Jews on Broadway: An Historical Survey of Performers, Playwrights, Composers, Lyricists and Producers (4 page)

Jews on Broadway

to sit with friends and laughed, jeered and applauded loudly, while eating and drinking dur ing the show. Some of this behavior spilled over into vaude ville, where the audiences were sometimes as busy as the performers.

The theater was a meeting place of sorts, in which to visit with friends, mingle, talk, gossip and enjoy the camaraderie. It was an escape from the difficult working and living conditions, and it provided the community with a much-needed sense of Jewish unity. The audiences laughed, cried and sang along with the stars on stage. Most of the Yiddish theater pro -

duc tions were shows designed for the mass audience. They were not highly sophisticated, nor were they vaudeville. They had story lines that were either easy to follow, familiar to the culture or taken from classic lit erature but adapted for the audience. Most of the immigrants were denied much education in their homelands, so, while some shows were enlightening, many were simply entertaining. The audiences could enjoy and discuss their theater experience with their neighbors ... and did they ever. The shows and the stars were the talk of the Lower East Side, and in time, throughout Jewish neighborhoods in Brooklyn and other parts of New York City. Quite devoted to their favorite stars, some fans even got into fights, literally, when debating which celebrity was the better performer.

THE ACTRESSES

As Nahma Sandrow describes in her book, the actresses in Yiddish theater fell into several categories. They were “vivacious spubrette or hoyden, stately prima donna, emotional heroine, character comedienne or villainess. They all had to have good voices, and usually they had to be able to dance. In looks, the public favored flavored flashing eyes, ador -

able smiles, and zaftik (juicy) figures.”11

Bessie Thomashefsky, Boris’ wife, was a leading star of the era. Bes -

sie and Boris were the preeminent couple in show business of their time.

Michael Tilson Thomas, conductor and grandson of the Thoma shef skys, recreated the legendary couple on stage at Carnegie Hall’s Zan kel Hall in New York City. Tilson Thomas would comment that they were “the Rich ard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor of their time,” based on their notoriety, their wealth and their adoring public.12 Together they would perform in numerous shows in New York, Boston, Philadelphia and Chi -

cago. Bessie’s versatility on stage allowed her to take a on a great range 18

1. Immigration, Yiddish Theater and Building Broadway
of roles. She could play the diva, take on comical roles with a Fanny Brice flair for wisecracks, or perform a dramatic role as well as any actress of her generation. When the couple eventually separated, her career continued with what was often considered her greatest, most highly acclaimed role as the seductive lead in Oscar Wilde’s
Salomé
. She would also go on to manage her own Lower East Side theater troupe and revive some of her favorite roles. An independent woman, Bessie would even take on the leading role in a play called
Chantzhe
[Hannah]
in Amerika,
about a woman who wanted nothing more than to be a chauffeur, something that was unheard of at the time, in what still remains a heavily male-dominated field.

Among the Yiddish actresses of the era was Bertha Kalish, an immigrant from the Austro-Hungarian Empire. She had moved to Romania and become a star of Yiddish theater before making her way to America where she grew to prominence in a Yiddish version of Henrik Ibsen’s classic
A Doll’s House,
as well as in
Fedora
and
The Kreutzer Sonata.
In fact, she was so highly acclaimed in
The Kreut zer Sonata
that she would play the role on Broadway in 1906. Kalish would go on to play various other significant roles in both Yiddish and English and was always described as being a beautiful woman with a magnificent voice.

There were other women of the Yiddish theater, such as Jenny Goldstein, known as the reigning queen of melodrama, musical tearjerkers and full-blown musical spectaculars. Sara Adler, Jacob’s wife, who began her American stage career as Sara Heine, the wife of Maurice Heine, another Yiddish actor, was featured in nearly 300 roles. Sara, who spoke Russian, supposedly learned Yiddish while being in Yiddish theater.

Although many of her performances were with her husband Jacob, she also performed across the river from the Lower East Side, in Brooklyn, presenting the works of Ibsen and Shaw to Yid dish- speaking audiences.

The legendary Molly Picon, discussed in greater length in Chapter Two (during her days in vaudeville), also honed her skills in Yiddish theater. Fanny Thomashefsky taught her piano, Michael Thomashefsky put her on stage at 15 (in his Yiddish repertory troupe at the Arch Street The ater) and she performed in Boris Thomashefsky’s
Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

Clearly, she was trained by one of the preeminent theatrical families.

While she was to go on to great notoriety in English theater, Picon never forgot her roots.

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Jews on Broadway

THE PLAYHOUSES AND THE PLAYWRIGHTS

Like popular television shows and mainstream mass-appeal movies, the shows of Yiddish theater were the premiere entertainment for the Jewish audience, rivaling Broadway at the box office.

Six theaters were the most prominent of the many venues for Yiddish theater. In the Bowery, The Windsor, which opened in 1893, was the larg est, with a seating capacity of 3,500, dwarfing even the largest Broadway theaters of the time. The Windsor housed the most mainstream popular shows. The People’s Theater was a spacious 2,500-seater leased at the start of the 20th century by Thomashefsky. Adler managed the Grand Theater, a 2,000-seat venue featuring what Adler called “better theater,” meaning the more sophisticated plays adapted by Gordin.

Another large theater was the Thalia, built in the 1880s holding 3,000

theatergoers and featuring shows starring David Kessler. Each theater had its own repertory system presenting new shows on a regular basis, plus “benefits” for the stars and occasionally for charities. Prices were typically in the $.25 to $1.00 range for tickets, and the collective 11,000

seats in these four prominent theaters were filled nearly every night.

Two more prominent theaters would open in 1911 and 1912, north of the Bow ery on Second Avenue. The nearly 2,000 seat Second Avenue Theater was built for David Kessler. and the National, also roughly 2,000

seats, was built for Boris Thomashefsky. At the time, these were the

“state-of-the-art,” ele gant the aters that highlighted an area that would become known as the “Yid dish Broadway.” In fact, the opening of these theaters brought numerous dignitaries including the mayor of New York City, William Jay Gaynor, who might not have understood Yiddish, but nonetheless was on hand for the festive occasions.

The sheer size of the theaters meant that a new show could be seen by many people in a short time. As a result, it also meant there was an ongoing demand for new material. The early light musicals of Goldfadn, Grodner and those emulating their style were one of several genres that marked the era. There were the “crowd pleasers” from the early years of Yiddish theater, which continued to draw large audiences as new waves of immigrants descended on the Lower East Side. The stories were simple and the songs brought back the spirit of their homeland.

By contrast, there were Gordin’s “high-brow” dramatic plays, which 20

1. Immigration, Yiddish Theater and Building Broadway
would not only fuel the career of Jabob P. Adler, but also legitimize Yiddish theater for those who looked down upon it, calling the populist plays shund, a Yiddish word roughly meaning “trashy.” However, the term eventually came to describe the “commonplace” shows that appealed to the masses. Similarly, popular reality television shows today might be referred to by critics as a “shund” despite being money-making ventures with great mass appeal. It took time for the Jewish “intellectual elite” to accept Yiddish theater, which they considered to have more of a circus-like atmosphere than actual theater.

While Gordin was more concerned with quality, there was a definite need for quantity. Playwrights Moyshe Hurwitz and Joseph Lateiner were two of the most prolific of the era, each writing hundreds of plays.

Their works included melodramas, comedies, tragedies and lavish spec-tacles, sometimes all in the same play. They turned out plays like bakers turn out bread, and their craft became known as baking plays because it was similar to the process of shaping the dough, cooking it and repeating the same process again and again. The plays followed a few similar story lines and were baked hastily, sometimes missing an act, but always fresh out of the oven for opening night ... even if they didn’t always totally make sense. Plots, storylines and even lines of dialogue were often lifted from one play and dropped into another to finish a scene or make a smoother transition.

One of the most successful plays of the time,
The Jewish Heart,
in 1908, mixed comedy and drama into a relatable storyline to capture the hearts of the audience, making them cry and making them laugh.
The
Jewish Heart
was not only a major hit, but it set the stage, literally, for another type of Yid dish play, the domestic drama. More practical and

“realistic” than the musi cal comedies, and easier to relate to then the classics, these plays touched upon Jewish culture. They were about working people, butchers, factory work ers, firefighters and seamstresses. They were about typical Jewish families and the desire of the younger generation to better assimilate into the American mainstream. They were about coming from the old country and missing relatives and customs they had left behind. They were about wed dings and celebrations, as well as sad-ness and tragedy. They played on the emotions of an audience that related to the storylines and identified with the characters.

As the new wave of immigrants that came to America from 1905

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Jews on Broadway

through 1908 became more sophisticated and grew to seek more than just the “light” musical genre, Gordin’s writings and Adler’s performances would once again be in vogue as well as the domestic “slice of life” plays.

Pretty soon, all three types of plays would encapsulate Yiddish theater.

As for Goldfadn, the man who started it all, his reputation preceded him when he came to New York City in 1887. He was a folk hero. His songs were sung in Russian and Hungarian as well as in Yiddish. Despite great adoration by the masses, he remained poor, unable to build and sustain a successful company in London, Paris or New York City. By the time of his arrival in America, Yiddish theater, beginning with his play
The Witch
, had legs of its own and stars leading their own companies.

Goldfadn was unable to make a dent in the already established American medium that he had created in Europe over a decade earlier. His penchant for control and his steadfast ways were unwelcome among the new breed of performers, and before long he was on his way back to Europe, not to return until 1902, some two decades after the birth of Yiddish theater in America.

Not unlike a silent film star returning to the business in the era of

“talk ies,” Goldfadn was out of step with the changes in the genre. His efforts to get a company off the ground or a show produced were futile.

Finally, in 1907 he was able to convince Thomashefsky to produce his play
Ben-Ami.
The play was a success. Goldfadn died shortly after opening night. His funeral drew some 30,000 people to pay their respects to the father of Yiddish theater. Following his death, the play lasted for several months playing to sold out audiences. Years later, The Goldies would be established as awards given out by the Hebrew Actor’s Union in his honor to celebrate excellence in the theater.

Yiddish theater would continue to draw an audience, with several variations, including patriotic shows during World War I. In the 1920s an artistic form prevailed and there was, in essence, a second wave of popularity, which lasted into the late 1930s. As the second generation of immigrants became Americanized and the influx of new immigrants slowed considerably, Yiddish as a spoken language began to disappear.

The children of the early immigrants spoke English, and they were gravitating to vaudeville and to the stages of Broadway. Through the years, special projects, like that of Tilson Thomas, Thomashefsky’s grand son, as well as museums and numerous books, such as that of Nahma San -

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1. Immigration, Yiddish Theater and Building Broadway
drow, have chronicled the golden age of Yiddish theater. They have educated several generations of Jews, providing them with a glimpse of this important and highly influential period in Jewish American culture.

Meanwhile on Broadway

At the turn of the century (the twentieth, that is), the Broadway the ater district was primarily centered between Union Square (14th Street) and 24th Street, just north of what came to be known as the Yiddish Broadway. It would be during the early 1900s that the Broadway theater district began mov ing north to Herald Square and continued on to 42nd Street, and above. George M. Cohan’s classic lyric echoed the movement of “Broadway” as he wrote: “Give my regards to Broadway, remember me to Herald Square, tell all the gang at 42nd Street that I will soon be there.” The subway and better streetlights made it easier and safer to get around at night, allowing for expansion of the theater district. The Times Building on Longacre Square opened in 1902, and the name was officially changed to Times Square. Theaters, including the Victoria, Republic, Lyric and the New Amsterdam, were among the new venues built on 42nd Street between 1899 and 1905.

It was during these early years of the 20th century that several key Jewish entrepreneurs drove the expansion of the Broadway theater district. They included Charles Frohman, Oscar Hammerstein and the Shuberts, all of whom are Broadway legends thanks to their “off-stage”

contributions to what would become known as the Great White Way.

Charles Frohman, who moved with his family from his birthplace in Ohio to New York City in 1864, went from a career in the newspaper industry to a booking agent, producer and theater owner. His production of
Shenandoah
in the late 19th century was his breakthrough success. He followed that show with Clyde Fitch’s
Masked Ball,
and his producing career was off and running. By the time he died aboard the Lusi tania, which was torpedoed and sank in 1915, he had produced over 700 shows.