Re: Musicals/Jewish content: More replies to Alex

[music <music...>]

Alex wrote:

   I'm also a little rusty on this one, but the original Broadway
   production of Oklahoma included a star of the Yiddish theatre (can't
   recall who it was) in the role of the Persian traveling salesman, Ali
   Hakim.  Apparently, he'd played the role very Yiddishly for comic
   effect.

Joseph Buloff was the Yiddish theater star who was in the original cast of
OKLAHOMA! (which has an exclamation point in its title, I'm now noticing,
just like my CD, OPEN THE GATES!)

Alex also wrote:

   I've also heard that an early draft of West Side Story had one of the
   gangs being Jewish.  Frankly, that boggles the mind, not that there
   were never Jewish gangs, but it's hard to imagine one in that show.

I knew I had read that somewhere, too.  From the notes to the Smithsonian's
recording(s) AMERICAN MUSICAL THEATER;  SHOWS, SONGS, AND STARS, by one
Dwight Blocker Bowers:

"Jerome Robbins's original title was EAST SIDE STORY for his modern
retelling of ROMEO AND JULIET.  The warring houses of Shakespeare's tragedy
became feuding families of Catholics and Jews on Manhattan's Lower East
Side during the Easter-Passover season.  Leonard Bernstein and Arthur
Laurents shared Robbins's enthusiasm for the idea, but artistic differences
and previous commitments led to a temporary abandonment of the project.  In
1954, nearly six years after their first planning sessions, Laurents and
Bernstein found a more appropriate contemporary metaphor in a series of LOS
ANGELES TIMES articles about teenage Anglo-Hispanic warfare.  Robbins
approved their changes and enthusiastically resumed work on the
adaptation...."


--Robert Cohen




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