Jews on Broadway: An Historical Survey of Performers, Playwrights, Composers, Lyricists and Producers (29 page)

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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Jews on Broadway

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
the 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.

Meeting composer William Finn, Lapine also took on the role of librettist on the shows
March of the Falsettos
and
In Trousers
in the early 1980s, the latter of which opened with the song
Four Jews in a Room
Bitch ing
. A reworked version of
March of the Falsettos
, simply called
Falset-169

Jews on Broadway

tos
, would make it to Broadway in the early 1990s and win Tony Awards for Best Book and Best Score.

But it was in the early 1980s that Lapine would meet and start working with Stephen Sondheim. He would write the book for
Sunday in the
Park with George
,
Into the Woods
and
Passion
. Together, Sondheim and Lapine developed a chemistry that merged Sondheim’s music with the chemistry taking place onstage between the actors.

Like many Broadway directors, Lapine would head to Hollywood in the 1990s to direct feature films. After three highly acclaimed films with modest box office returns, Lapine returned to Broadway. This time he collaborated with Brooklyn-born writer/actress Claudia Shear to create a show about the legendary Mae West entitled
Dirty Blonde
, which opened on Broadway in 2000 and ran for over 350 performances. After teaming with Michael Legrand on a post–World War II musical fantasy flop called
Amour
, Lapine was back on track serving as director on the entertaining box office hit
The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee
in 2005, which ran for nearly three years.

Like Coleman and Sondheim, another theater veteran to thrive in the late 1980s and through the ’90s was Alfred Uhry, who enjoyed a brief taste of Broadway as a lyricist in 1968 with the help of Frank Loesser and a show called
Here’s Where I Belong
, which opened and closed the same night. It was not until the mid–1970s that Uhry would truly enjoy his first Broadway success working along with composer Robert Waldman on
The Robber Bridegroom.
The Robin Hood–esque musical saw over 550 performances at Broadway’s Helen Hayes Theater and earned Uhry a Tony Award nomination.

Then, in the late 1980s, now in his 50s, the Atlanta-born Jewish lyri cist turned his attention to playwriting and quickly emerged as a significant writer for both stage and screen.

Uhry wrote about Southern-based Jews in three plays that became known as the Atlanta Trilogy. The first play, set in Georgia, was about the relationship between an elderly Jewish woman and her African American chauffeur. The Off Broadway Pulitzer Prize–winning drama was called
Driving Miss Daisy
. The play delved gently into the subject of rac -

ism and prejudice through a series of events in their sentimental journey together, illustrating the bond these two very different, yet compassionate seniors shared in the eyes of a society wrought with prejudice. The film 170

7. Young Playwrights with a Message, Inflation, Disney and Me
adaptation later won the Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Writing of an Adapted Screenplay.

Having now achieved prominence as a writer, Uhry took on anti–

Semitism even within the Jewish community itself with his play entitled
The Last Night of Ballyhoo
, a 1996 comedic-drama set at the onset of World War II. The play, about a Southern Jewish family that celebrates Christmas, knows little to nothing about Passover and is even naive to the prejudice that exists within their own Jewish community, received a Tony Award for Best Play. It also generated a lot of discussion about Jew ish culture and how it was often misinterpreted even by many Jewish people in a time of growing anti–Semitism.

The third play in Uhry’s trilogy brought him back to his musical back ground as he also served as librettist on
Parade
. Despite being a musi cal,
Parade
explored the 1913 lynching by the Ku Klux Klan of a Jew ish factory manager accused of murder. Once again Uhry explored anti–Semitism and in this case, the founding of the Anti-Defamation League as a response to this unjust crime. While the musical was not suc cessful on Broadway, it won the Tony Awards for best book and best score.

At a time in the 1990s when anti–Semitism and prejudice toward American Jews had become far less outwardly prevalent, Uhry brought very real reminders of such intolerance to the public through his critically acclaimed works.

And Me

It was also in the 1980s that I was fortunate to come into my own as a Broadway producer. Yes, another Jewish boy from Long Island grew up with a love of theater. It all emanated from that first experience, seeing
Little Me
in 1961. Some 20 years later, I had become co-owner of the Palace Theater along with Jimmy Nederlander, and in 1981 I had the pleasure of starting the new decade by working with Lauren Bacall, as the first of three major stars to take the lead role in
Woman of the Year
(the others were Raquel Welch and Debbie Reynolds). The show ran for two years, and each of the stars was marvelous in the lead role.

It was on my next hit show,
La Cage aux Folles
in 1983, that I realized I had actually become a part of something very significant — Broadway.

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Jews on Broadway

Producer Allan Carr was originally trying to create an American version of the French play and film,
La Cage Aux Folles
, called
The Queen of
Basin Street.
The original effort did not pan out, but because the show had such potential, Carr forged ahead bringing in Jerry Herman to write both the music and lyrics. I joined the team when they started seeking a theater and became involved as a producer. Soon Harvey Fierstein was brought in to write the book, and Arthur Laurents came onboard to direct. This was truly a very Jewish team. It was also largely a gay team, who looked at me and shook their heads as I was the token heterosexual in the group. Nonetheless, I too appreciate that we were teaming up on something more than just a great comical musical with a fabulous score.

We had a cause to rally around as we worked to bring the show to Broadway. It was a call for tolerance and for acceptance of gays in society at a time when such acceptance was still shaky at best.

We opened in Boston in July to great reviews. Of course that made us a little worried because now the New York critics would have higher expectations. The show finally opened in New York in August of 1983.

New York Times
critic Frank Rich called it the “most old-fashioned major musical Broadway has seen since
Annie
, and it’s likely to be just as popular with children of all ages.”2 My father, who was always one of my most staunch supporters called that (the “old-fashioned musical” reference) the kiss of death. In fact, after returning to my apartment with some friends, following the lavish opening night party at the Pan Am building complete with a 28-piece orchestra, my father convinced me that the show was doomed. So, the celebration ended quickly, and I spent the evening alone nursing two bottles of champagne. The next morning, despite a hangover, I remember going to the meeting with the show’s creative team and all of the producers. Everyone was all smiles. “We have a big hit on our hands, the money’s rolling in,” was the theme of this joyful meeting. While my dad thought that the “old-fashioned musical”