Jews on Broadway: An Historical Survey of Performers, Playwrights, Composers, Lyricists and Producers (26 page)

ships. As the AIDS epidemic grew, Kramer’s voice became more prominent as he sought to increase public awareness, political action and 149

Jews on Broadway

fund ing for the medical community to conduct research in an effort to find an effective cure. He was highly critical of the society’s blind eye toward the growing crisis.

Kramer’s success and status as a playwright was based largely on one epic drama,
The Normal Heart
, which ran through the 1980s at the Public Theater. While the illness is unnamed in the play, it is the central theme of a show that came in part from the deaths of many of Kramer’s friends and tugged at the hearts of both gay and straight audiences. It was a landmark play that has since been produced hundreds of times throughout the United States and in countries around the globe.
The
Normal Heart
became synonymous with promoting awareness of the AIDS crisis. In 2000, the Royal National Theater in London named
The Normal Heart
one of the one hundred greatest plays of the 20th century.

Another gay Jewish playwright, Tony Kushner also made a major impact in the struggle to generate greater awareness about the AIDS

crisis. Born in 1956, Kushner grew up in Louisiana, where he developed an interest in writing. He would come to New York City in the 1970s to attend Columbia University. After several attempts to get his work staged, Kushner’s play
The Age of Assassins
was produced Off Broadway at the Newfoundland Theatre. From there, Kushner began having his plays produced Off Broadway and outside of New York City. He wrote both original works and adaptations of successful other playwrights’

works ranging from Bertolt Brecht’s
Mother Courage and Her Children
to Shakespeare’s
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
and
The Tempest
.

It was his 1992 seven-hour epic,
Angels in America
(a play in two parts:
Millennium Approaches
and
Perestroika
), about the HIV epidemic and the political climate of the time, that brought Kushner to national attention.
Angels
won Kushner a Pulitzer Prize and was later turned into a movie. It drew attention to the epidemic and was considered one of the most significant works of the decade.

Kushner would later generate attention once again for the musical
Caroline, or Change
which followed a successful Off Broadway run with several months on Broadway in 2004. Kushner wrote the book and lyrics while Jeanine Tesori, a noted Jewish arranger and composer, supplied the music.

Tesori, a Barnard College graduate, first made it to Broadway in 150

7. Young Playwrights with a Message, Inflation, Disney and Me
1995 while working on the revival of
How to Succeed in Business Without
Really Trying
. In 2000, she worked with Dick Scanlon composing original songs for
Thoroughly Modern Millie
. Tesori also worked with Kushner on his revival of
Mother Courage and Her Children
as part of the Shakespeare in the Park Festival in 2004.

Her work on
Caroline, or Change
was particularly interesting in that it combined numerous musical styles including Jewish klezmer and folk music that was originally brought to America by the Eastern European immigrants. Klezmer music influenced many composers including Leo -

nard Bernstein.

Jonathan Larson was another of the young Jewish forces in theater in the 1990s, in this case with his music and lyrics as well as his playwriting. Born in 1960 and raised in White Plains, New York, Larson not only learned piano as a youngster, but also learned the trumpet and tuba.

His music was accompanied by his passion for acting. In college, he performed in, and composed music for, several productions at Adelphi University.

Settling in the West Village, Larson wrote plays about social issues including homophobia and acceptance. His somewhat autobiographical production of
Tick...Tick...BOOM!
ran Off Off Broadway and generated attention in the early 1990s. During this time, Larson would begin work on a show called
Rent
, a rock opera about struggling artists on New York’s Lower East Side. Sadly, Larson would never see the huge success of
Rent
on Broadway. Larson died of a rare disorder known as Marfan’s syndrome.

Rent
, nonetheless, took on a life of its own, running on Broadway for an incredible 5,124 performances over 12 years and winning the Tony Award for Best Musical. Larson received a Pulitzer Prize posthumously for his work on
Rent
.

While young playwrights and activists from the gay community and the theater community worked hard to spread the word about the growing epidemic in hopes of generating support, the number of victims was rapidly growing. One of those to succumb to AIDS was choreographer/director Michael Bennett.

Born in 1943, Bennett’s mother was Jewish, his father Roman Cath -

olic. A dancer from a young age, Bennett dropped out of high school at the age of 16 to join a touring company of Jerome Robbins’
West Side
Story
. Although Bennett danced his way to Broadway in the musical
Sub-151

Jews on Broadway

ways Are for Sleeping
in 1961, he opted instead to set his sights on choreography.

His career as a choreographer included
Promises, Promises
;
Coco
; Stephen Sondheim’s
Company
; and
Seesaw
, a show on which he also served as librettist and director. Bennett brought openly gay characters to Broadway in this 1973 show, a rarity at the time. It was, however, in 1975 that Bennett’s innovative concept of creating a show won him both critical acclaim and Tony Awards. Using numerous hours of interviews with actual performers, Bennett created
A Chorus Line
, which earned over $37 million for the Public Theater. Bennett would have another huge hit in 1981 with
Dreamgirls
, producing and directing his way to Tony nominations. Sadly, Bennett was only 44 when he died in 1987, three years before
A Chorus Line
closed. Much like Robbins before him, Bennett made an impact as a choreographer and a director, bringing new energy to the dance and movement of an entire production. He was part of the gay Jewish theater community that lost too many members to a modern day plague.

Another Jewish-born spokesperson for gay civil rights who emerged in the 1980s was playwright and actor Harvey Fierstein. The raspy-voiced Brooklyn native, Fierstein launched his career as an openly gay comic, actor and female impersonator at New York clubs. He catapulted to fame with his play
Torch Song Trilog y
, starring in his own work, which had rarely been done on Broadway since Woody Allen in
Play It Again, Sam
.

Originally an Off Broadway show staged in Greenwich Village,
Torch
Song Trilog y
moved to Broadway in 1982. Fierstein won Tony Awards for both the play and for his acting. The show broke conventional norms, using three one-act plays to create one four-hour, three-part trilogy about a Jewish drag queen living in New York City and searching for love and acceptance. While
Torch Song Trilog y
continued for over 1,200

performances, Fierstein took on the job of writing the book for
La Cage
aux Folles
, which would open on Broadway in 1983.

Following
La Cage
, Fierstein would move on to other projects, writing or performing. His role as Tracy Turnblad’s stage mother Edna, in
Hairspray
, won him another Tony Award in 2003. I also brought him in to play Tevye in
Fiddler on the Roof
in 2004, a role he enjoyed so much that he returned to play it again when the production went on tour.

Not unlike Zero Mostel on Broadway, or Boris Thomashefsky in 152

7. Young Playwrights with a Message, Inflation, Disney and Me
Yiddish theater, Harvey Fierstein established himself as a consummate stage performer, able to take on a wide variety of roles, some serious, others comical, and always put his signature on the show. Along with Nathan Lane and a few other select performers, Fierstein has a drawing power on Broadway that does not come from another medium, but from his Tony Award–winning body of stage work and his reputation as a performer.

And finally, there is David Mamet, a Jewish-born playwright and director who grew up in the Chicago area but settled in New York City where he helped form an Off Broadway theater company from which many of his early plays emerged. Throughout the 1970s, Mamet became known for tackling a wide range of subject matter in his work, often with dark humor and profanity laced within his tightly crafted dialogue.

Shows such as
Sexual Perversity in Chicago
,
Duck Variations
and
American
Buffalo
all generated significant attention Off Broadway.

It was in the 1980s that Mamet made it to Broadway with
Glengarry
Glen Ross
. The show, which depicted unethical and amoral business practices, became a highly acclaimed hit. In fact, the Pulitzer Prize–winning drama was widely considered Mamet’s most significant work. Mamet would follow with
Speed the Plow
in 1988, which took a satirical look at the film business.

Mamet continued turning out plays that were rich in dialogue and prompted many critical discussions, such as his 1992 two-person show,
Oleana
. Not unlike Lillian Hellman’s
The Children’s Hour
,
Oleana
skill-fully explored how one person’s accusations could destroy someone else’s life. Mamet’s knack for exploring the human condition clearly made him one of the most heralded playwrights of the late 1980s and 1990s. He remains a respected writer and spokesperson on the American theater today.

Wendy Wasserstein

While the successful Broadway playwrights of the 1980s and ’90s were primarily male, and gay, there was also room for a Jewish woman with a comedic flare. From Fanny Brice, Molly Picon and Sophie Tucker to Joan Rivers, Gilda Radner, Rita Rudner, Joy Behar and Sarah Silver-153

Jews on Broadway

man, Jewish women have always had a knack for making audiences laugh.

Despite the wealth of Jewish comediennes, there have been few females to tickle the funny bones of Broadway audiences with original plays.

Wendy Wasserstein not only brought comedy to Broadway through her work, but not unlike her male counterparts, brought forward her own social concerns. Wasserstein presented the voices of women on stage, particularly in her breakthrough hit,
The Heidi Chronicles
, in 1988.

One of five sisters, Wendy Wasserstein grew up in Brooklyn. Her father was very successful as a textile executive, and her mother was an amateur dancer who immigrated to the United States from Poland. Her grandfather, on her mother’s side, was a playwright, and an influence on Wasserstein, who would go on to earn a master’s degree in creative writing from the City College of New York and an M.F.A. from the Yale School of Drama.

In
The Heidi Chronicles
, Wasserstein used her knack for sharp comedic dialogue to shed light on the social issues faced by women includ ing liberation in the 1960s, feminism in the 1970s and betrayal in the 1980s. She made audiences laugh while also making them think about the changing issues that women faced. The show, which opened Off Broad way, later moved to Broadway for over 600 performances and won not only the Tony Award for best play but also a Pulitzer Prize for Wasserstein.

While there were few plays with Jewish themes in the 1990s, one that garnered attention Off Broadway and later on Broadway in 1993, running for 556 performances, was Wasserstein’s follow-up to
The Heidi
Chronicles
, entitled
The Sisters Rosensweig
. The comedy about three middle-aged Jewish-American sisters in London to celebrate one of their birthdays was described by Wasserman in the Huntington Theater program as: “A practicing Jew, a wandering Jew and a self-loathing Jew are sitting around a living room in London.”1 But the show proved to be much more than that, as it epitomized the strong bond between these three very different women. From personal revelations to their ongoing sibling rivalry, they draw in an audience by way of Wasserstein’s richly humorous dialogue that drives the show forward.

Wasserstein would continue to write plays through the 1990s and into the new century, including
Isn’t It Romantic, The American Daughter
and
Old Money
. Sadly she died in 2006 at the age of 55. In her plays, 154

7. Young Playwrights with a Message, Inflation, Disney and Me
Wasserstein utilized her Jewish sense of humor to bring the female voice to Broadway in a manner that had not been done before. As a result, stars such as Jane Alexander, Madeline Kahn, Linda Lavin, Joan Allen and other notables appeared in her plays.

No longer accused of being Communist for standing up for social issues, the Jewish playwrights of this era, from Kramer and Kushner to Wasserstein, were able to make their voices heard without having to look over their shoulders. They followed Odets, Kaufman and others in their belief that the theater was, and still is, a forum for expression and a means of making an impact.

“More Traditional” Newcomers

Among the other new Broadway talents to emerge in the ’80s and

’90s were Maury Yeston and Jerry Zaks. Unlike the new breed of playwrights, both were more closely associated with the more “traditional”

style of Broadway musicals. Yeston surfaced as a composer and lyricist, while Zaks had a brilliant sense for directing, preferably comedy.

Yeston, who grew up in Jersey City in the 1950s, was, like many Jew ish composers, the grandson of a cantor. Both of his parents also had musical talent. So, like many of his musical predecessors, Yeston was weaned on music and took to the piano at a very young age. An early trip to New York City to see
My Fair Lady
, not unlike my own trip to Manhattan to see
Little Me
, turned out to be an eye-opening experience for Yeston who, like myself, was immediately drawn to the theater.