Broadway Musicals: A Jewish Legacy imagine...

This is New York, and this is Broadway,

home of the songs that have entertained and inspired us

for generations.

# Life can be bright in America

# If you can fight in America

# Life is all right in America

# If you're a white in America... #

Now, here's my question.

What do the following have in common?

Irving Berlin, George and Ira Gershwin, Richard Rodgers,

Laurence Hart, Oscar Hammerstein,

Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim.

The list goes on and on.

Yes, they're musical titans, every one.

AND they also happen to be Jewish.

# If I were a rich man... #

Tonight, Imagine explores the remarkable role

that Jewish immigrants have played

in creating the modern American musical.

# Tomorrow, tomorrow

# I love ya, tomorrow

# You're only a day away #

Behind me you see a phalanx,

an avalanche of Jews who have come with their talent, their money...

I was a protege of the great Boris Thomashefsky.

It's a fascinating tale.

There's wit, wisdom and, of course, unforgettable music.

# Don't tell me not to fly I've simply got to

# If someone takes a spill it's me and not you

# Who told you you're allowed to rain on my parade? #

But before we begin,

it's worth remembering an important piece of advice.

In any great adventure, you don't want to lose.

You won't succeed on Broadway if you don't have any Jews.

# There's no business

# Like show business

# Like no business I know... #

Once upon a time, King Arthur wanted to take his knights on a quest

to do a musical on Broadway, but this was a very, very bad idea.

And I'm going to tell you why.

# In any great adventure if you don't want to lose

# Victory depends upon the people that you choose

# So listen, Arthur darling Closely to this news

# You won't succeed on Broadway if you don't have any Jews

# You may have the finest sets Fill the stage with penthouse pets

# You may have the loveliest costumes and best shoes

# You may dance and you may sing but I'm sorry, Arthur, king

# You'll hear no cheers Just lots and lots of boos

# You may have butch men by the score, whom the audience adore

# You may even have some animals from zoos

# Though you've holes and Krauts instead

# You may have unleavened bread

# But I tell you, you are dead if you don't have any Jews... #

It's not funny unless it's true.

And people only laugh because... It's true.

Rodgers and Hammerstein!

You can name off all the Broadway composers.

Jerry Herman. Irving Berlin.

Everybody on Broadway except Cole Porter.

Sheldon Harnick and Jerry Bock.

George Gershwin, Steve Sondheim.

I'm trying to think if there was anybody not Jewish.

# Ho-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-oy! #

My husband Adolph Green and his wonderful partner

Betty Comden, and, of course, Lenny Bernstein.

Why were they, so many of them, Jewish?

# There simply must be

# Arthur, trust me Simply must be Jews! #

Is it that they were misfits

and then they all found themselves in musical theatre

because it was a place where, with their unusual brains,

they could all collaborate and co-exist in an environment

that allowed for that flexibility?

Maybe that was it.

Maybe one day we'll say, "Oh, they all had ADD

"and that's why they all ended up in musical theatre.

"It wasn't about the Jewishness at all."

For generations of Jewish songwriters,

Broadway has been a catalyst for transformation.

On Broadway, the idea of outsiders beating the odds

could be dramatised in a uniquely American art form.

Here, melodies derived from Jewish prayers inspired new songs

that millions would embrace.

Musical theatre offered Jewish songwriters

a chance to make it in America

and, in return, they fashioned an America of their own,

through songs and shows that have endeared themselves

to countless people the world over.

Porgy And Bess and Show Boat

and Oklahoma! -

these are ideas that are fictions.

What do we make America into?

How do we take what we know and make it into America?

The Broadway musical is a sort of tipping point experience

where a handful of composers and lyricists

created a way for all of us

to experience the ideas

that have become part of what we call the American Dream.

Before the Broadway musicals set up home near Times Square

in the early 20th century, there was

a lively theatre that thrived downtown, on the Lower East Side,

where Yiddishkeit, meaning "all things Jewish", took centre stage.

There, Russian immigrants like Boris Thomashefsky

and his wife Bessie pioneered a novel form of musical theatre

which spoke to the multitude of newcomers fresh off the boat -

the Yiddish theatre.

There is a huge connection between Broadway

and the American Yiddish theatre.

People don't get that any more,

about how powerful Yiddishkeit was

in the foundation of Broadway,

and that the direction of Yiddishkeit was twofold.

It was to amuse,

but it was also to instruct,

and that the theatre could be used, ultimately, as a medium for

showing people on stage

how certain situations in life might play out,

and hopefully offering them the opportunity

to learn from the examples that they saw on stage.

I was a protege of the great Boris Thomashefsky!

CROWD GASPS

Yes, yes!

He taught me everything I know. MOURNFUL VIOLIN

I'll never forget, he turned to me on his deathbed and said,

"Maxella, alle Menschen mussen machen!

"Heden togegatzen katschen pischen pippikochen!"

What does that mean?

Who knows? I don't speak Yiddish.

Strangely enough, neither did he.

Very often, in listening to an early Broadway song, you can think

that you're hearing a Jewish song.

So there's not all that much difference

between a song like Greena Cousina...

..and the opening of Swanee.

# I've been away from you a long time

# I never thought I'd miss you so

# And how I feel, your love is real

# Near you, I wanna be... #

In 1919, the composer George Gershwin and lyricist Irwin Caesar

wrote Swanee, the most popular song of Gershwin's entire career.

# ..Swanee, you're calling me

# Swanee, how I love ya How I love ya

# My dear old Swanee... #

The song relied on a theatrical convention

dating back to the 19th century,

in which a black-faced minstrel yearned for a mythic South land.

# ..Praying for me, praying for me Down by the Swanee... #

When he hit the big time with Swanee,

Gershwin was only 20 years old,

but had already been working in the music industry for five years.

A high school dropout, he first tried to write songs for the

Yiddish theatre, but was turned down for being "too American".

The Gershwin family, like so many immigrant families,

figured, "Give your kid music lessons because that's one more

"step up the rung of ladder of assimilation and success."

Give your kids every possible chance.

So they buy a piano for George's brother Ira,

and it's up on a crane, put through their window of their apartment,

and suddenly George goes over and starts playing.

Well, he's been practising on a player piano.

PIANO TAKES UP TUNE OF "SWANEE"

So he gets music lessons and goes on to become a piano player

on Tin Pan Alley, then a Broadway composer.

Ira turns from writing clever light verse to becoming a lyricist.

And Ira's way of keeping up with

this very revolutionary musical brother of his

is to build lyrics around American slang.

Ira loved to use colloquial expressions in his writing.

The best example of that that I know

is that one weekend, probably in about 1936,

Ira and his wife Leonore came to spend the weekend with my parents.

My father manufactured tomato products

and during the course of that weekend,

Ira said to my father, "Tell me, how come you call them tom-ay-toes

"and your sister calls them tom-ah-toes?"

And my father said to Ira, "Well, if I call them tom-ah-toes,

"the farmers that I buy them from

"would not know what I was talking about."

And everybody forgot about it.

# You like pot-ay-to and I like...

# Pot-ah-to?

# You like tom-ay-to and I like...

# Tom-ah-to!

# Pot-ay-to # Pot-ah-to

# Tom-ay-to # Tom-ah-to

# Let's call the whole thing off!

# But oh If we call the whole thing off

# Then we must part

# And oh, if we ever part then that might break my heart

# So if you like pyjamas and I like py-jay-mas

# I'll wear pyjamas and give up py-jay-mas

# For we know we need each other so

# We better call the calling-off off... #

The very same year that George and Ira began

writing shows together for Broadway,

George was commissioned to write a brand-new piece

for an evening of experimental music.

His modest offering was Rhapsody In Blue.

MUSIC: "Rhapsody In Blue"

How does Gershwin start the Rhapsody In Blue?

But with a klezmer clarinet!

You can hear him - dulyan, dulyan da!

We could be talking about Romania here.

You know? I mean, it's pure Yiddishkeit, you know?

But he cloaks it within, you know, classical forms

that are contemporary, modern classical music,

influenced with jazz.

So his music really is a melting pot.

It becomes reflection of the American experience.

George Gershwin was always experimenting,

trying to bring jazz and blues and ragtime,

basically black music, into mainstream Broadway musicals.

There's a big affinity between the Jewish wail that you hear

in the temple and the black spiritual, or the blues.

I think a lot of it has to do with the minor key.

I think it also has something to do with bent notes and altered chords.

HE PLAYS A SCALE

The blues scale has a kind of built-in minor-ness to it.

That blue note is...

Well, I guess it's a blue note, though it existed before the blues,

is that, you know, the...

Doesn't that kind of sound Jewish to you? Yeah.

It's the kind of little flat thing.

As opposed to, if I'm in the key of C, you know...

MORE UPBEAT CHORDS

..sounds sort of Episcopalian.

I mean, the Jewish thing, it's...

It's all minor.

Because, you know, Jews and their misery.

The blacks amazingly always still had a little faith and hope.

So they're at odds.

Not the Jews.

Ira collaborated with George on one of the songs for Porgy And Bess.

It is a song that debunks the Bible.

# It ain't necessarily so... #

It Ain't Necessarily So.

# The things you're liable to read in the Bible

# It ain't necessarily so. #

# The things that you're liable to read in the Bible

# It ain't necessarily so... #

That line is actually lifted from the Liturgy

because when you're called up to the Torah in the temple on Saturday,

you have to make a blessing

and you say...

HE SPEAKS YIDDISH

..which is the same thing as...

# It ain't necessarily so. #

So to borrow a prayer over the Bible

for a song that debunks the Bible

seems to me to be the very definition of chutzpah, cheekiness.

# Wadoo Wadoo

# Zim bam boddle-oo

# Hoodle a da wa da... #

They were very clever,

as lines like about Jonah,

"He made his home in that fish's ab-do-men."

# Oh, Jonah, he lived in the whale

# Oh, Jonah, he lived in the whale

# For he made his home in that fish's abdomen... #

Tunes written by Jews for non-Jewish audiences.

The greatest ones have all been re-versioned by the greatest

African American jazz artists.

Some of the most important examples of jazz improvisation

come from Gershwin tunes.

That back and forth, that may not always be a cordial one,

it might be a contentious one,

but I just love that there's a dialogue going on.

I like that there's a battle.

I like that there's a sense of, "Oh, you wrote this?

"I'm going to rewrite it."

"You were inspired by this thing I did?

"Now I'm going to take your inspiration

"and I'm going to redo it and take it one step higher."

That sense of a kind of friendly competition

runs throughout American pop music.

All of these songs that were created,

first on Broadway and later in Hollywood,

have really become a part of our collective culture.

And it's amazing that this great body of American song

was produced by a handful of people,

most of them Jewish,

starting with people like Jerome Kern,

Irving Berlin and Harold Arlen,

George and Ira Gershwin,

Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart,

all Jewish songwriters.

I think Broadway was like a little Jewish club

and it's still a little Jewish club.

It's a wonderful club to be in.

My father couldn't wait to go to work.

He didn't want to do anything else but work.

Daddy met Larry Hart through friends

and in a very short time, they understood the same things

that they wanted out of the musical theatre, and nobody had done it yet,

and they got along wonderfully.

Gentlemen, you're about to be interviewed.

Wait till I fix my tie.

Don't you like being interviewed?

I don't mind, as long as you don't ask us which we write first,

the words or the music. I'm not going to ask you that.

Richard Rogers and Laurence Hart both lived in uptown Manhattan.

They came from successful families and studied at Columbia University

but they struggled to get their songs to Broadway,

as they re-enacted a few years later for the movie cameras.

It's all your fault.

My fault? All you did was talk about your lyrics.

Why didn't you let me play the music for 'em?

I'm sick of this racket.

Now you'll have to go into the real estate business with your father.

Come on.

Just as Rodgers was about to give up on music

and go into the babies' underwear business, the team struck gold

with a song that turned their home town into an isle of joy.

Manhattan.

Manhattan!

We'll have Manhattan, the Bronx and Staten...

# Island, too # It's lovely going through the zoo

# It's very fancy on old Delancey Street, they say. #

The song Manhattan starts with these Lower East Side streets.

It starts with Delancey Street and Mott Street

but it expands exponentially.

It goes to Central Park. It goes to Coney Island.

It goes to the Theater District.

Their dreams were taking over all of Manhattan

and of course that's exactly what they did in their song.

While Rodgers and Hart rhapsodised about the Lower East Side in song,

this predominantly Jewish neighbourhood was, in reality,

one of the most congested places on Earth -

horribly crowded, noisy and filthy.

But this rough and tumble world

would produce America's greatest songwriter.

In 1893, Irving Berlin,

then five years old, gets off the boat at Ellis Island in New York.

His earliest memory as a child growing up in Russia

was of a pogrom,

a vigilante attack on his Jewish village.

And he remembers hiding in a ditch with his brothers and sisters

and parents, watching Russian Cossacks burn down their village.

Then he comes to America, gets off the boat, looks around him,

sees all these Americans

and he says, "We stood there in our Jew clothes."

He realised how different he was from everybody else.

His father was a cantor

who taught him how to sing prayers in synagogue.

But Berlin took his cue from New York's unique musical melting pot.

The ethnic songs were

very popular at that point.

So there was Sadie Salome...

..there was the Yiddisha Nightingale, a beautiful song...

..and so forth.

They were humorous love songs.

JOLLY MUSIC PLAYS

Berlin was soon writing songs for major Broadway reviews

like the Ziegfeld Follies

and for shows that unleashed

the anarchic talents of the Marx Brothers.

Allez-vous. Are you boys giving me the run-around?

No way. Come over here.

# And I'll be there with you

# When my dreams

# Come true... #

PLAYS: "When My Dreams Come True"

INSTRUMENT SQUEAKS

Berlin wanted to write popular songs for a multi-ethnic America.

And as time went on, the business of pop songwriting,

Berlin became the kind of poster boy for the immigrant Jewish

sensibility transformed into the mainstream American.

For so many, becoming American meant changing your name.

Israel Baline became Irving Berlin.

Jacob Gershowitz - George Gershwin.

Isidore Hochberg morphed into Yip Harburg,

who wrote lyrics for The Wizard Of Oz

with composer Hyman Arluck,

better known as Harold Arlen.

To be considered American you've got to sound a certain way,

you've got to look a certain way. And if your last name has too many

syllables and makes people think of herring, you might not get the job.

# Oh, someone's 'ead resting on my knee

# Warm and gentle as tender as 'e can be

# Who takes good care of me

# Oh, wouldn't it be luvverly?

# Luvverly

# Luvverly... #

Bizarrely, Jewish songwriters almost never told Jewish stories.

Instead, their main characters might be a downtrodden flower girl

with a Cockney accent,

As in Alan J Lerner and Frederick Loewe's My Fair Lady.

Or perhaps a mixed-race singer passing as white

in Oscar Hammerstein and Jerome Kern's Show Boat.

# Fish gotta swim

# Birds gotta fly

# I gotta love one man till I die

# Can't help lovin' that man of mine... #

One of the ways that Jewish songwriters on Broadway wrote

about the experience of being Jewish is by writing about other outsiders.

I'm not going to tell you the story of Jews in America, but I am

going to tell you the story of an African-American on a riverboat.

I'm going to use somebody else's story to tell you mine.

The more the Jews are not writing about Jews, I think you could

argue is when they're actually writing the most about Jews.

Show Boat's lyricist, Oscar Hammerstein II,

was born into a Broadway dynasty.

He was raised a Protestant

but his grandfather and namesake was a German-born

Jewish impresario,

whose theatres helped define Times Square at the turn of the century.

As a teenager, Oscar went to summer camp,

not simply to play sports but to learn to put on shows.

For many of Broadway's songwriters,

summer camps offered unexpected and invaluable experience.

At Camp Paradox, Lorenz Hart was known as Shakespeare

because his trunk was crammed with books instead of clothes.

And at that same camp, Richard Rodgers spent his spare time

writing songs when he wasn't teaching kids how to swim.

My parents owned a summer children's camp

and I eventually became the drama counsellor and put on shows there.

I was learning about those simple songs that became

The Best Of Times, that became Mame

and Hello, Dolly! without knowing it.

The camp that I went to let me put on the shows.

I was 13 or 14 years old,

but I thought that was the best present anybody ever gave me.

It probably changed my life.

I was told when I went to Camp Wigwam

that Steve Sondheim had gone there

but he said, "I never went to Wigwam,

"I went to Camp Androscoggin."

Summer camps weren't just training grounds for songwriters.

Occasionally, they fostered lifelong partnerships.

My father was music directing at this camp.

It was really his lucky day

when this weird, schlubby guy,

Adolph Green, arrived to play the Pirate King in Pirates Of Penzance.

And Lenny had heard about Adolph through Adolph's friends,

how Adolph knew everything there was to know about classical music.

On their first meeting, when my father found out that Adolph

purportedly knew everything, he said, "Oh, yeah, come over here."

And they sat down at the piano and my father said, "What's this?"

And he played something and Adolph would say, "Ravel, Piano Concerto

"No. 2." "Oh." Two seconds, OK?

Played another thing. "Tchaikovsky's...No. 4."

Two seconds - he knew it.

And my father couldn't stump him

until finally he played this one thing.

"What's this?" And Adolph didn't know what it was.

And Lenny jumped up, grabbed him and kissed him.

He said, "I just made it up on the spot to try to really screw you."

They were best friends for evermore

and the thing about Adolph is that he had this kind of impish spirit.

He had this liveliness and this antic quality.

And then, when Betty Comden became Adolph's working partner,

and she was so lively and quick on the trigger and funny and sassy...

..the three of them had so much fun together.

They really spoke to this zany part of my father.

This monstrous little duet is entitled

Carried Away.

# Modern man, what is it?

# Just a collection of complexes and neurotic impulses

# That occasionally break through... #

You mean sometimes you blow your top, like me?

# I do. #

If they hadn't come along, maybe my father wouldn't have written

musical theatre, or certainly not the kind of musical theatre that he

wrote with Betty and Adolph that was so delightfully fun and goofy.

I mean, after all, he was supposed to be a very serious maestro.

THEY SING IN THE ROUND: # I get carried away

# He gets carried Yes, carried away. #

In the early 20th century,

New York City attracted a sizeable Jewish population.

By the 1920s, nearly one in four residents was Jewish.

Even so, the predominance of Jewish songwriters on Broadway

was then, and remains today, a phenomenon.

They're almost all Jewish, but the great exception that makes

you wonder whether it's a rule at all is Cole Porter.

What the hell is he doing in there?

Porter, though he tried very hard to write

a successful Broadway show, hadn't succeeded.

Three shows flopped.

And, er...

he met Richard Rodgers in Venice and played him some of his songs.

Rodgers knew that this was an immensely talented man.

Porter confided at one point that he thought that he had finally

figured out the secret of writing hits.

"Oh," Rodgers said, "what's that?"

And Porter said, "I'm going to write Jewish tunes."

I asked him if that story were true and he said, "Yes."

And then I thought about it, and I thought well, "Gee, Cole Porter."

Well, what could be more Jewish sounding than...

# You'd be so nice to come home to... # ?

Especially since my father used to sing a song that went...

IN YIDDISH

I remember that, he used to sing it to me when I was a little boy.

So yeah, that...that...I wouldn't be a bit surprised

if that notion occurred to him.

There's something sort of Semitic about that as well.

# Strange, dear, but true, dear

# When I'm close to you, dear

# The stars fill the sky

# So in love... #

Yip Harburg, my father, said even Cole Porter was Jewish

because back in the Inquisition times

he was really Jewish and they forced

him to become a Christian, see.

So, since then...

And then Yip would sing some of Cole Porter's songs

in a Hebraic Middle Eastern chant, you know?

If you listen to My Heart Belongs To Daddy, the part in it...

# Da da-da da da-da da da-da. #

..that sounds a little like davening...

# Da da-da da da-da da da-da... #

..like praying in temple.

# ..So I want to warn you, laddie

# Though I think you're perfectly swell

# That my heart belongs to Daddy

# And my daddy, he treats it so well... #

In the mid-1930s,

Cole Porter's shows served as a great escape for theatregoers

in the midst of the Great Depression.

# ..My heart belongs to Daddy. #

Across the Atlantic in Nazi Germany, however,

very few Jewish families were fortunate enough to escape

the Third Reich's murderous anti-Semitism.

ANTHEMIC MUSIC PLAYS

MARCHING FEET AND CHANTING

SHIP'S HORN SOUNDS

CHANTING IN BACKGROUND SUBSIDES

WISTFUL BRASS-RICH MUSIC PLAYS

I decided to become a citizen

the day on which I arrived here, six years ago.

I remember very well the feeling I had as the ship moved

down the harbour past the Statue of Liberty and the skyscrapers.

All about us were exclaiming in amazement at the strange sights,

but my wife and I had the sensation that we were coming home.

Kurt Weill was Germany's leading theatrical composer.

He was also Jewish -

the son of a cantor.

Weill's work, which included the popular Threepenny Opera,

was denounced by the Third Reich for being degenerate.

January 30th, the reason I remember it is my birthday.

January 30 1933,

not my...my birth date, no,

but my "birth" day, was when Hitler became Chancellor of Germany.

Kurt Weill left that day and a LOT of people left that day.

It was a huge exodus. Goodbye. They knew.

Weill and his wife and muse Lotte Lenya

would eventually make their way to the United States

where the Threepenny Opera had already made its Broadway debut.

Kurt Weill had already brought

his own radical musical revolution

to America before he got there.

Come join the army or...

His...his love of the ambivalence of major

and minor in so many of his songs. Pirate Jenny...

There are Jewish melodic elements in his music.

But he comes to America and you can see

the evolution of musical style as he writes September Song.

# But it's a long, long while

# From May to December

# And the days grow short

# When you reach September... #

September Song from the show Knickerbocker Holiday

became Weill's first popular standard in America.

He was immediately recognised as a great composer.

One of the great landmark shows was Lady In The Dark.

Moss Hart took his own psychoanalysis

and used it as a motivation for writing that show.

No-one had seen anything like it.

Lady In The Dark paired Weill with Ira Gershwin,

who was working on his first Broadway show

since the death of his brother George at just 38.

It made an overnight star of Danny Kaye, who recited

Gershwin's witty list of Russian composers at breakneck speed.

# Stravinsky, Rimsky-Korsakoff Mussorgsky

# And Gretchaninoff and Glazounoff

# And Caesar Cui, Kalinikoff Rachmaninoff

# Stravinsky and Gretchnaninoff Rumshinsky and Rachmaninoff

# I really have to stop, the subject has been dwelt upon enough!

# Stravinsky Rachmaninoff

# We really aught to stop because we all have undergone enough! #

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

WEILL: What the immigrants of today are bringing to this country

is not more and not less than what the immigrants of earlier

persecutions have brought here.

All they could ever bring was the work of their hands

and the work of their heads.

That's what they offer to this country

and what the people of this country are so ready to accept.

Kurt Weill was incredibly...

I'd almost say obsessed with

the idea of assimilation, obsessed

with the idea of being different.

He tried to make it in Hollywood and they said his stuff was too Jewish.

Studios execs said, "Your stuff is too Jewish".

And he was perplexed by that.

He said, "Irving Berlin is a Russian Jew.

"I'm a German Jew. That's the only difference.

"We're both Americans."

Though both Kurt Weill and Irving Berlin

were Jewish American immigrants,

Berlin's uncanny ability

to write songs that felt American was unparalleled.

Berlin humbly claimed that he just had a little knack for songwriting.

But time and time again,

he would create defining anthems for his adopted country.

This is the guy who will so assimilate to America,

he will write the most popular Christmas song, White Christmas.

And even though he's Jewish, writes the most popular Easter song,

Easter Parade.

It's the Horatio Alger story told in Yiddish.

He grows up and becomes the most American of all of us.

# God bless America

# Land that I love

# Stand beside her

# And guide her

# Through the night

# With a light from above... #

That song came from the heart and it was his thank-you to this country

that had taken him in and given him

the chance to become who he became.

Who would think that in the most American major-sounding work

that Berlin wrote there would be in it what

I hear very clearly as this, well, the Jewish word would be...

IN YIDDISH

But it would be a real cantorial

# La da-da da-da-da du-dudum... #

SINGS IN YIDDISH IN RISING PITCH

Well, let's take that...

..and I'll just put a fundamental bass tone under it.

# God bless America

# My home

# Sweet

# Home! #

APPLAUSE

But there were people who protested God Bless America.

There were ministers who got up in church and said,

"What does a Jew have to do with asking God to bless America?"

There was real anti-Semitism.

You know, you didn't feel that in the world of the theatre

because that was a world in which no...nobody knew who everybody was

or where they came from, just what they did.

So popular was God Bless America,

it almost replaced the national anthem.

With the onset of World War II, Jewish songwriters joined the effort

to lift the spirits of servicemen

and the country at large.

Berlin mounted a new show called This Is The Army,

with receipts donated to an army relief fund.

The lyricist Dorothy Fields,

who wrote On The Sunny Side Of The Street,

cheered up servicemen at the stage door canteen.

And Private Frank Loesser, later famed for Guys And Dolls,

wrote the wartime hit Praise The Lord And Pass The Ammunition.

Servicemen on leave were given free tickets to see Oscar Hammerstein's

latest show, created with his new partner, Richard Rodgers.

# There's a bright golden haze on the meadow

# The corn is as high as an elephant's eye

# And it looks like it's climbing clear up to the sky

# Oh, what a beautiful morning

# Oh, what a beautiful day

# I've got a beautiful feeling

# Everything's going my way... #

Rodgers and Hammerstein brought

a new, dramatic depth to the Broadway musical,

often raising sensitive moral and racial issues

for both their characters and audiences to confront.

Hammerstein wrote the book and lyrics,

bringing a signature compassion to his body of work,

which informed his personal life as well.

I think Oscar was a liberal - Jewish in that respect -

and cared a great deal about the world.

You can tell by all the lyrics that he wrote.

Like Show Boat,

which was the landmark un-prejudiced musical,

that he felt keenly about those things.

He was one of the people who started the Pearl Buck Foundation.

Those children were the product of Asian women

and usually American GIs.

# Bali Ha'i may call you

# Any night, any day

# In your heart you'll hear it call you

# Come away, come away

# Bali Ha'i... #

In their Pulitzer-prize-winning show, South Pacific,

Rodgers and Hammerstein dramatised the experience of servicemen

and women overseas

and delivered an urgent musical plea for racial tolerance.

# It's not born in you It happens after you're born

# You've got to be taught to hate and fear

# You've got to be taught

# From year to year

# It's got to be drummed in your dear little ear

# You've got to be carefully taught... #

You've Got To Be Carefully Taught was something that they felt

strongly about.

Now, they didn't try to do stories just because they could

get their political leanings in front of the public.

But it comes up all the time because it's there all the time.

It mattered to them.

BOTH: # There's a place for us

# A time and place for us... #

SINGS IN SPANISH

# Hold my hand and I'll take you there... #

As the Broadway musical matured in the wake of World War II,

issues like bigotry and racism were no longer entirely off limits.

The director Jerome Robbins

began working on a show called East Side Story

that featured a conflict between Jews and Gentiles.

Jerry Robbins came to Lenny Bernstein and me

to do a contemporary version of Romeo And Juliet.

One or the other was to be Catholic

and Jewish, I forget which.

And what finally happened was

I realised it was Abie's Irish Rose set to music.

That was an enormous hit in the Dark Ages, with a Catholic girl

and a Jewish boy.

And so we dropped it.

Years later, East Side Story was transformed

when the creative team found a way to project the fears and tensions

of assimilation on to a new group of immigrants.

With a score by Leonard Bernstein,

and lyrics by a 27-year-old Stephen Sondheim,

the show set to music the conflict between

ethnic Whites and Puerto Ricans

finding their way in America.

HIGH`SPIRITED VOICES

# Lots of new housing with more space

# Lots of doors slamming in our face

# I'll get a terraced apartment... #

Better get rid of your accent.

# ..Life can be bright in America

MEN: # If you can fight in America

# Life is all right in America

# If you're all-white in America. #

That's something that has made the show more timely today than

it was then.

When the word "immigrant" is said on the stage today, you can

feel the whole audience freeze because of all this...

I won't characterise it -

stuff going on in Congress about immigrants.

It's a nation of immigrants, which we are very busy trying to deny.

THEY WHOOP

THEY CHEER

My father never gave up on the idea that the world could become

a better place.

But he struggled with it because all these ghastly calamities kept

happening in his lifetime

starting with World War II really

being the big one and then the bomb. And then he went through

McCarthyism, which was so evil. So all the way through his life he was

constantly doing whatever he could to make the world a better place,

racism not the least of these evils that he was trying to repair.

And I really think he felt somehow that

if he wrote a great enough piece of music, he could change the world.

You can really hear that struggle in West Side Story. It's

about intolerance and hatred and the misery that that sows in the world.

# Somehow

# Someday

# Somewhere. #

# Let me entertain you

# Let me see you smile

# Let me do a few tricks

# Some old and then some new tricks

# I'm very versatile

# And if you're real good

# I'm going to make you feel good

# And something to smile... #

Forgive me, Steve.

# ..Let me entertain you

# And we'll have a real good time Yes, sir

# And we'll have

# A real good time. #

Jule Styne was a London emigre

raised in Chicago, who, as a young child,

mastered the classical piano.

But despite his obvious talents,

he was a little insecure around his schoolmates.

I wanted to be liked,

wanted applause badly.

And I went out and bought

20 Irving Berlin songs over the weekend.

And I memorised them.

Alexander's Ragtime Band was one of them

and I played it with all the power I had in my hands,

my Beethoven power on Alexander's Ragtime Band.

And I walked into that gymnasium on Monday afternoon.

I was an instant smash!

After years working as a bandleader, a vocal coach

and a top Hollywood composer,

Styne longed for the creative freedom of Broadway.

His scintillating score for the landmark show Gypsy,

which starred Ethel Merman,

seemed to draw on all of Styne's show biz know-how.

I'd wanted Steve Sondheim to do the whole score.

Merman... Actually, her agent didn't want Steve,

so we needed a composer, and Jerry Robbins suggested Jule.

Jule was very fertile,

but he came from the old school,

you know, he was not used to writing this kind of integrated stuff,

so I would just give him lyrics to set, for the most part.

I would write out the rhythms, and Ethel Merman belted songs.

What can I say?

# That's OK for some people

# Who don't know they're alive

# Some people... #

Every star has a trademark, and you better deliver that trademark,

somewhere, for that audience.

When I gave Steve the tune to...

# Some people ba-da-da-da.... #

..but the release goes... # But I... #

# ..But I... #

At that moment, the audience says, "Oh, there's Merman."

# ..When I think of all the sights that I gotta see yet

# All the places I gotta play... #

Steve understood what that was all about,

and when he heard her do it, he knew what I was talking about.

When we were out of town, it was Easter Passover,

and Jule decided to give a Seder.

Now, Ethel Merman, who had been born Zimmerman,

was always terrified that somebody would think she was Jewish.

She was German, and if you ran into her on the streets

of Philadelphia and say, "What did you do today, Ethel?",

she'd say, "Oh, I was praying for the show...in church!"

Anyway...at rehearsals, she always had a turkey sandwich,

so Jule invites her to the Seder.

She said to me, "What am I going to eat?"

I said, "You're not going to have to eat any little Christian babies.

"You'll have capon, which is chicken, Ethel, chicken."

Well, the night came and she dressed very properly -

a little black dress - she even seemed to have less hair.

Jule escorted her to the seat of honour

and she sat down, she opened her bag and took out a ham sandwich

and put it on the plate.

And Jule looked at her.

This was his star, but it was his Seder.

So he picked up the sandwich and threw it on the floor.

He said, "Ethel, you're insulting the waiters."

LAUGHTER

And then he turned around - she couldn't see him - and he broke up.

Styne's ability to write great material

for renowned singers like Merman

was called upon with a vengeance for Funny Girl,

a show based on the legendary life of Fanny Brice.

# Everyone was singing

# Dancing, springing

# At a wedding yesterday

# Yiddle on his fiddle played some ragtime

# And when Sadie heard him play... #

It was no mean feat to find a performer to

take on the role of Fanny Brice.

Fanny was one of a kind -

a musical talent who could make people laugh AND cry.

After rejecting a number of versatile actresses,

Jule Styne went to a cabaret show in Greenwich Village.

She opened her mouth, one note came out

and my arm was practically broken

because Jule was pressing down so hard.

"This woman must play Funny Girl!"

He was absolutely right then convinced, totally, 1,000%,

and from there, that was the beginning of Funny Girl.

# Lovers

# Are very special people

# They're the luckiest people in the world

# With one person

# One very special person

# A feeling deep in your soul

# Says you were half now you're whole

# No more hunger and thirst

# But first be a person who needs people... #

What I wanted to do is take advantage of

all these vocal talents that she had.

When you know somebody... It's like, you write for Merman,

you go further because you know they're going to bake it.

# ..The luckiest people in the world... #

And I accomplished it on Rain On My Parade.

You know, like, how's a girl going to sing...

HE PLAYS PIANO INTRO

# Life's candy and the sun's a ball of butter

# Don't bring around a cloud to rain on my parade

# Don't tell me not to fly

# I've simply got to

# If someone takes a spill it's me and not you

# Who told you you're allowed to rain on my parade?

# Nobody

# Is gonna

# Rain on my parade... #

In 1964, the same year Funny Girl opened,

the unimaginable happened.

A musical devoted entirely to a Jewish story came to Broadway.

Seven decades earlier, a violent pogrom forced Irving Berlin's family

to flee their Russian village.

Now a pogrom, re-imagined on stage,

would disrupt a wedding celebration

in a hit Broadway musical.

THEY PLAY: "If I Were A Rich Man"

We should introduce ourselves.

In place of your usual glamorous hosts,

you have two frightened writers today.

This is Sheldon Harnick, who wrote the lyrics to Fiddler On The Roof.

And this is Jerry Bock, who wrote the music to Fiddler On The Roof.

And conducting the orchestra today, Milton Green,

who conducts the orchestra at the Imperial for us every night.

There was the sceptical feeling,

that this might not be a universal show,

if any show can be termed universal, appealing to almost everybody.

But this show more than others might be specifically designed

for just a certain group of people.

And we had this in mind,

without destroying any of the authenticity

or the folklore or the colour of the show.

We didn't want to limit it just for the appreciation of a small group.

Many people have said, "Oh, you were so brave."

We didn't feel that way.

I thought, "I'm a Jew, I fought Hitler...

"Certainly, the American people, we all fought Hitler.

"What's so...what's so brave?

"What's so avant-garde about doing a show about Jews?" So we did.

We did many backers' auditions for the women who sell theatre parties

and many of them were Jewish because they represented Jewish groups.

Usually, the way the audition would go is that

I would explain what the book was, in brief,

and Jerry Bock and I would then sing some of the score.

TOGETHER: # May the Lord protect and defend you

# May the Lord preserve you from pain

# Favour them, oh, Lord

# With happiness and peace

# Oh, hear our Sabbath prayer

# Amen... #

Hal Prince, who was our producer,

after we would do the backers' audition,

he would have to get up and really try and convince these ladies

that the show was going to be fun and not just a show that had a pogrom

at the end of the first act and an exile at the end of the second act.

So Hal had his work cut out for him

because these women were very sensitive

and they thought, "Our audiences are not going to like this."

They asked me to direct it.

And I said, "I'm the wrong guy.

"You've got to get Jerry Robbins or someone like him.

"He can give it a universality with movement,

"so it won't be just for a narrow audience."

And the first question that Jerome Robbins asked was,

"What is this show about?"

We explained what we thought the show was about, and Robbins,

to our surprise said, "No, that's not what gives

"these stories their power."

Time and again, at meetings, he'd say, "What is this show about?"

and we'd say, "Well, it's about this farmer,"

and we'd start to describe the plot, and he'd say, "No!"

And then finally, one day, I believe it was Sheldon Harnick said,

"Well, I mean it's about tradition, what else is it about?"

And Jerry said, "That's what it's about. Write about tradition."

# Who day and night must scramble for a living

# Feed a wife and children

# Say his daily prayers and still... #

That's the old lyric. Everything involves...

# Who day and night must scramble for a living

# Feed a wife and children

# Say his daily prayers?

# And who has the right as master of the house

# To have the final word at home? #

And the daughter's theme was...

# And who does Mama teach

# To mend and tend and fix?

# Preparing me to marry whoever Papa picks

BOTH: # Tradition

# Tradition

# Tradition, tradition

# Tradition! #

The opening number, Tradition, was common to every culture

so the show was as common to Japanese family life

as it was to Jewish family life.

And it went all over the world

and every single place it went, it became THEIR family story,

despite the idiosyncrasies of what was Jewish about it.

# If I were a rich man

# Ya ba dibba dibba dibba dibba dibba dibba dum

# All day long I'd biddy biddy bum

# If I were a wealthy man

# I wouldn't have to work hard

# Ya ba dibba dibba dibba dibba dibba dibba dum

# Lord who made the lion and the lamb

# You decreed I should be what I am

# Would it spoil some vast, eternal plan

# If I were a wealthy man? #

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

Fiddler On The Roof is not just a success, it's a massive blockbuster,

and it opens the door for Jewish stories on Broadway in a way

that's absolutely unprecedented.

There are musicals about stories from the Old Testament.

There are musicals set on the Lower East Side with Jewish families.

There's musicals set in the suburbs with Jewish families.

So the fact that you could have a successful Jewish musical

just ushers in a tidal wave of Jewish-themed shows.

# Wilkommen! Bienvenue! Welcome!

# Fremder! Etranger! Stranger... #

The time was finally right for Broadway to take on

the most sensitive theme in the modern Jewish canon -

the rise of Nazi Germany.

# ..Wilkommen! Bienvenue! Welcome!

# Im Cabaret Au Cabaret

# To Cabaret... #

The creative team behind Cabaret

fearlessly dramatised the intolerance

that had driven Kurt Weill from his homeland.

And his wife, Lotte Lenya, would embody

the emotional heart of the show.

# With time rushing by

# What would you do?

# With the clock running down

# What would you do...? #

We were dealing with an historical moment in which Jews

were very much involved.

# ..I will listen... #

The fact that one of the characters is Jewish

is very important to the plot.

# ..If you were me... #

It took place in a world in which

anti-Semitism would reach its zenith,

obviously, with the slaughter...

It's not...

about, I don't think...

It's not about Jewishness, it's about hatred.

And the danger of not being aware of what's going on around you.

# I know what you're thinking

# You wonder why I chose her

# Out of all the ladies in the world

# That's just the first impression... #

If You Could See Her Through My Eyes

was written for Joel Grey and a gorilla.

It's a very gentle little vaudeville song which goes...

# If you could see her through my eyes... #

It's just this kind of simple melody.

Now, what could be more innocent than that?

It was a love song to this gorilla across the stage,

and it ended with,

"If you could see her through my eyes,

"she wouldn't look Jewish at all."

And it was clearly illustrative of what had happened to Germany.

That line - she wouldn't look Jewish at all -

was a real slap in the face.

We wanted people to realise what anti-Semitism is really like,

what real prejudice comes with.

It comes with jokes.

What I guess we were naive about

was how Jewish audiences would react to that.

And it came as a shock to realise that they thought

we were saying Jews looked like gorillas.

The songwriter's aim to depict elements of anti-Semitism

with an ingeniously dark humour did not play well

with some of theatre-going public.

I was not only the director but the producer of that show,

and I said, "We're going to change it.

"We're playing with fire all over the place.

"We've got Nazis on the stage.

"We're asking so much of an audience at a time

"when this is not the currency of musicals.

"I won't do it."

But when the movie was made, and that was that many years later,

the public had followed us and caught onto it

and was more sophisticated.

# Oh, I understand your objection

# I grant you the problem's not small

# But if you could see her through my eyes... #

(She wouldn't look Jewish at all.)

LIVELY MUSIC PLAYS

APPLAUSE

The anti-Semitism at the core of Cabaret

may have seemed like

a remote and distant memory to some in the audience,

but for others, it was a familiar story,

experienced first-hand in America.

When I was growing up, my father thought it would be good for us

to work on a farm.

He was in the tobacco business and sent us up to a farm.

And we saw right away that the young men were

virulently anti-Semitic.

Everybody was "the Jew boss", "the Jew driver" -

so my brother and I made a pact to say

if they should ever ask us that we were Greek Orthodox...

Greek Orthodox, cos we were dark, you know, fairly dark.

But one day, they said, "You guys are Jewish," my brother and me,

and they started to beat up my brother.

About six of them.

And then they tied me to a tree, they tied me to a tree,

and put papers under it and lit a fire.

I remember the smoke and inhaling it,

and I remember them pummelling my brother.

And then the straw boss, whose name was Murphy, came along

and they said, "Aw, here comes the Jew boss, we better stop,"

and he set us free. Didn't say anything about it.

He said, "All right, come on, lunchtime is over."

That was all.

One of the ways I think you can look at

the sing-and-be-happy poptimism of the Broadway stage

is that it's a release valve.

It allows you to sing your way into a new world.

# Grey skies are going to clear up

# Put on a happy face

# Brush off the clouds and cheer up

# Put on a happy face

# Take off the gloomy mask of tragedy

# It's not your style

# You look so good that you'll be glad you decided to smile

# Pick out a pleasant outlook

# Stick out that noble chin

# Wipe off the full-of-doubt look

# Slap on a happy grin

# And spread sunshine all over the place

# Just put on a happy face. #

He and his partner Lee Adams write quintessentially

up, optimistic songs,

what you associate with America.

And it's...it's wonderful.

Probably one of the best songs they ever wrote was

Put On A Happy Face. It's a credo.

And it's built in to the material they write.

The song became famous.

And, you know, sometimes people say,

"Do you know what's going to be a hit?"

I have no idea, but that song turned out to be

one of the reasons I have this apartment.

Strouse tapped into Broadway's optimism once again

when he scored an adaptation

of a Little Orphan Annie comic strip,

working with the lyricist Martin Charnin.

# Just thinking about tomorrow

# Clears away the cobwebs and the sorrow

# Till there's none

# When I'm stuck with a day

# That's grey and lonely

# I just out my chin

# And grin

# And say...

# Oh...

# The sun'll come out tomorrow

# Show you gotta hang on till tomorrow

# Come what may

ALL: # Tomorrow, tomorrow

# I love ya, tomorrow

# You're only a day away

# Tomorrow... #

Many have claimed that in the late-20th century,

Jews became mainstream American culture.

That in the literary world, in theatre, in film,

Jews were American pop culture

in a way that was very different from the pre-World War II years.

Where no longer were they outsiders working in

but they were now insiders working on the inside.

And that's a huge shift.

We made it.

We made it!

But then you have Sondheim coming along, Stephen Sondheim.

He's another generation along and he's sort of saying,

"Look, we have everything.

"Aren't we supposed to be happy?"

And his shows consistently are questioning -

is the American Dream in fact fulfilling the promise?

Yes, we've gained acceptance in this country.

Does that mean we're happy?

# Isn't it rich?

# Are we a pair?

# Me here at last on the ground

# You in midair

# Send in the clowns... #

Whether inspired by a Swedish film,

a Victorian horror story

or assassination attempts on US Presidents,

Stephen Sondheim's work has illuminated

both the light and dark side of humanity.

# ..One who keeps tearing around

# One who can't move... #

People do want you to come out

and say something either positive or negative.

They don't like the idea that you're

saying something positive AND negative.

But even in the most simple-minded musicals, you know,

you get a song, an Irving Berlin musical,

where, "I hate you but I love you."

I mean, ambivalence is the stuff of drama.

I don't know why people have made so much out of it.

It's just that I tend to deal with it on a more realistic level

than it has been dealt with in musicals before.

Or had been, I should say.

But ambivalence is what drama is about.

Stephen Sondheim changed Broadway.

He created a world where you can write about everything and anything,

and nothing is off limits.

All sorts of music can be used.

To go from Sweeney Todd and Passion

to the pastiche work in Follies

or the contemporary music of its time that was in Company,

on and on and on.

But the bad part is he made it that everyone is expecting that now,

from everyone.

And not everyone can deliver that,

and sometimes you go to the theatre and you don't want that.

Musicals started going in very interesting and offbeat directions.

I had three major hits in the '60s -

Milk And Honey, Hello, Dolly! and Mame

all came pouring out of me,

and I thought you just wrote a musical and it ran for seven years.

But then the '70s came,

I thought that the kind of stuff I did was over

and nobody wanted the quintessential Broadway musical any longer.

In 1983, Jerry Herman and his collaborators

reinvigorated the old-fashioned musical with the classic

outsider-seeking-acceptance theme.

In a modern twist, the central characters were a gay couple,

one of whom was a drag queen.

The drag character does

what's become a sort of anthem in our community - I Am What I Am.

# I am what I am

# I don't want praise

# I don't want pity... #

I have been beaten, I've been made fun of, they've called me names,

but I do not for any of that ever say I'm not me.

# ..So it's time to open up your closet

# Life's not worth a damn

# Till you can say

# Hey, world

# I am what I am... #

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

The musical represents mainstream America,

and I think that when a people are presented on Broadway

and accepted on Broadway,

groups that were formerly viewed with suspicion

have a shot at acceptance, a way in.

And this is largely because of what Jews did to create the musical.

The 2001 Tony Award for Best New Musical - The Producers!

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

Behind me you see a phalanx,

an avalanche of Jews, who have come...

LAUGHTER

..with their talent, their money, their spirit

and their love for the theatre,

and that's what brings us all together tonight.

We all love this thing called the theatre.

It was always my dream to marry comedy with music with dancing.

That's called a musical comedy.

# Springtime for Hitler and Germany

# Look, it's springtime

# Winter for Poland and France... #

In 2001, Mel Brooks's preposterous musical The Producers

won a record-breaking 12 Tony Awards.

It welcomed Nazi characters back to Broadway

and this time, Jewish audiences just couldn't get enough.

How do you get even with Adolf Hitler?

How do you get EVEN with him?

There is only one way to get even.

You have to bring him down with ridicule.

# Heil myself

# Watch my show

# I'm the German Ethel Merman Don't you know...? #

One of my lifelong jobs has been to make the world

laugh at Adolf Hitler.

# ..Make a great big smile

# Everyone Sieg Heil

# To me, wonderful me... #

Look at the musicals.

Look at the musical comedies we have exported.

They say happiness. They say hope.

They say we're tough.

They say we can survive.

They say we're sharp.

We're hip. We're America.

The Broadway musical distinguishes us

from every other country in the world.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

Do I have enough awards, Alan?

Do I have the most awards of anybody in show business?

You sure do. Has he?

Well, he's got the most awards for a particular show

in the history of theatre.

The Producers got... How many? ..16.

12. 12.

But that is the most. I say 16.