May is Jewish American Heritage Month
Jewish Heritage Month
During May, Jewish American Heritage Month recognizes the contributions American Jews have made, and continue to make, to the history, culture, and society of this country. These remarkable individuals have contributed to the theatre community. The origins of Jewish Heritage Month began in 1980 with the establishment of Jewish American Week. Beginning in 1981, presidents started designating a Jewish American Heritage Week in April or May. In 2006, George W. Bush was the first to proclaim May as Jewish American Heritage Month.
David Belasco, (July 25, 1853 - May 14, 1931), an American theatrical producer and playwright whose important innovations in the techniques and standards of staging and design were in contrast to the quality of the plays he produced.. From 1873 to 1879 he worked in several San Francisco theatres as actor, manager, and play adapter and in the latter year toured in Hearts of Oak, which he cowrote with James A. Herne. Belasco moved to New York City in 1880, becoming associated there with the Frohmans as manager of the Madison Square Theatre and later of the Lyceum. In 1890 he leased a theatre and became an independent producer. Feeling the pressure of the monopolistic Theatrical Syndicate, he built his own theatre in 1906. Belasco was the first American producer whose name, regardless of star actor or play, attracted patrons to the theatre. He chose unknown actors and elevated them to stardom. He also preferred playwrights whose success depended upon his collaboration. He gained a reputation for minute attention to detail, sensational realism, lavish settings, astonishing mechanical effects, and experiments in lighting. He maintained a large permanent staff that worked constantly to perfect surprising effects. This work led to the virtual elimination of footlights and to the first lensed spotlights. As a result, he brought a new standard of production to the American stage. Because of his austere, cleric like dress and personal manner, he came to be known as the “Bishop of Broadway.”
George S. Kaufman (November 16, 1889 – June 2, 1961) Kaufman was the most successful playwright in the American theater during Broadway’s golden years between the two World Wars. His particular brand of sharp comedy and satire produced forty-five Broadway plays, the majority of which were successes; all but one of which were written in collaboration with other authors. He was also a talented and precise director of his own work and several other popular plays and musicals. Renowned as a humorist and wit, he was a charter member of the famed Algonquin Round Table. Kaufman worked with most of the major theatrical talents of his era and was the winner of two Pulitzer Prizes for drama including the first Pulitzer ever awarded to a musical.
Lillian Hellman (June 20, 1905 - June 30, 1984) American playwright and motion-picture screenwriter whose dramas forcefully attacked injustice, exploitation, and selfishness. In the 1930s, after working as a book reviewer, press agent, play reader, and Hollywood scenarist, she began writing plays. Her dramas exposed some of the various forms in which evil appears—a malicious child’s lies about two schoolteachers (The Children’s Hour, 1934); a ruthless family’s exploitation of fellow townspeople and of one another (The Little Foxes, 1939, and Another Part of the Forest, 1946); and the irresponsible selfishness of the Versailles-treaty generation (Watch on the Rhine, 1941, and The Searching Wind, 1944). Criticized at times for her doctrinaire views and characters, she nevertheless kept her characters from becoming merely social points of view by writing credible dialogue and creating a realistic intensity matched by few of her playwriting contemporaries.. Hellman, a longtime supporter of leftist causes, detailed in Scoundrel Time (1976) her troubles and those of her friends with the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings during the 1950s. Hellman refused to give the committee the names of people who had associations with the Communist Party; she was subsequently blacklisted though not held in contempt of Congress. Her collected plays, many of which continued to be performed at the turn of the 20th century, were published in 1972.
Wendy Wasserstein (October 18, 1950 - January 30, 2006) In 1989, Wendy Wasserstein won the Pulitzer Prize for The Heidi Chronicles and was the first woman playwright to win a Tony Award. In 1973, Wasserstein joined the MFA program at The Yale School of Drama and was the only woman in the playwriting program. Her thesis, Uncommon Women and Others, depicting five women friends over several years, was produced at the Phoenix Theater in New York in 1977. Wasserstein devoted her career to depicting intelligent, talented, nuanced women, such as the protagonists of her 1992 The Sisters Rosensweig. While she is mainly known for her dramas, she also wrote three musicals, various comedy skits for the television series Comedy Zone, and essays published in the New Yorker, Esquire, Harper’s Bazaar, and other magazines.
Tony Kushner, born July 16, 1956, is an American dramatist who became one of the most highly acclaimed playwrights of his generation after the debut of his two-part play Angels in America (1990, 1991). . His early plays include La Fin de la Baleine: An Opera for the Apocalypse (1983), A Bright Room Called Day (1985), Yes, Yes, No, No (1985), and Stella (1987). His major work, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, consists of two lengthy plays that deal with political issues and the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s while meditating on change and loss—two prominent themes throughout Kushner’s oeuvre. The first part, Millennium Approaches (1990), won a Pulitzer Prize and a Tony Award for best play; the second, Perestroika (1991), also won a Tony Award for best play. Angels in America proved to be extremely popular for a work of its imposing length (the two parts run seven hours in total), and it was adapted for an Emmy Award-winning television film that aired in 2003. In addition to his work for the stage, Kushner contributed screenplays to Steven Spielberg’s films Munich (2005; cowritten with Eric Roth) and Lincoln (2012). Kushner also authored the children’s book Brundibar (2003; illustrated by Maurice Sendak) and coedited (with Alisa Solomon) the essay collection Wrestling with Zion: Progressive Jewish-American Responses to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (2003). He received the National Medal of Arts in 2013.
Paddy Chayefsky, (January 29, 1923 - August 1, 1981) an American playwright and screenwriter whose work was part of the flowering of television drama in the 1950s. He also wrote several critically acclaimed films. Chayefsky served during World War II in the U.S. Army. On his return to New York City, he worked as a printer’s apprentice, then began writing radio adaptations for Theatre Guild on the Air (1951–52) and mystery dramas for television series. His first full-length television play was Holiday Song (1952). His greatest success was Marty (1953), about the awakening of love between two plain people, a butcher and a schoolteacher. The film version in 1955 won four Academy Awards, including one for Chayefsky’s screenplay, and the Palme d’Or at the Cannes film festival. Two of his other television plays also were made into motion pictures: The Bachelor Party (1953; film 1957) and The Catered Affair (1955; film 1956). Another television drama, Middle of the Night (1954), became, in expanded form, Chayefsky’s first stage play and marked his Broadway debut (1956). His next two stage productions, The Tenth Man (1959) and Gideon (1961), were on religious themes and attacked contemporary cynicism, while The Passion of Josef D. (1964) was a treatment of Joseph Stalin and the Russian Revolution. Chayefsky also wrote numerous film scripts and scenarios. In addition to Marty, he received Academy Awards for his screenplays for The Hospital (1971), about a depressed chief of medicine in a hospital experiencing many inexplicable deaths, and Network (1976), a brilliant satire of network television.
Oscar Hammerstein II, (July 12, 1895 - August 23, 1960), an American lyricist, musical comedy author, and theatrical producer influential in the development of musical comedy and known especially for his immensely successful collaboration with the composer Richard Rodgers. . Between 1920 and 1959 he wrote all or part of about 45 musical dramas for stage, film, or television. Among Hammerstein’s best known early works are Rose Marie (1924; music by Friml); The Desert Song (1925; music by Romberg); and the Jerome Kern musicals Sunny (1925) and Show Boat (1927), which includes the perennial favorites, “Ol’ Man River” and “Only Make Believe.” He teamed with Richard Rodgers in creating Oklahoma! (1943; winner of the Pulitzer Prize, 1944), Carousel (1945), and South Pacific (1949; Pulitzer Prize in 1950), combining bright tunes with relatively sophisticated stories—a blend then unfamiliar to the stage but later widely adopted. Hammerstein’s lyrics are often marked by a simplicity and sensitivity perhaps best exemplified by “If I Loved You” (from Carousel). Rodgers and Hammerstein formed a music publishing firm, Williamson Music, Inc., and from 1949 were theatrical producers for their own works as well as for those of many others. Other musical comedies with Rodgers include The King and I (1951), The Sound of Music (1959), Flower Drum Song (1958), and the film State Fair (1945).Hammerstein won Academy Awards for the songs “The Last Time I Saw Paris” from Lady Be Good (1941) and “It Might as Well Be Spring” from State Fair (1945). In addition, he received three Tony Awards for South Pacific and one for The King and I.
Harvey Fierstein, (born June 6, 1954) is an American comedian, author, and playwright who is best known as the author of The Torch Song Trilogy, which centers on gay families. He often speaks out about gay rights issues. With a bachelor of fine arts degree (1973) he soon made a career in New York theatre and playwriting. He won a part at age 16 in Andy Warhol’s play Pork (1971; staged at La MaMa), Fierstein went on to perform in more than 60 productions, in which he often played roles in drag. In the late 1970s Fierstein wrote a trilogy of plays (The International Stud, Fugue in a Nursery, and Widows and Children First), eventually performed together as Torch Song Trilogy. Seen all at once on Broadway (1982), in a production starring the author himself, the trilogy proved to be a powerful, profoundly moving statement that took audiences into the then little-known world of gay families and their struggle for self-acceptance and love. After winning Tony Awards for acting and writing, Fierstein went on to appear in the 1988 screen version of Torch Song Trilogy. Fierstein’s Tony-winning book for the 1983 musical La Cage aux Folles (adapted from Jean Poiret’s play) continued to move gay issues into the mainstream. In 2003 Fierstein elicited rave reviews on Broadway for his exuberant cross-dressing performance in the hit stage musical version of Waters’ camp film Hairspray; he won his fourth Tony Award. He later appeared in Broadway revivals of Fiddler on the Roof and La Cage Folles. In addition, he wrote the librettos for the musicals A Catered Affair in which he also starred; Newsies, the Musical and Kinky Boots. . Fierstein also wrote and produced Casa Valentina, a play based on the true story of a group of heterosexual married men in the early 1960s who met on the weekends at a rundown resort in the Catskill Mountains of New York, where they could freely indulge in their shared desire to dress and act like women. He then wrote and starred in Bella Bella.. The monologue play was about U.S. politician Bella Abzug. Beyond Broadway, gay rights activists welcomed Fierstein’s commentaries in the early 21st century on the public television documentary series In the Life
Ben Hecht (February 28, 1894 – April 18, 1964) Hecht’s now-legendary partnership with fellow newspaperman Charles McArthur scored its first Broadway hit in 1928 with The Front Page, followed by Twentieth Century in 1932. He wrote copiously for both stage and screen throughout the ’30s. While this aspect of Hecht’s life has since been eclipsed by the immortality of his best plays and movies, for Americans paying attention to such things during the WWII era, Ben Hecht was one of the country’s most visible advocates for anti-fascist and pro-Jewish causes. Hecht donated his services as a proud propagandist, writing several newspaper editorials, speeches, and pamphlets, but he captured the most attention by turning to the theatre, conceiving of a spectacular pageant advertised as “A Mass Memorial Dedicated to the Two Million Jewish Dead of Europe.” We Will Never Die was first performed at Madison Square Garden on March 9, 1943, and in many ways was the nation’s first Holocaust drama. Hecht and Billy Rose, who served as “producer,” enlisted many fellow Jewish Broadway luminaries, actors of stage and screen, and a cast of literally hundreds of extras, including a chorus of exiled rabbis. Between two New York performances and a five-city national tour (during which Hecht added a scene depicting the recent Warsaw Ghetto uprising), the pageant reached large audiences and received even more exposure through press coverage in each city. As many later Hollywood activists would learn, Hecht knew that reporters pay more attention to your cause when celebrities are attached. “By aggressively calling attention to his people’s plight at a time when so many others were afraid to make waves, Hecht redefined what it meant to be an American Jew. “He wrote another theatrical pageant-drama, A Flag Is Born, it opened in the fall of 1946 (starring Paul Muni as an aged Holocaust survivor) for a four-month run on Broadway, followed by a national tour. (In Broadway annals it’s most famous for casting the pre-Streetcar Marlon Brando). Hecht’s political pursuits certainly paved the way for many subsequent followers of all backgrounds in the performing arts to similarly leverage their celebrity in the name of social justice.
Judith Malina (June 4, 1926 – April 10, 2015) Judith Malina won acclaim as an actress, director, and producer through the experimental Living Theatre she co-founded with her husband, Julian Beck, in 1948. Malina was praised for her avant-garde, political approach to directing. The Living Theatre toured the United States and France and performed street theater in Brazil before the company was expelled as incendiary. Malina used the theater for political awareness and action and advocated for the antiwar movement, Women Strike for Peace, and the Industrial Workers of the World. Malina also performed as an actress, wrote poetry, and taught at NYU and Columbia University. She received many honors for her work, including an Obie Award, the Paris Critics Circle medallion, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, and was inducted into the Theatre Hall of Fame in 200
Adolph Green (December 2, 1914 - October 23, 2002) Playwright, performer and lyricist Adolph Green and his partner Betty Comden constituted the writing team of Comden and Green that turned out lyrics, books, and screenplays for six decades of American hit musicals. At home primarily on Broadway (Wonderful Town 1953, Bells Are Ringing 1956, On the Twentieth Century 1978), they also spent years in Hollywood at MGM, producing film musicals like On the Town (1949), Singin’ in the Rain (1952), and The Band Wagon (1953)..Leonard Bernstein with his first great stage success, the ballet Fancy Free (1944), had plans to turn it into a Broadway musical. Bernstein approached Comden and Green to write the book and lyrics, which they were only too happy to do, taking the opportunity to include substantial parts in it for themselves. The smashing success of the result, On the Town (1944), encouraged them to follow with two more musicals, Billion Dollar Baby (music by Morton Gould, 1945) and Bonanza Bound (1947). They continued to work with MGM, writing screenplays for famous actors such as June Allyson, Peter Lawford, Ginger Rogers, and Fred Astaire. In the 1950s Comden and Green returned to Broadway, with the revue Two on the Aisle (1951) starring Bert Lahr and Dolores Gray, Wonderful Town (Tony Award®, Best Musical, 1953) with Rosalind Russell and Edie Adams as two Ohio sisters trying to find their way in the Big City, and Bells Are Ringing (Tony Award® nominee, Best Musical, 1957) starring Judy Holliday. With tunes like “Just in Time,” “Long Before I Knew You,” and “The Party’s Over,” this score proved to be among their finest and most popular. Say, Darling followed in 1958 (meanwhile they furnished the screenplay for the film version of Auntie Mame), and in the same year a revue called A Party with Betty Comden and Adolph Green brought them in person to the Broadway stage doing some of their early sketches; another version of it was mounted almost twenty years later. The next decades brought repeated triumphs on Broadway stages: Do Re Mi (Tony Award® nominee, Best Musical, 1961), Subways Are For Sleeping (1961), Fade Out – Fade In (1964), Hallelujah, Baby! (Tony Awards®, Best Composer and Lyricist, Best Musical, 1968), Applause (Tony Award®, Best Musical, 1970), Lorelei (1974), On the Twentieth Century (Tony Awards®, Best Book of a Musical, Best Original Score, 1978), a staged version of Singin’ in the Rain (Tony Award® nominee, Best Book of a Musical, 1986), and The Will Rogers Follies (Tony Award®, Best Original Score, 1991). Among other credits are six songs for Mary Martin’s Peter Pan (1954), a modernized Die Fledermaus for the Metropolitan Opera, and stage vehicles for Carol Burnett, Leslie Uggams, and Lauren Bacall. Comden and Green received Kennedy Center Honors in 1991.
Sholem Aleichem (February 18, 1859 – May 13, 1916) Born in Ukraine, Sholem Aleichem was a popular author, humorist, and playwright noted for his many Yiddish stories of life in the shtetl. He is one of the preeminent classical writers of modern Yiddish literature. Drawn to writing as a youth, he became a private tutor of Russian at age 17. He later served in the Russian provincial town of Lubny (now in Ukraine) as a “crown rabbi” (official record keeper of the Jewish population; despite the word rabbi, it was not a religious position). While at Lubny he began writing in Yiddish, though he earlier composed his articles in Russian and Hebrew. He published more than 40 volumes of novels, stories, and plays in Yiddish. (He also continued to write in Russian and Hebrew.) His works were widely translated, and he became known in the United States as “the Jewish Mark Twain.” He was the first to write in Yiddish for children. Adaptations of his work were important in the founding of the Yiddish Art Theatre in New York City, and the libretto of the musical Fiddler on the Roof (1964; film 1971) was adapted from a group of his Tevye the Dairyman stories, which have been translated many times over. Fiddler on the Roof was the first commercially successful stage production about Jewish life in Eastern Europ
Boris Aaronson (October 15, 1898 - November 16, 1980) As the son of the Grand Rabbi of Kiev, Ukraine, Boris enjoyed educational and cultural opportunities denied to most of the Jews of his time. He showed artistic talent early in childhood and took to calling himself “The Outlaw” because he was always looking for ways to escape from his large, traditional family. By the time of the Russian Revolution in 1917, he had found a mentor in Alexandra Exter, a Paris-trained artist who was one of the principal designers at the Moscow State Yiddish Theater (also known as the Kamerny Theatre). In 1922, he left Russia, moving first to Berlin and then on to New York, where he quickly established himself as a designer in the bustling Yiddish theater world. Of particular note are the sets he designed for multiple Yiddish Art Theater productions directed by Maurice Schwartz, including adaptations of STEMPENIU, THE FIDDLER in 1928 and ROAMING STARS in 1930 (both of which were based on stories by Sholem Aleichem). In the 1930s Aronson worked at the Group Theater with legendary figures such as Elia Kazan, Harold Klurman, and Clifford Odets. Then he moved up to Broadway, designing the original sets for many of the most famous dramas ever produced, including THE TIME OF YOUR LIFE (1939), CABIN IN THE SKY (1940), THE COUNTRY GIRL (1950), THE ROSE TATOO (1951), I AM A CAMERA (1951), THE CRUCIBLE (1953), A VIEW FROM THE BRIDGE (1955), BUS STOP (1955), and THE DIARY OF ANN FRANK (1955). After FIDDLER ON THE ROOF, in 1964, he formed a highly collaborative relationship with FIDDLER’s producer Harold Prince, eventually receiving four TONY awards for CABARET (1966), COMPANY (1970), FOLLIES (1971), and PACIFIC OVERTURES (1976). The last production Aronson worked on was a CBS performance of THE NUTCRACKER for Mikhail Baryshnikov in 1977. He died on November 16, 1980. Two days after his death, a new revival of FIDDLER opened in New York based on his original designs.
Jean Rosenthal (March 16, 1912 – May 1, 1969) Jean Rosenthal was a pioneer in theater lighting design, finding new aesthetics for dance performances and theater productions. “Light is quite tactile to me. It has shape and dimension.” Inspired by the paintings of Rembrandt and Monet, Rosenthal mastered the technical and poetic aspects of stage lighting. She used light’s form, color, and movement to express the intention of performance. Carefully integrating light into the overall texture of a piece, Rosenthal believed that “the most successful and brilliant work a lighting designer can do is usually the least noticeable.” Rosenthal studied at the Neighborhood Playhouse School and became enamored of the famed faculty member Martha Graham. She helped out with various aspects of production and technical work for Graham’s performances, then enrolled at Yale to gain more technical training. In 1938 she became a production assistant at Orson Welles’s Mercury Theater. She composed lighting for major Broadway plays including 1957’s West Side Story, 1960’s Becket, 1964’s Fiddler on the Roof, 1965’s The Odd Couple, and 1966’s Cabaret. She continued working with Graham throughout her career until her death, calling their collaborations a renewal of her interior spirit.
Stacey Becker
Governor for Membership
During May, Jewish American Heritage Month recognizes the contributions American Jews have made, and continue to make, to the history, culture, and society of this country. These remarkable individuals have contributed to the theatre community. The origins of Jewish Heritage Month began in 1980 with the establishment of Jewish American Week. Beginning in 1981, presidents started designating a Jewish American Heritage Week in April or May. In 2006, George W. Bush was the first to proclaim May as Jewish American Heritage Month.
David Belasco, (July 25, 1853 - May 14, 1931), an American theatrical producer and playwright whose important innovations in the techniques and standards of staging and design were in contrast to the quality of the plays he produced.. From 1873 to 1879 he worked in several San Francisco theatres as actor, manager, and play adapter and in the latter year toured in Hearts of Oak, which he cowrote with James A. Herne. Belasco moved to New York City in 1880, becoming associated there with the Frohmans as manager of the Madison Square Theatre and later of the Lyceum. In 1890 he leased a theatre and became an independent producer. Feeling the pressure of the monopolistic Theatrical Syndicate, he built his own theatre in 1906. Belasco was the first American producer whose name, regardless of star actor or play, attracted patrons to the theatre. He chose unknown actors and elevated them to stardom. He also preferred playwrights whose success depended upon his collaboration. He gained a reputation for minute attention to detail, sensational realism, lavish settings, astonishing mechanical effects, and experiments in lighting. He maintained a large permanent staff that worked constantly to perfect surprising effects. This work led to the virtual elimination of footlights and to the first lensed spotlights. As a result, he brought a new standard of production to the American stage. Because of his austere, cleric like dress and personal manner, he came to be known as the “Bishop of Broadway.”
George S. Kaufman (November 16, 1889 – June 2, 1961) Kaufman was the most successful playwright in the American theater during Broadway’s golden years between the two World Wars. His particular brand of sharp comedy and satire produced forty-five Broadway plays, the majority of which were successes; all but one of which were written in collaboration with other authors. He was also a talented and precise director of his own work and several other popular plays and musicals. Renowned as a humorist and wit, he was a charter member of the famed Algonquin Round Table. Kaufman worked with most of the major theatrical talents of his era and was the winner of two Pulitzer Prizes for drama including the first Pulitzer ever awarded to a musical.
Lillian Hellman (June 20, 1905 - June 30, 1984) American playwright and motion-picture screenwriter whose dramas forcefully attacked injustice, exploitation, and selfishness. In the 1930s, after working as a book reviewer, press agent, play reader, and Hollywood scenarist, she began writing plays. Her dramas exposed some of the various forms in which evil appears—a malicious child’s lies about two schoolteachers (The Children’s Hour, 1934); a ruthless family’s exploitation of fellow townspeople and of one another (The Little Foxes, 1939, and Another Part of the Forest, 1946); and the irresponsible selfishness of the Versailles-treaty generation (Watch on the Rhine, 1941, and The Searching Wind, 1944). Criticized at times for her doctrinaire views and characters, she nevertheless kept her characters from becoming merely social points of view by writing credible dialogue and creating a realistic intensity matched by few of her playwriting contemporaries.. Hellman, a longtime supporter of leftist causes, detailed in Scoundrel Time (1976) her troubles and those of her friends with the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings during the 1950s. Hellman refused to give the committee the names of people who had associations with the Communist Party; she was subsequently blacklisted though not held in contempt of Congress. Her collected plays, many of which continued to be performed at the turn of the 20th century, were published in 1972.
Wendy Wasserstein (October 18, 1950 - January 30, 2006) In 1989, Wendy Wasserstein won the Pulitzer Prize for The Heidi Chronicles and was the first woman playwright to win a Tony Award. In 1973, Wasserstein joined the MFA program at The Yale School of Drama and was the only woman in the playwriting program. Her thesis, Uncommon Women and Others, depicting five women friends over several years, was produced at the Phoenix Theater in New York in 1977. Wasserstein devoted her career to depicting intelligent, talented, nuanced women, such as the protagonists of her 1992 The Sisters Rosensweig. While she is mainly known for her dramas, she also wrote three musicals, various comedy skits for the television series Comedy Zone, and essays published in the New Yorker, Esquire, Harper’s Bazaar, and other magazines.
Tony Kushner, born July 16, 1956, is an American dramatist who became one of the most highly acclaimed playwrights of his generation after the debut of his two-part play Angels in America (1990, 1991). . His early plays include La Fin de la Baleine: An Opera for the Apocalypse (1983), A Bright Room Called Day (1985), Yes, Yes, No, No (1985), and Stella (1987). His major work, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, consists of two lengthy plays that deal with political issues and the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s while meditating on change and loss—two prominent themes throughout Kushner’s oeuvre. The first part, Millennium Approaches (1990), won a Pulitzer Prize and a Tony Award for best play; the second, Perestroika (1991), also won a Tony Award for best play. Angels in America proved to be extremely popular for a work of its imposing length (the two parts run seven hours in total), and it was adapted for an Emmy Award-winning television film that aired in 2003. In addition to his work for the stage, Kushner contributed screenplays to Steven Spielberg’s films Munich (2005; cowritten with Eric Roth) and Lincoln (2012). Kushner also authored the children’s book Brundibar (2003; illustrated by Maurice Sendak) and coedited (with Alisa Solomon) the essay collection Wrestling with Zion: Progressive Jewish-American Responses to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (2003). He received the National Medal of Arts in 2013.
Paddy Chayefsky, (January 29, 1923 - August 1, 1981) an American playwright and screenwriter whose work was part of the flowering of television drama in the 1950s. He also wrote several critically acclaimed films. Chayefsky served during World War II in the U.S. Army. On his return to New York City, he worked as a printer’s apprentice, then began writing radio adaptations for Theatre Guild on the Air (1951–52) and mystery dramas for television series. His first full-length television play was Holiday Song (1952). His greatest success was Marty (1953), about the awakening of love between two plain people, a butcher and a schoolteacher. The film version in 1955 won four Academy Awards, including one for Chayefsky’s screenplay, and the Palme d’Or at the Cannes film festival. Two of his other television plays also were made into motion pictures: The Bachelor Party (1953; film 1957) and The Catered Affair (1955; film 1956). Another television drama, Middle of the Night (1954), became, in expanded form, Chayefsky’s first stage play and marked his Broadway debut (1956). His next two stage productions, The Tenth Man (1959) and Gideon (1961), were on religious themes and attacked contemporary cynicism, while The Passion of Josef D. (1964) was a treatment of Joseph Stalin and the Russian Revolution. Chayefsky also wrote numerous film scripts and scenarios. In addition to Marty, he received Academy Awards for his screenplays for The Hospital (1971), about a depressed chief of medicine in a hospital experiencing many inexplicable deaths, and Network (1976), a brilliant satire of network television.
Oscar Hammerstein II, (July 12, 1895 - August 23, 1960), an American lyricist, musical comedy author, and theatrical producer influential in the development of musical comedy and known especially for his immensely successful collaboration with the composer Richard Rodgers. . Between 1920 and 1959 he wrote all or part of about 45 musical dramas for stage, film, or television. Among Hammerstein’s best known early works are Rose Marie (1924; music by Friml); The Desert Song (1925; music by Romberg); and the Jerome Kern musicals Sunny (1925) and Show Boat (1927), which includes the perennial favorites, “Ol’ Man River” and “Only Make Believe.” He teamed with Richard Rodgers in creating Oklahoma! (1943; winner of the Pulitzer Prize, 1944), Carousel (1945), and South Pacific (1949; Pulitzer Prize in 1950), combining bright tunes with relatively sophisticated stories—a blend then unfamiliar to the stage but later widely adopted. Hammerstein’s lyrics are often marked by a simplicity and sensitivity perhaps best exemplified by “If I Loved You” (from Carousel). Rodgers and Hammerstein formed a music publishing firm, Williamson Music, Inc., and from 1949 were theatrical producers for their own works as well as for those of many others. Other musical comedies with Rodgers include The King and I (1951), The Sound of Music (1959), Flower Drum Song (1958), and the film State Fair (1945).Hammerstein won Academy Awards for the songs “The Last Time I Saw Paris” from Lady Be Good (1941) and “It Might as Well Be Spring” from State Fair (1945). In addition, he received three Tony Awards for South Pacific and one for The King and I.
Harvey Fierstein, (born June 6, 1954) is an American comedian, author, and playwright who is best known as the author of The Torch Song Trilogy, which centers on gay families. He often speaks out about gay rights issues. With a bachelor of fine arts degree (1973) he soon made a career in New York theatre and playwriting. He won a part at age 16 in Andy Warhol’s play Pork (1971; staged at La MaMa), Fierstein went on to perform in more than 60 productions, in which he often played roles in drag. In the late 1970s Fierstein wrote a trilogy of plays (The International Stud, Fugue in a Nursery, and Widows and Children First), eventually performed together as Torch Song Trilogy. Seen all at once on Broadway (1982), in a production starring the author himself, the trilogy proved to be a powerful, profoundly moving statement that took audiences into the then little-known world of gay families and their struggle for self-acceptance and love. After winning Tony Awards for acting and writing, Fierstein went on to appear in the 1988 screen version of Torch Song Trilogy. Fierstein’s Tony-winning book for the 1983 musical La Cage aux Folles (adapted from Jean Poiret’s play) continued to move gay issues into the mainstream. In 2003 Fierstein elicited rave reviews on Broadway for his exuberant cross-dressing performance in the hit stage musical version of Waters’ camp film Hairspray; he won his fourth Tony Award. He later appeared in Broadway revivals of Fiddler on the Roof and La Cage Folles. In addition, he wrote the librettos for the musicals A Catered Affair in which he also starred; Newsies, the Musical and Kinky Boots. . Fierstein also wrote and produced Casa Valentina, a play based on the true story of a group of heterosexual married men in the early 1960s who met on the weekends at a rundown resort in the Catskill Mountains of New York, where they could freely indulge in their shared desire to dress and act like women. He then wrote and starred in Bella Bella.. The monologue play was about U.S. politician Bella Abzug. Beyond Broadway, gay rights activists welcomed Fierstein’s commentaries in the early 21st century on the public television documentary series In the Life
Ben Hecht (February 28, 1894 – April 18, 1964) Hecht’s now-legendary partnership with fellow newspaperman Charles McArthur scored its first Broadway hit in 1928 with The Front Page, followed by Twentieth Century in 1932. He wrote copiously for both stage and screen throughout the ’30s. While this aspect of Hecht’s life has since been eclipsed by the immortality of his best plays and movies, for Americans paying attention to such things during the WWII era, Ben Hecht was one of the country’s most visible advocates for anti-fascist and pro-Jewish causes. Hecht donated his services as a proud propagandist, writing several newspaper editorials, speeches, and pamphlets, but he captured the most attention by turning to the theatre, conceiving of a spectacular pageant advertised as “A Mass Memorial Dedicated to the Two Million Jewish Dead of Europe.” We Will Never Die was first performed at Madison Square Garden on March 9, 1943, and in many ways was the nation’s first Holocaust drama. Hecht and Billy Rose, who served as “producer,” enlisted many fellow Jewish Broadway luminaries, actors of stage and screen, and a cast of literally hundreds of extras, including a chorus of exiled rabbis. Between two New York performances and a five-city national tour (during which Hecht added a scene depicting the recent Warsaw Ghetto uprising), the pageant reached large audiences and received even more exposure through press coverage in each city. As many later Hollywood activists would learn, Hecht knew that reporters pay more attention to your cause when celebrities are attached. “By aggressively calling attention to his people’s plight at a time when so many others were afraid to make waves, Hecht redefined what it meant to be an American Jew. “He wrote another theatrical pageant-drama, A Flag Is Born, it opened in the fall of 1946 (starring Paul Muni as an aged Holocaust survivor) for a four-month run on Broadway, followed by a national tour. (In Broadway annals it’s most famous for casting the pre-Streetcar Marlon Brando). Hecht’s political pursuits certainly paved the way for many subsequent followers of all backgrounds in the performing arts to similarly leverage their celebrity in the name of social justice.
Judith Malina (June 4, 1926 – April 10, 2015) Judith Malina won acclaim as an actress, director, and producer through the experimental Living Theatre she co-founded with her husband, Julian Beck, in 1948. Malina was praised for her avant-garde, political approach to directing. The Living Theatre toured the United States and France and performed street theater in Brazil before the company was expelled as incendiary. Malina used the theater for political awareness and action and advocated for the antiwar movement, Women Strike for Peace, and the Industrial Workers of the World. Malina also performed as an actress, wrote poetry, and taught at NYU and Columbia University. She received many honors for her work, including an Obie Award, the Paris Critics Circle medallion, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, and was inducted into the Theatre Hall of Fame in 200
Adolph Green (December 2, 1914 - October 23, 2002) Playwright, performer and lyricist Adolph Green and his partner Betty Comden constituted the writing team of Comden and Green that turned out lyrics, books, and screenplays for six decades of American hit musicals. At home primarily on Broadway (Wonderful Town 1953, Bells Are Ringing 1956, On the Twentieth Century 1978), they also spent years in Hollywood at MGM, producing film musicals like On the Town (1949), Singin’ in the Rain (1952), and The Band Wagon (1953)..Leonard Bernstein with his first great stage success, the ballet Fancy Free (1944), had plans to turn it into a Broadway musical. Bernstein approached Comden and Green to write the book and lyrics, which they were only too happy to do, taking the opportunity to include substantial parts in it for themselves. The smashing success of the result, On the Town (1944), encouraged them to follow with two more musicals, Billion Dollar Baby (music by Morton Gould, 1945) and Bonanza Bound (1947). They continued to work with MGM, writing screenplays for famous actors such as June Allyson, Peter Lawford, Ginger Rogers, and Fred Astaire. In the 1950s Comden and Green returned to Broadway, with the revue Two on the Aisle (1951) starring Bert Lahr and Dolores Gray, Wonderful Town (Tony Award®, Best Musical, 1953) with Rosalind Russell and Edie Adams as two Ohio sisters trying to find their way in the Big City, and Bells Are Ringing (Tony Award® nominee, Best Musical, 1957) starring Judy Holliday. With tunes like “Just in Time,” “Long Before I Knew You,” and “The Party’s Over,” this score proved to be among their finest and most popular. Say, Darling followed in 1958 (meanwhile they furnished the screenplay for the film version of Auntie Mame), and in the same year a revue called A Party with Betty Comden and Adolph Green brought them in person to the Broadway stage doing some of their early sketches; another version of it was mounted almost twenty years later. The next decades brought repeated triumphs on Broadway stages: Do Re Mi (Tony Award® nominee, Best Musical, 1961), Subways Are For Sleeping (1961), Fade Out – Fade In (1964), Hallelujah, Baby! (Tony Awards®, Best Composer and Lyricist, Best Musical, 1968), Applause (Tony Award®, Best Musical, 1970), Lorelei (1974), On the Twentieth Century (Tony Awards®, Best Book of a Musical, Best Original Score, 1978), a staged version of Singin’ in the Rain (Tony Award® nominee, Best Book of a Musical, 1986), and The Will Rogers Follies (Tony Award®, Best Original Score, 1991). Among other credits are six songs for Mary Martin’s Peter Pan (1954), a modernized Die Fledermaus for the Metropolitan Opera, and stage vehicles for Carol Burnett, Leslie Uggams, and Lauren Bacall. Comden and Green received Kennedy Center Honors in 1991.
Sholem Aleichem (February 18, 1859 – May 13, 1916) Born in Ukraine, Sholem Aleichem was a popular author, humorist, and playwright noted for his many Yiddish stories of life in the shtetl. He is one of the preeminent classical writers of modern Yiddish literature. Drawn to writing as a youth, he became a private tutor of Russian at age 17. He later served in the Russian provincial town of Lubny (now in Ukraine) as a “crown rabbi” (official record keeper of the Jewish population; despite the word rabbi, it was not a religious position). While at Lubny he began writing in Yiddish, though he earlier composed his articles in Russian and Hebrew. He published more than 40 volumes of novels, stories, and plays in Yiddish. (He also continued to write in Russian and Hebrew.) His works were widely translated, and he became known in the United States as “the Jewish Mark Twain.” He was the first to write in Yiddish for children. Adaptations of his work were important in the founding of the Yiddish Art Theatre in New York City, and the libretto of the musical Fiddler on the Roof (1964; film 1971) was adapted from a group of his Tevye the Dairyman stories, which have been translated many times over. Fiddler on the Roof was the first commercially successful stage production about Jewish life in Eastern Europ
Boris Aaronson (October 15, 1898 - November 16, 1980) As the son of the Grand Rabbi of Kiev, Ukraine, Boris enjoyed educational and cultural opportunities denied to most of the Jews of his time. He showed artistic talent early in childhood and took to calling himself “The Outlaw” because he was always looking for ways to escape from his large, traditional family. By the time of the Russian Revolution in 1917, he had found a mentor in Alexandra Exter, a Paris-trained artist who was one of the principal designers at the Moscow State Yiddish Theater (also known as the Kamerny Theatre). In 1922, he left Russia, moving first to Berlin and then on to New York, where he quickly established himself as a designer in the bustling Yiddish theater world. Of particular note are the sets he designed for multiple Yiddish Art Theater productions directed by Maurice Schwartz, including adaptations of STEMPENIU, THE FIDDLER in 1928 and ROAMING STARS in 1930 (both of which were based on stories by Sholem Aleichem). In the 1930s Aronson worked at the Group Theater with legendary figures such as Elia Kazan, Harold Klurman, and Clifford Odets. Then he moved up to Broadway, designing the original sets for many of the most famous dramas ever produced, including THE TIME OF YOUR LIFE (1939), CABIN IN THE SKY (1940), THE COUNTRY GIRL (1950), THE ROSE TATOO (1951), I AM A CAMERA (1951), THE CRUCIBLE (1953), A VIEW FROM THE BRIDGE (1955), BUS STOP (1955), and THE DIARY OF ANN FRANK (1955). After FIDDLER ON THE ROOF, in 1964, he formed a highly collaborative relationship with FIDDLER’s producer Harold Prince, eventually receiving four TONY awards for CABARET (1966), COMPANY (1970), FOLLIES (1971), and PACIFIC OVERTURES (1976). The last production Aronson worked on was a CBS performance of THE NUTCRACKER for Mikhail Baryshnikov in 1977. He died on November 16, 1980. Two days after his death, a new revival of FIDDLER opened in New York based on his original designs.
Jean Rosenthal (March 16, 1912 – May 1, 1969) Jean Rosenthal was a pioneer in theater lighting design, finding new aesthetics for dance performances and theater productions. “Light is quite tactile to me. It has shape and dimension.” Inspired by the paintings of Rembrandt and Monet, Rosenthal mastered the technical and poetic aspects of stage lighting. She used light’s form, color, and movement to express the intention of performance. Carefully integrating light into the overall texture of a piece, Rosenthal believed that “the most successful and brilliant work a lighting designer can do is usually the least noticeable.” Rosenthal studied at the Neighborhood Playhouse School and became enamored of the famed faculty member Martha Graham. She helped out with various aspects of production and technical work for Graham’s performances, then enrolled at Yale to gain more technical training. In 1938 she became a production assistant at Orson Welles’s Mercury Theater. She composed lighting for major Broadway plays including 1957’s West Side Story, 1960’s Becket, 1964’s Fiddler on the Roof, 1965’s The Odd Couple, and 1966’s Cabaret. She continued working with Graham throughout her career until her death, calling their collaborations a renewal of her interior spirit.
Stacey Becker
Governor for Membership
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