By Sarah Emily Gilbert
With 12 Tony Award nominations – including best musical – An American in Paris is taking Broadway by storm. An adaptation of the 1951 Vincente Minnelli movie, the Gershwin musical effortlessly captures the spirited attitude of Post-WWII Paris. Among a triad of ex-pats vying for a single woman is the quick-witted and sardonic character, Adam Hochberg. more
By Linda Arntzenius
Illustrations by Jorge Naranjo
“You won’t succeed on Broadway if you don’t have any Jews,” Eric Idle’s clever quip from Monty Python’s Spamalot never fails to elicit laughter from a Broadway audience. It’s long been taken for granted that the Broadway musical is a particularly Jewish success story. Idle’s observation was expressed decades earlier by none other than Cole Porter, the exemplar of Broadway song composers. Porter, who was not Jewish, was once asked how he would go about writing “American” music. “I’ll write good Jewish tunes,” he said.
Michael Kantor’s recent documentary, The Broadway Musical—A Jewish Legacy, celebrates the Jewish roots of this distinctly American form with a loving look at Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, George and Ira Gershwin, Lorenz Hart, Richard Rodgers, Oscar Hammerstein II, Kurt Weill, Sheldon Harnick, Jerry Bock, Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim, Stephen Schwartz, and Jule Styne, among many other giants of the Broadway stage. more
