As the 20th century reached its midpoint, tunesmiths moved elsewhere. (The Brill Building, famously home to later generations of songwriters, is just north of Times Square.) Old buildings came down while new ones went up, and our portion of West 28th is now a bustling commercial hodge-podge bookended by the flower district to the west and the perfume district to the east. To learn more about our new neighborhood—where Emma Goldman founded her anarchist magazine, too, and Zero Mostel had a painting studio—Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry spoke to Jim Mackin, a New York City historian and tour guide, about West 28th Street, how specialized commercial districts come into being, and Irving Berlin’s first big hit. [Running time: 16:17.]

There is, of course, another striking fact about this creation story, and about the whole history of the modern musical as Stempel tells it. This Midwestern epic, which seemed to capture the country’s most idealized image of itself—this story about cowboys and farmers, with names like Curly and Laurey and Jud—was being created in New York City by two Jews, with names like Hammerstein and Rogazinsky (Anglicized to Rodgers by the composer’s grandfather). No wonder they felt the importance of “integration” so keenly: What was Oklahoma! if not a triumph of integration, not just artistic but social and psychological? (David Lehman makes a similar point in Nextbook Press’s A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs.)

Stempel does not tell the history of the Broadway musical as a Jewish story, and of course it is not simply a Jewish story. It is also a black story, and an Irish story, and a gay story, which is another way of saying that it is an American story. For Stempel, it all begins in the mid-19th century, when shows like Uncle Tom’s Cabin and The Black Crook combined theatrical spectacle, moral uplift, and frank eroticism to create a new kind of popular sensation. All of these elements, Stempel shows, would remain at the core of Broadway’s DNA, and the tension among them was the force propelling the musical’s rapid evolution. Throughout its history, the people who made shows and the people who watched them would debate the proper proportions of sophistication and vulgarity; but the best musicals have always had at least some of each. Try to make the musical a purely artistic form, and you end up with shows like Porgy and Bess or Candide or Assassins—all of which flopped on their first appearance and have lived subsequently in opera houses or on cast albums, not on Broadway.

Shows devoid of any artistic ambition, on the other hand, have made their money and disappeared. Today, the songs that Cole Porter and the Gershwins and Rodgers and Hart wrote for Broadway in the 1920s and 1930s are “standards,” constituting the American Songbook. But no one revives the shows themselves, which were too silly and dispensable to last. How many people who know the Gershwins’ yearning love song “Lady Be Good” know anything about the show in which it appeared, Lady, Be Good!, which ran for 10 months in 1924-25? Stempel is one of the rare ones, and his summary of the show explains the problem: “a brother-sister team of vaudevillians become ever more deeply entangled in high society … until the heroine saves her brother from penury and a loveless marriage by impersonating a Mexican heiress.” The original would have been worth seeing, since it starred Fred and Adele Astaire, but no one is calling for a revival.

That marks the main difference between Broadway before Oklahoma! and Broadway after Oklahoma!. It is the shows of the Golden Age, from the 1940s through the 1960s, that are still cherished and revived. Rodgers and Hammerstein followed their breakthrough with Carousel, South Pacific, The King and I, and The Sound of Music. Porter wrote the music for Kiss Me, Kate, and Irving Berlin for Annie Get Your Gun; Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe wrote My Fair Lady, Camelot, and Brigadoon. Then there’s West Side Story, Guys and Dolls, Gypsy, and How To Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, to name just a few of the biggest hits. Reading Stempel’s accounts of these shows and the people who made them—he focuses mainly on the writers, with occasional sidelights on important producers and directors—leaves no doubt that the Broadway musical was one of the great phases of American popular culture, like jazz before it and rock and roll afterward.

This Golden Age is usually said to have come to an end with Fiddler on the Roof, by Sheldon Harnick and Jerry Bock, which premiered in 1964 and ran on Broadway for an astonishing seven years. Is it a coincidence that this show, the most explicitly Jewish musical ever written, is the one that marked the end of an era? Writing about Fiddler, Stempel comes as close as he ever does to wondering about the Jewishness of the Broadway musical as a form:

Not only were Jews as a group involved in virtually all aspects of Broadway show business—creating, producing, disseminating, and consuming shows—but Broadway culture itself was regularly perceived as somehow Jewish in character. Indeed, the “disproportionate” Jewish presence in, on, and around Broadway altogether became a topic of interest in many discussions of twentieth-century American popular culture.

The cautious quotation marks around “disproportionate” are understandable—here, as in discussions of Hollywood, the observation that Jews have a large role in creating American culture can sometimes lead to ugly suggestions that they have too large a role. But the proportion of Jews among the makers of Broadway’s Golden Age is more than striking: Of the shows mentioned above, all but one were written by Jews. (The exception is Kiss Me, Kate, with music by Cole Porter. It is a nice example of Broadway’s alchemy that Porter, a WASP born in Indiana, became the most urbane and sophisticated, the most quintessentially “New York,” of all Broadway composers.)

It would be interesting to know what proportion of the Broadway audience, in the years 1940-1970, was also Jewish. Stempel is generally uninterested in economic and demographic questions—he is writing about the works of Broadway, not how Broadway works—and there may be no way of finding out the answer. But it is noteworthy that Broadway’s Golden Age coincided exactly with the period of American Jews’ rise into the middle class and the professions, and with the migration of New York’s Jews from the Lower East Side and Brooklyn to Long Island and Westchester—the prosperous suburbs, from which they could return for dinner and a show in Times Square.

Seeing Broadway’s classics as shows written by Jews for a largely Jewish audience does not make them parochial, or restrict their appeal to American and, indeed, international audiences. (When Fiddler went to Tokyo, Stempel writes, a Japanese producer asked the book-writer, Joseph Stein, “whether they actually understood Fiddler on the Roof in America,” because “it’s so Japanese!”) But it’s possible that, again as with Hollywood movies, Broadway musicals had such a universal appeal precisely because they were the product of Jews imagining their way into American life—a kind of imagining with worldwide resonance in the American century.

Certainly it is striking how many of the Golden Age musicals deal with exactly the subjects that most concerned American Jews in the postwar era, when the aftermath of the Holocaust and the early Civil Rights Movement put Jews at the forefront of struggles for racial and social justice. From Rodgers and Hammerstein’s South Pacific, with its anti-racist anthem “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught,” to West Side Story, with its vision of love struggling against prejudice, to Finian’s Rainbow, in which a leprechaun turns a racist Southern senator into a black man, the Broadway musical was drawn to a liberal vision of integration and brotherhood.

That this vision, and the music that expressed it, were never too challenging or too adventurous—that the musical happily used leprechauns to make a point about tolerance—is a reminder that Broadway was always a business first, and the musical always a popular art. If it is no longer very popular today—if jukebox musicals and mega-spectacles have left only a little space for good original shows (like the recent Grey Gardens)—this is not necessarily because, as the usual charge sheet has it, the writers of musicals have retreated into a Sondheimesque intellectuality and abrasiveness. Near the end of the book, Stempel quotes Jason Robert Brown, one of the acclaimed but not quite popular composers hailed as “Sondheim’s children”: “A commercially successful show is, by some definitions, a better work.” On Broadway, Showtime makes clear, a masterpiece isn’t a masterpiece unless it’s a hit.

Rufus Wainwright opened the show, in the Allen Room at Lincon Center, with its wall of windows overlooking Columbus Circle and Central Park, with a soulful rendition of Irving Berlin’s “Let’s Face the Music and Dance.” He was backed by a 14-piece band, playing sultry nightclub arrangements of a dozen pop standards behind not just Wainwright but also Shannon McNally, Jenni Muldaur, Van Dyke Parks, and Christine Olmann, who brought the house down belting a loungey arrangement of Arlen and Koehler’s “Stormy Weather” in a flowing pink ’60s dress and a towering bouffant of blonde hair.

But even bigger names played, too. Sting proved himself a master of the songbook, delivering plaintive, moving renditions of George and Ira Gershwin’s “Love Is Here to Stay” and, later, “”Someone to Watch Over Me.” And none other than Lou Reed showed up to close the show with a hard-rocking, guitar-and-drums-heavy take on Arlen and Johnny Mercer’s “One For My Baby (and One More For the Road).”

All photos by Dese’Rae Stage:

Wainwright with David Lehman, author of the Nextbook Press book A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs.

Photos from “I Gotta Right To Sing The Blues?” Music and readings from A Fine Romance, at The Allen Room, Frederick P. Rose Hall, Home of Jazz at Lincoln Center, Broadway at 60th Street, New York City.

“I Gotta Right To Sing the Blues?”—a concert inspired by Lehman’s book, produced by Hal Willner, and starring Rufus Wainwright and others—takes place tomorrow night at Manhattan’s Lincoln Center.

American Classics With a Yiddish Accent [Soundcheck]
A Fine Romance [Nextbook Press]

Related: Lehman serves up an American songbook playlist

A Fine Romance

Brian Wilson’s New Partner: George Gershwin [NYT]

“The Lady is a Tramp,” music by Richard Rodgers, lyrics by Lorenz Hart. It’s probably my favorite Rodgers and Hart song—though there’s a lot of competition, and it’s fierce. “The Lady is a Tramp” is a perfect example of Hart’s wit on the one side and Rodgers’s gift for up-tempo melodies on the other. Hart’s irony is such that not everyone who loves this great song presumes to understand it, so here’s a quick primer: the song defies the classy “lady” by listing some of the ways she defies convention and stereotype—and thus is a “tramp” in the eyes of fakes and phonies. She is a down-home gal, happy with common things—the rowing in Central Park lake, the beach at Coney Island—who disdains slumming and idle gossip: “Won’t go to Harlem in ermine and pearls, / Won’t dish the dirt with the rest of the girls.” The Frank Sinatra version from his 1957 record A Swingin’ Affair (or from the soundtrack of the 1957 movie Pal Joey) is the preferred choice here.

“Nice Work If You Can Get It,” music by George Gershwin, lyrics by Ira Gershwin. One of two joyous Gershwin and Gershwin songs that punctuate their celebration of love with the same rhetorical question: “Who can ask for anything more?” (The other song is “I Got Rhythm.”) I have a particular affection for Mel Torme’s version, which he recorded with the Marty Paich “Dek-Tette” in November 1956. Torme sings the verse—usually given at the start of the song—in the middle, as a second bridge. It contains Ira Gershwin’s immortal couplet: “The only work that really bring enjoyment / Is the kind that is for girl and boy meant.”

“All the Things You Are,” music by Jerome Kern, lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein. There are so many fine renditions it’s hard to know which to recommend: Helen Forrest’s voice mingling sexily with Artie Shaw’s clarinet in 1939; Sinatra reaching vocal heights on a V-disc in 1944; Beverly Sills pouring forth like Keats’s nightingale in 1973; the late John McGlinn giving it the full operatic treatment on his Broadway Showstoppers album of 1993. “Popular songs are subject to constant interpretation,” as Mel Torme has noted, and “All the Things You Are” works as a big-band tune, a pretext for bop improvisation, a ballad, an aria, or a big chorus number developing out a duet. Many consider it the all-time greatest love song. What makes it such? The soaring melody, the harmonic complexities and daring shifts of key, the marriage of the music and the words, the lyrics that express longing and epitomize the ode in praise of one’s sought-for partner. Hammerstein wasn’t very proud of “that moment divine” toward the end: “Someday I’ll know that moment divine / When all the things you are, / Are mine.” The need to rhyme forced the inversion of usual word order. Yet somehow even this poetical outburst enhances the sublime effect.

“Stormy Weather,” music by Harold Arlen, lyrics by Ted Koehler. When Arlen and Koehler wrote and played their songs as house musicians for the Cotton Club in Harlem, they created such standards as “Get Happy,” “I’ve Got the World on a String,” “Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea.” In “Stormy Weather,” they came up with the signature songs of two great singers, Lena Horne and Ethel Waters. It is a lament for a lost love, but it has an unusual spiritual quality. “All I do is pray / The Lord above will let me / Walk in that sun once more.” The music manages to make you feel the sadness of the moment and the promise of that moment redeemed. “Stormy Weather” is at or near the top of meteorological love songs, a surprisingly populous category.

“Let’s Face the Music and Dance,” music and lyrics by Irving Berlin. Every time you think that you can sum up Irving Berlin—with his “simplicity” and his “common touch” and his unabashed sentimentality—along comes a song of such melodic complexity and melancholy mood that makes you understand why George Gershwin likened Berlin to Franz Schubert. “Let’s Face the Music and Dance,” from 1936, is a song very much of its moment: dark days of bankruptcy and unemployment, with threatening signals of strife to come in Europe. The song is both an invitation to the dance and a variant on the theme of carpe diem: “There may be trouble ahead, / But while there’s music and moonlight and love and romance,” what else can we do but “face the music”—in a double sense—“and dance.” Fred Astaire sings it to Ginger Rogers in Follow the Fleet (1936).

“Over the Rainbow,” music by Harold Arlen, lyrics by Yip Harburg. “Over the Rainbow” as sung by the teenage Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz (1939) tops most all-time lists of favorite songs in Hollywood movies. The Technicolor vision of Oz that commences after Garland sings the song in black-and-white occurs not only as a magical answer to her vast yearning prayer but as an allegorical representation of the fantasized end of the Depression. If, following the song from the soundtrack, you listen to Judy sing “Over the Rainbow” in her famous Carnegie Hall concert of April 23, 1961, you’ll enrich your experience of this most famous of Arlen’s songs.

“There’s No Business Like Show Business,” music and lyrics by Irving Berlin. Originally, Jerome Kern was commissioned to write Annie Get Your Gun. When Kern died in 1945, the producers turned to Irving Berlin, who wrote a major score in half the usual time. A peerless mix of humor and sentiment, its anthem, “There’s No Business Like Show Business,” quickly became the ultimate Broadway anthem. (Its most formidable competition is “That’s Entertainment” by Arthur Schwartz and Howard Dietz.) Berlin’s song will always be associated with Ethel Merman, queen of the ladies who can belt to the back row without no need of artificial magnification. There’s a 1954 Hollywood movie called There’s No Business Like Show Business starring Merman, Donald O’Connor, Marilyn Monroe, Mitzi Gaynor, Johnny Ray, and Dan Dailey: all Berlin songs, and when everyone assembles to do the title number, you’ll want to sing along.

“A Fine Romance,” music by Jerome Kern, lyrics by Dorothy Fields. Ginger Rogers sings it to Fred Astaire, but the version I fell in love with is Billie Holiday’s from the 1930s. It’s a sarcastic love song. We may be used to the genre of the lover’s complaint, but it usually comes from the man, and this one is from the female point of view and has a top-drawer Dorothy Fields lyric, “You’re calmer than the seals in the Arctic Ocean. / At least they flap their fins to express emotion.”

“Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend,” music by Jule Styne, lyrics by Leo Robin. Carol Channing performed this song from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes superbly on stage, and Channing’s remains the definitive version, though Marilyn Monroe’s seductive delivery in the movie leaves little to be desired. Jule Styne is a master of the big brassy Broadway number and Leo Robin’s lyrics are unbeatably witty and smart. The triple rhymes come at you fast: a guy may think you’re “awful nice/ but get that ‘ice’ or else no dice.” Never has the adult male aptitude for irresponsible philandering been stated with such melodious gusto: “He’s your guy / When stocks are high, / But beware when they start to descend. / It’s then that those louses / Go back to their spouses.”

“I Can’t Get Started,” music by Vernon Duke, lyrics by Ira Gershwin. It’s that evergreen story: I have conquered worlds but not, alas, your heart. The music is marvelous, and the lyric is an outstanding instance of the inventory as a lyrical form, listing the singer’s diverse accomplishments yet ruefully concluding that he (or she) is downhearted for the simple reason that “I can’t get started with you.” Ira Gershwin’s gift for polysyllabic rhyme is on heroic display: “Oh, tell me why / Am I no kick to you? / I, / Who’d always stick to you? / Fly / Through thin and thick to you? / Tell me why I’m taboo!” Frank Sinatra’s cover on the 1959 album No One Cares) wins my vote for capturing the song’s melancholy. But you might prefer the jovial duet of Bing Crosby and Rosemary Clooney under Billy May’s direction in August 1958.

On November 10, David Lehman will speak at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan. To purchase tickets for this event, click here.