005, Shaiman worked on the musical version of Neil Simon’s The Odd Couple. Despite a cast that featured Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick, the show ran for only seven months. Shaiman nonetheless has established himself as a sought-after Broadway composer and lyricist.
And the Newcomers
ADAM GUETTEL
Along with the Adlers and the Hammersteins, another remarkable Broadway family would be the Rodgers family. The daughter of composer Richard Rodgers, Mary Rodgers composed the music for several Broadway shows including the successful 1959 musical Once Upon a Mattress.
It was, therefore, not a surprise when her son Adam Guettel would emerge as a young soprano by the age of ten, singing at the New York City 182
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Opera and at the Metropolitan Opera House. But by the age of 13, Guettel’s voice was changing and his opera career appeared to be behind him.
The young child protégé was not at all unhappy to be changing careers, wanting to follow his new dream of writing music.
After graduating from Yale University in 1987, Guettel began writing music, first as a young rock and roller and later as a Rodgers. He clearly had his own creative instincts, but his lineage was present in his composi -
tion. “I grew up in great privilege; I was given a great heritage,”2 explained Guettel in an interview for The Jewish Exponent, adding that he writes out of fundamental values that connect with Jewishness and the stage.
Unfortunately his composer grandfather died when he was 14. “If I had had the chance, there are thousands of questions I had wanted to ask him. I would have loved to have known his thoughts,”3 said Guettel, who first drew attention and favorable reviews for his music and lyrics for Floyd Collins, a 1996 musical about a man trapped in a Kentucky cave. Several musicals later, in 2003, his work based on an Elizabeth Spencer novella, The Light in the Piazza, would be staged first in Seattle and then in Chicago, before opening on Broadway for a run of 504 performances. The score, complete with classical music and opera, won Tony Awards for Best Original Score and Best Orchestration.
While differences between the creative team members ended Guettel’s next project, a musical version of the popular film The Princess Bride, he is working on several upcoming projects, and there is already anticipation for his work based on both Piazza and his family ties. For more than a decade Guettel has also taught musical theater performance classes at major universities including Harvard, Yale and Princeton.
IDINA MENZEL (AND WICKED)
Along with The Producers, one of the most highly acclaimed shows of the past decade featuring many Jewish contributors, has been Wicked (which as of the writing of this book has topped 2,700 performances on Broadway). The idea for the show Wicked came from Stephen Schwartz, who in 1998 procured the rights to Gregory Maguires’ 1995 novel Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West. The story focused on the witches from The Wizard of Oz. Schwartz (discussed in greater detail in Chapter 6), had enjoyed great Broadway success with Godspell 183
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and Pippin back in the 1970s before moving on to write the music for animated Disney films of the 1990s. For Wicked, however, he would team up with Emmy Award–winning television writer Winnie Holtzman to write the book . Holtzman was well versed in musical theatre writing, hav ing studied at New York University with the likes of Stephen Sondheim, Hal Prince, Comden and Green and Leonard Bernstein. Nonetheless, Wicked marked her debut on Broadway.
Numerous performers have come and gone during the ongoing success of the show; however, one of the most notable was Idina Menzel.
Born Idina Mentzel, the Jewish actress/singer from Queens changed her last name because it was so often mispronounced. Menzel’s family moved to Long Island where she grew up singing the songs from Annie and dazzling her fellow summer campers with her rendition of The Way We Were.
After playing Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz in high school, the young performer would hone her singing talent fronting for wedding bands.
An audition for a new Broadway show called Rent would change her life forever. She landed the role and the show landed on Broadway in 1996. She even met her husband, fellow actor Taye Diggs, while performing in Rent. After a short stint in The Wild Party at the Manhattan Theatre Club and playing Fanny Brice in a Funny Girl concert at the New Amsterdam Theater in 2002, she would go on to Wicked where she would play Elphaba, a.k.a. the Wicked Witch of the West, for a year and a half. For her bewitching performance, she won the Tony Award for Best Performance by a Lead Actress in a Musical. She would later return to the role in London in late 2006. Performing in concerts and appear ing on the TV hit Glee, Menzel has emerged as a major talent with many possibilities in her future.
JEFF MARX AND ROBERT LOPEZ
Most composers or lyricists do not grow up with the dream of bringing an adult puppet show to Broadway. Jeff Marx, nonetheless, had his breakthrough on Broadway in that very manner, collaborating with his partner Robert Lopez on the musical Avenue Q. Marx, who grew up in Hollywood, Florida, was destined to be a lawyer, having passed the bar.
However, it was upon meeting Lopez that they decided to try their hand at writing. Together they worked on a Muppet movie script, for which 184
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they won a $150,000 award. The movie was never produced, but Marx and Lopez decided that since there was a universal love for puppets, they would create their own with a new story, one that appealed to adults.
Thus, a five-year project began, which culminated in Avenue Q, the story of a wide-eyed college grad who comes to New York City with big dreams and little money. He ends up on the Lower East Side with a host of unique and entertaining characters, which included former television personality Gary Coleman.
In an interview for the student newspaper of the University of Kansas, Marx explained that he and Lopez spent a long time creating an adult version of Sesame Street. They wanted to create a show about their friends and themselves. “It’s not just funny because they say ‘fuck’ all the time like we do, it’s entertaining because they are dealing with real issues like being closeted, still getting money from their parents and obsessions with porn,”4 explained Marx in the interview.
The producer of Rent, Jeff Seller was quite impressed with Avenue Q and helped bring it to Off Broadway in early 2003. After great reviews and constant sellouts, the show then moved to Broadway that summer where it played for over 2,500 performances in a six-year run. Marx and Lopez won Tony Awards for Best Musical and Best Original Score.
MICHAEL MAYER
Michael Mayer was not entirely new to Broadway when he became director on Thoroughly Modern Millie, which I had the pleasure of producing in 2002. His Broadway credits actually dated back to the late 1990s with a musical called Triumph of Love in 1997 and a revival of You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown in 1999.
Born in Maryland, Mayer came to New York City after high school where he studied acting and graduated from New York University with an M.F.A. in theater. Like many directors, Mayer began as an actor but developed an interest in directing as he became more involved in theater.
In 1999, Mayer joined forces with Dick Scanlon, Jeanine Tesori, Richard Morris and myself to bring the 1967 film Thoroughly Modern Millie to the stage for the first time. F
rom the tryouts in La Jolla, California, to opening night at the Marquis Theater on Broadway in 2002, Mayer worked diligently helping to bring a show that was a little too long for 185
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a musical (at three hours) down to a more manageable length (two and a half ). He also worked with three Millies in the process. Kristin Cheno -
with was the first Millie, but she had television and film projects that pre cluded her continuing in the show. Erin Dilly was the next Millie.
But Dilly as Millie did not make it to Broadway. When she took ill, her replacement, Sutton Foster, took over the role. I recall, upon seeing Fos -
ter perform, Mayer exclaimed, “There’s Our Millie!” And sure enough, Foster, who was thrust into the role and landed ever so quickly on Broadway, ended up walking away with the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical. Millie, meanwhile, was awarded Best Musical.
As for Mayer, while Millie ran for over 900 performances, he would move on to Spring Awakening, the coming-of-age musical for which he would win a Tony Award for Best Director. Most recently, Mayer joined forces with Billy Joe Armstrong, lead singer of the rock band Green Day, to bring the band’s mega-selling album American Idiot to Broadway. The show, which gained momentum in Berkeley, California, moved to the St. James Theater on Broadway in March of 2010, marking three original musicals, and five Broadway shows total, in a span of just eight years for Mayer.
ANITA WAXMAN
No, Broadway producers need not be members of the good old boys’ club. Anita Waxman, along with partner Elizabeth Williams, certainly proved that point during the first decade of the new century.
Waxman, who hails from California, turned to theater after a lucra-tive corporate career in which she was the founder and chairman of Howe-Lewis International Incorporated, a very successful management consulting and executive search service firm. In 1998, she met the Southern-born Williams, who had already been involved in a few Broadway productions, including Into the Woods and The Secret Garden.
Jews on Broadway: An Historical Survey of Performers, Playwrights, Composers, Lyricists and Producers Page 23