East Side, West Side

In 1947, Jerome Robbins approached Leonard Bernstein and Arthur Laurents about developing a contemporary musical adaptation of Romeo and Juliet.  He proposed that the plot focus on the conflict between an Irish-Catholic family and a Jewish family living on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, called East Side Story.  Ultimately, the three decided that it was simply the wrong time for a Broadway show about a Jewish conflict, and project was shelved.  It was more than five years later that the group revived the idea, brought in Stephen Sondheim as lyricist, and re-focused the plot on the tensions between white Polish-Americans and Puerto Rican immigrants on the West Side:  West Side Story.  Most modern audiences, when they see this show, are completely unaware of its roots in the Jewish immigrant tradition.

See if you can spot what the Broadway titans in the following list all have in common:

Irving Berlin, George and Ira Gershwin, Leonard Bernstein, Jerry Herman, Sheldon Harnick, Jerry Bock, Richard Rogers, Oscar Hammerstein, Laurence Hart, John  Kander, Kurt Weill, Jule Styne, Charles Strouse, and Stephen Sondheim.

Yes, they're all of them of Jewish heritage.  In fact, it's pretty hard to come up with a famous Broadway composer in the 20th century who wasn't Jewish. Cole Porter, I suppose, and even he collaborated primarily with other Jews.  I'll leave it for the anthropologists to tell us why we find so many Jews in the musical comedy traditions in America; for us, it's enough to acknowledge their huge contribution, and of course, to instantly make fun of it:

Ironically, when Spamalot, 2005, made the move from Broadway to the West End in London, this song (You Won't Succeed on Broadway) had to be completely re-written, since the London stage has no such connection with the Jewish tradition.

For decades in the early part of the 20th century, the most prolific and famous Broadway composers were almost exclusively Jewish, starting way back with George Gershwin, and moving right up to the present day with the likes of Stephen Sondheim and Jason Robert Brown. Mel Brooks, one of the brightest comedic stars of both stage and screen, frequently pokes fun of his Jewish heritage in his work, not the least of which includes his Broadway smash hit, The Producers, 2001.  Its original opening number, The King of Broadway, is the most quintessentially Jewish song from the entire show:

It is in this strong tradition of Jewish folk song parodies that Act II of Urinetown opens, with its Klezmer orchestrations of What Is Urinetown?, an obvious allusion to Fiddler on the Roof, and its iconic Jerome Robbins' choreography.

When Fiddler first opened in 1964, it wasn't at all clear that the show would run for a year, much less become one of the longest-running shows on Broadway. After all, besides telling the story of a somewhat narrow and unknown group of people (the Russian Jews at the turn of the last century), Act I ends in a pogrom, and Act II ends in an exile, not good opportunities for big showstopping numbers. Nonetheless, the show found a universal appeal in its portrayal of tradition, and its relative importance in human lives.  Fiddler remains one of the few shows whose rights are available only to those groups willing to recreate the original choreography of the show as closely as possible - a fact that Urinetown does not ignore. Bits of Fiddler find their way into the choreography of What Is Urinetown? in most productions, and ours will be no exception.  Can anyone here dance while balancing a bottle on his head?

The success of Fiddler as an openly Jewish Broadway production (rather than a production simply staffed with Jewish artists) finally broke the ground necessary for the American musical theatre to address a difficult subject:  the rise of Nazi Germany, and its impact on the Jewish community. Cabaret, 1966, was penned by the team of John Kander and Fred Ebb, another Jewish power couple, who set their plot in the Kit Kat Club of 1931 Berlin. Throughout the show, the nightclub serves as a metaphor for the increasingly threatening Weimar Republic. The final stark conversion of the club's dim lighting into the famous Nuremberg lights is one of the most chilling moments in all of Broadway history.

Despite the fact the 20th century Jewish history gives us plenty of serious themes to deal with, the most significant Jewish contribution to the Broadway stage remains its sense of broad and insightful humor, often of the self-deprecating variety.  As a typical entrant in this category, I leave you with a snippet of Little Shop of Horrors, 1982, written by another Jewish contributor, Alan Menken, possibly my all-time favorite American composer:

Snuff That Cool Boy

Early in Act II of Urinetown we find Hope Cladwell taken hostage by our band of revolutionaries, and an internal debate is had on whether or not to take her life as retribution for Cladwell's betrayal. Hot Blades Harry and Little Becky Two-Shoes lead the murderous faction, as Little Sally urges more humane restraint.  Harry and Becky make their case most fervently in the song Snuff That Girl, which owes its historical context to a song first performed in West Side Story in 1957.

In West Side Story, we see another band of hotheads (in this case a street gang called the Jets, made up of antsy white boys) who are itching for a fight with the Sharks, a Puerto Rican gang whose territory adjoins their own.  Riff, the leader of the Jets, plays the Little Sally role here, telling his fellow bangers to keep their cool, at least for the moment. But the underlying need to knock heads keeps bubbling up through the Jets' outwardly "cool" exterior - resulting, naturally, in a ballet-like dance number, but one with periodic bursts of violent energy and intimidating finger-snapping.

Harry Hot Blades leads the dance break in Snuff That Girl, but unlike Riff, this hothead is for all-out warfare.  Compare the finger-snapping, and the barely-restrained undercurrents of violence in both of these songs, and it's impossible to miss the intended parody.  I've included "Cool" from the movie version of West Side Story below.  The crouching dance move you see at 2:52 (performed directly at the camera) was copied exactly in the dance break of Snuff That Girl by John Carrafa, the choreographer of Broadway's Urinetown, which always got a huge laugh (from people who were old enough to know West Side Story, anyway):



The gang-style ballet dancing in West Side Story, while ground-breaking and powerful in the early 60s, has not aged well; it's hard to imagine current-day gang bangers pulling off a pirouette in an intimidating way.  So this choreography style has come in for a fair amount of parody, even without Urinetown's help:



And the Jets and Sharks would be somewhat chagrined, I think, to learn that their moves were being used now to sell clothes from the Gap (and lots of other stuff):



West Side Story was originally choreographed by Jerome Robbins, but Snuff That Girl, as originally choreographed, mostly paid homage to Bob Fosse, choreographer of such standards as Chicago, Sweet Charity, and Cabaret; but as this post is already getting overly long, we'll leave our discussion of Bob for another day.