Jews on Broadway: An Historical Survey of Performers, Playwrights, Composers, Lyricists and Producers Read Online Free PDF

Thomashefsky’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
    Clearly, she was trained by one of the preeminent theatrical families.
    While she was to go on to great notoriety in English theater, Picon never forgot her roots.
    19
    Jews on Broadway
    THE PLAYHOUSES AND THE PLAYWRIGHTS
    Like popular television shows and mainstream mass-appeal movies, the shows of Yiddish theater were the premiere entertainment for the Jewish audience, rivaling Broadway at the box office.
    Six theaters were the most prominent of the many venues for Yiddish theater. In the Bowery, The Windsor, which opened in 1893, was the larg est, with a seating capacity of 3,500, dwarfing even the largest Broadway theaters of the time. The Windsor housed the most mainstream popular shows. The People’s Theater was a spacious 2,500-seater leased at the start of the 20th century by Thomashefsky. Adler managed the Grand Theater, a 2,000-seat venue featuring what Adler called “better theater,” meaning the more sophisticated plays adapted by Gordin.
    Another large theater was the Thalia, built in the 1880s holding 3,000
    theatergoers and featuring shows starring David Kessler. Each theater had its own repertory system presenting new shows on a regular basis, plus “benefits” for the stars and occasionally for charities. Prices were typically in the $.25 to $1.00 range for tickets, and the collective 11,000
    seats in these four prominent theaters were filled nearly every night.
    Two more prominent theaters would open in 1911 and 1912, north of the Bow ery on Second Avenue. The nearly 2,000 seat Second Avenue Theater was built for David Kessler. and the National, also roughly 2,000
    seats, was built for Boris Thomashefsky. At the time, these were the
    “state-of-the-art,” ele gant the aters that highlighted an area that would become known as the “Yid dish Broadway.” In fact, the opening of these theaters brought numerous dignitaries including the mayor of New York City, William Jay Gaynor, who might not have understood Yiddish, but nonetheless was on hand for the festive occasions.
    The sheer size of the theaters meant that a new show could be seen by many people in a short time. As a result, it also meant there was an ongoing demand for new material. The early light musicals of Goldfadn, Grodner and those emulating their style were one of several genres that marked the era. There were the “crowd pleasers” from the early years of Yiddish theater, which continued to draw large audiences as new waves of immigrants descended on the Lower East Side. The stories were simple and the songs brought back the spirit of their homeland.
    By contrast, there were Gordin’s “high-brow” dramatic plays, which 20
    1. Immigration, Yiddish Theater and Building Broadway would not only fuel the career of Jabob P. Adler, but also legitimize Yiddish theater for those who looked down upon it, calling the populist plays shund, a Yiddish word roughly meaning “trashy.” However, the term eventually came to describe the “commonplace” shows that appealed to the masses. Similarly, popular reality television shows today might be referred to by critics as a “shund” despite being money-making ventures with great mass appeal. It took time for the Jewish “intellectual elite” to accept Yiddish theater, which they considered to have more of a circus-like atmosphere than actual theater.
    While Gordin was more concerned with quality, there was a definite need for quantity. Playwrights Moyshe Hurwitz and Joseph Lateiner were two of the most prolific of the era, each writing hundreds of plays.
    Their works included melodramas, comedies, tragedies and lavish spec-tacles, sometimes all in the same play. They turned out plays like bakers turn out bread, and their craft became known as baking plays because it was similar to the process of shaping the dough, cooking it and repeating the same process again and again. The plays followed a few similar story lines and were baked hastily, sometimes