New York’s Yiddish Theater: From the Bowery to Broadway ed. by Edna Nahshon

Abstract

MUSICAL THEATER AND OPERA New York's Theater: From the Bowery to Broadway. Edited by Edna Nahshon. New York: Columbia University Press, in association with the Museum of the City of New 2016. [328 p. ISBN 9780231176705 (hardcover), $40; ISBN 9780231541077 (e-book), $39.99.] Illustrations, bibliography, index.Yiddish theater arrived in New York in 1882 while still in its infancy. Just six years earlier, Ukrainian-born Abraham Goldfaden (1840-1908) had established a theater company in Iasi, Romania. His operetta The Sorceress was the first in a long series of dramas, melodramas, comedies, operettas, and musicals that lit up the stages on New York's Second Avenue for some seventy-five years. At its height in the 1920s, more than a dozen theaters on the city's Lower East Side and in the outer boroughs attracted thousands of attendees per week to shows ranging from high-class Shakespeare translations to the basest vaudevilles.By the 1950s, the Holocaust in Europe and assimilation in the United States combined to reduce potential audiences to the point that theater pretty much died out in the following decade. All that was left was for the actors, producers, writers, and composers to write their memoirs, for scholars to write histories of a glorious past, for companies to undertake the rare revival-and for Edna Nahshon to mount a superb exhibit that also resulted in the book under review. Much more than a mere byproduct or companion to the exhibit, New York's Theater serves as an excellent history through images, together with illuminating essays by Nahshon herself and other scholars.The greatest value offered by the book lies in its three hundred illustrations, many in color, drawn primarily from material at the Museum of the City of New with contributions from the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, the Library of Congress, and other sources. In addition to many photographs of theater stars, we find reproductions of posters, programs, scenes from shows, sheet music, set designs, costumes, and costume designs. There are photos of theaters and of important historical events, such as crowds of mourners lining the streets for the funeral of actor Jacob P. Adler (pp. 20-21).In the chapter Overture: From the Bowery to Broadway, Nahshon provides a fact-filled capsule history of the theater. She ends the essay by quoting director Robert Sanford Brustein, who suggested that the essence of theater lives on today in the work of Carl Reiner, Mel Brooks, Neil Simon, and Woody Allen (p. 44), to which she adds Donald Margulies and Tony Kushner (p. 48), and I would add Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick.In the chapter Yiddish New York, Hasia Diner briefly tells the story of speakers' arrival in the city beginning in the 1870s. Nahma Sandrow, author of the comprehensive Vagabond Stars: A History of Theater (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1996), contributed the chapter Popular Theater: Music, Melodrama, and Operetta in which one of the more curious reproductions is that of a poster depicting the non-Jewish African-American Thomas LaRue in full cantorial regalia. The text on the poster identifies him as Tevye, the Black Cantor, the Greatest Wonder of the World (p. …