by dan pine
staff writer
Here’s a juicy bit of Broadway trivia. In the original 1943 Broadway staging of “Oklahoma!” the producers’ first choice to play peddler Aki Hakim was none other than Groucho Marx.
Groucho didn’t make it, the sting of which may have inspired his classic line, “I didn’t like the play, but then, I saw it under adverse conditions: The curtain was up.”
No one would ever say anything so sacrilegious about “Oklahoma!” today, least of all Andrea Most, a Jewish studies professor at the University of Toronto and a certified scholar of Broadway. She knew the Groucho story and plenty of others that figure into her book “Making Americans: Jews and the Broadway Musical.”
Most will bring her passion for musical theater to the Bay Area with two local appearances: a conversation with Mark Dollinger on Monday, Oct. 15 at the Peninsula Jewish Community Center in Foster City, and another Oct. 17 at S.F.’s Congregation Emanu-El, in conversation with Michael Krasny.
Most studied the connections between a group of talented Jewish artists and the rise of Broadway. From Gershwin to Bernstein, Broadway depended on these sons of immigrants to create its finest works.
“What is it about Jewish culture and the Jewish historical experience that makes for this incredibly creative outpouring?” she said by phone from her Toronto home. “What is it about this genre? It’s fascinating because of the ways [the musical] combines dialogue with song. The songs allow for a reinvention of self, yet the songs define community — who’s in and who’s out.”
Despite conventional wisdom, Most sees only a tangential link between the Yiddish theater of the Lower East Side and the Broadway musical. Most of the Jewish greats of early Broadway –– Rodgers and Hart, Jerome Kern, the Gershwin brothers –– did not work in the Yiddish theatre, and saw themselves as assimilated Americans.
“My book,” says Most, “focuses on the mid-‘20s through the early ‘50s, and a generation of American Jews living through a period of the worst anti-Semitism in U.S. history, not to mention World War II.”
Most has the reflective college professor shtick down pat, but she’s also an unabashed fan of Broadway musicals. She grew up listening to cast recordings and attending community theater in her hometown of Poughkeepsie, N.Y.
She kept up her love of theater at Yale, where she studied drama. For a time, Most worked in New York’s avant-garde theater scene, where she was ribbed for her love of good old-fashioned musicals.
Really old.
Keep your “Cats” and “Jersey Boys.” Most cites among her favorite musicals such rarely seen chestnuts as Rodgers and Hart’s “Babe in Arms” and the Gershwins’ “Girl Crazy” (though their showstoppers, “The Lady is a Tramp,” “My Funny Valentine,” “Embraceable You” and “I Got Rhythm,” never went out of style).
For all the contributions Jews have made to musical theater, it’s curious that Jewish characters virtually disappeared from the stage during the Golden Age of Broadway. After Eddie Cantor in the ‘20s, according to Most, you don’t see unmistakably Jewish characters in musicals until “Fiddler on the Roof” in 1964.
“Jewish producers who wanted their work to be for a mass audience felt audiences weren’t interested in Jewish characters,” she says. “Anti-Semitic critics were beginning to write about Jews controlling popular culture, and how this was a problem.”
Now a dual citizen of the United States and Canada, Most is active in Toronto Jewish life, and her two young children attend a Jewish day school.
Looking ahead, she plans next to write a more comprehensive book about the Jewish connection with popular entertainment.
Odds are, when she gets any down time, she’ll spend it near the front-row center.
“There’s something that happens at that moment you’re sitting in the theater, that first note is struck and the song begins,” she says. “You love that moment, and when it’s well done and you scream with delight.”
Andrea Most will lecture on Jews and Broadway 7:30 p.m. Monday, Oct. 15 at the Peninsula Jewish Community Center, 800 Foster City Blvd., Foster City. Admission is free. Information: (415) 650-212-7522 or www.pjcc.org. She will also appear 7:30 Wednesday, Oct. 17 at Congregation Emanu-El, 2 Lake Street, S.F. Information: (415) 751-2535.
CopyrightJ, the Jewish news weekly of Northern California