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(New York Jewish Week) — There’s a reliably humorous Twitter account known as @JewWhoHasItAll, which imagines a universe the place practically everyone seems to be Jewish and those that aren’t are the outliers.
That’s the feeling I obtained on a go to to the Museum of Broadway, which opened final month. A 3-story tribute to the Theater District situated in its very coronary heart, it’s organized round a collection of rooms devoted to landmark musicals and performs, and the bulk bear the stamp of Jewish creators: Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein’s “Showboat,” Richard Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Oklahoma!”, Leonard Bernstein’s “West Aspect Story,” Stephen Sondheim’s “Firm,” Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America.”
Different tasks devoted to the historical past of Broadway aren’t shy about noting the over-representation of Jews within the enterprise. “Broadway Musicals: A Jewish Legacy,” a documentary that appears to run on an almost infinite loop on my native PBS station, notes that “over the [first] 50-year interval of its growth, the songs of the Broadway musical have been created nearly completely by Jewish Individuals.”
If the Museum of Broadway acknowledges this, I didn’t discover. Some would possibly take this as an omission or a snub, the way in which critics objected when a brand new museum in regards to the historical past of Hollywood initially neglected the important Jewish contribution to the film enterprise. However on this case, the Jewishness of Broadway is taken as a given. You’d need to be culturally illiterate to not discover how lots of the most celebrated creators are Jewish: Along with the musical tributes, there are wall placards singling out the contributions of Sondheim and the director Harold Prince, a nook dedicated to “Fiddler on the Roof” and a gallery celebrating Joe Papp (born Joseph Papirofsky) and his Public Theater, that dependable pipeline of breakthrough Broadway reveals.
(There have been, nonetheless, frequent mentions of the particularly African-American contributions to Broadway. That appeared a deliberate try and counter perceptions that Broadway is certainly the “Nice White Manner.”)
The museum, whose opening was delayed by the pandemic, is a collaboration with Playbill, Broadway Cares/Fairness Fights AIDS (which is supported by a portion of the stiff $39 admission cost), the Al Hirschfeld Basis, Harmony Theatricals and Goodspeed Musicals. Its method is chronological, with a timeline that pulls guests from room to room, from vaudeville, via Broadway’s “Golden Age” and as much as the current. Unique costumes and props are on show in Instagram-ready settings that resemble the unique units for numerous reveals.
Among the many paraphernalia and stagecraft are quite a lot of Jewish highlights. Listed below are seven:
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A whirligig of Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals
A pattern of Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals, on show on the Museum of Broadway. (NYJW)
Simply previous the cornstalks celebrating the ground-breaking 1943 musical “Oklahoma!” is a wall show showcasing the duo’s most essential collaborations, together with “Carousel,” “South Pacific,” “The King and I,” “Flower Drum Track” and “The Sound of Music.” Rodgers, working with Hammerstein and earlier than him Lorenz Hart, wrote greater than 900 songs and 41 Broadway musicals. Mix that with Hammerstein’s work with Kern, and it’s onerous to think about two extra essential figures within the historical past of musical comedy.
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Jerome Robbins’ notes on “West Aspect Story”
Choreographer Jerome Robbins recommended a “seder” scene in an early conception of what turned “West Aspect Story.” (NYJW)
Look intently at this record of proposed scenes for a musical primarily based on “Romeo and Juliet” and also you’ll see the phrase “seder.” Robbins, the choreographer, initially proposed that the present concentrate on a star-crossed love story between a Jewish lady and an Irish boy, however he and his fellow Jewish collaborators — composer Leonard Bernstein, lyricist Stephen Sondheim and playwright Arthur Laurents — quickly felt the interfaith concept had already been exhausted in performs like “Abie’s Irish Rose.” When the present premiered in 1957, the gangs have been Puerto Rican and a medley of ethnic whites.
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Florence Klotz’s costume “bible”
Florence Klotz received six Tony Awards for her costume designs. (NYJW)
Costume designer Florence Klotz steadily collaborated with Prince and Sondheim. The museum shows her sketches for Sondheim’s “Follies” and “A Little Night time Music.” Born in Brooklyn, Klotz would win six Tony awards. She died in 2006. The museum additionally contains a complete ground devoted to the “backstage” expertise: costume and set designers, stage managers, prop masters and writers.
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A shrine to “Firm”
A show on the Museum of Broadway celebrates a current revival of “Firm.” (NYJW)
Sondheim and Prince emerge because the museum’s lodestars. “Their intense and fruitful partnership and their inventive trailblazing in [the 1970s] resulted in a unprecedented inventive innovation and a slew of provocative new works,” a wall card proclaims. “Firm” (1970) was a largely plotless exploration of city anomie. The museum calls it a “frank, even painful take a look at fashionable life,” completely attuned to the upper-middle class theatergoers who, it says, are the “spine” of the Broadway viewers. It’s the present folks love or hate in the event that they love or hate Sondheim. The “Firm” exhibit contains photographs of the unique solid and spare set, and a backdrop that attracts on the current gender-bending revival.
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A tribute to Joseph Papp
Costumes from productions that originated at Joseph Papp’s Public Theater on show on the Museum of Broadway. (NYJW)
Joe Papp flipped the script on how reveals made it to Broadway: His Public Theater produced edgy off-Broadway performs that drew audiences downtown, after which efficiently transferred that very same buzz to the “Large Stem.” Papp, a son of Yiddish-speaking mother and father who grew up in a Brooklyn slum, based the New York Shakespeare Pageant. A piece of the museum contains costumes and posters from essential productions that originated at The Public — together with wildly standard revivals of “The Pirates of Penzance” and “The Threepenny Opera” — and a costume Meryl Streep wore in her Broadway debut, in “Trelawny of the ‘Wells.’” Two different musicals developed at The Public — “Hair” and “A Refrain Line” — get their very own tribute rooms.
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Al Hirschfeld’s barber chair
A room on the Museum of Broadway contains works by the famed caricaturist Al Hirschfeld. (NYJW)
The museum has a complete gallery devoted to the work of artist Al Hirschfeld and his caricatures of Broadway stars and productions from 1923-2001. His pen-and-ink drawings have been a visible shorthand for “Broadway,” and it will typically appear that the celebs he drew would come to resemble his drawings, not the opposite manner round. The museum contains his splendidly kooky Barbra Streisand in “Humorous Woman” and a bearish, brooding Zero Mostel as Tevye. On show is a barber chair just like the one he utilized in his studio (the unique had fallen aside by the Nineties).
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A stage set from “The Producers”
An exhibit house on the Museum of Broadway evokes the surroundings from the Mel Brooks musical “The Producers.” (NYJW)
You may sit behind a desk and faux you might be Broadway producer Max Bialystock, who was performed by Nathan Lane within the phenomenally profitable 2001 musical adaptation of Mel Brooks’ 1967 movie in regards to the worst musical ever staged for Broadway. The show is a reminder of the influence of the present, and not solely on ticket costs: It proved the viability of adapting films for Broadway, and earned a record-setting 12 Tony Awards. The museum calls the musical, with its tap-dancing Nazis and candy and conniving Jewish protagonists, a “glittering homage to Broadway’s previous” — a previous that’s unmistakably Jewish.
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