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Episode 2 - Irving Berlin & The Immigrants That Invented Broadway

In this episode David Armstrong and special quest Albert Evans continue the amazing story of how Jewish, Irish and other immigrants invented the Broadway Musical -- including the immortal contributions of Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, McCarthy & Tierney, Eddie Cantor, Fanny Brice,, and Florenz Ziegfeld... Read More

31 mins
5/16/20

About

In this episode David Armstrong and special quest Albert Evans continue the amazing story of how Jewish, Irish and other immigrants invented the Broadway Musical -- including the immortal contributions of Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, McCarthy & Tierney, Eddie Cantor, Fanny Brice,, and Florenz Ziegfeld.

Transcript

[MUSIC]

Welcome to Broadway Nation: the podcast that tells the remarkable story of how Immigrant, Jewish, Queer, and Black artists invented the Broadway musical and how they changed America in the process. I'm David Armstrong and I call this episode "Yearning to Breathe Free: The Immigrants Who Created Broadway: Part 2.”

Our last episode ended with George M. Cohan and Victor Herbert establishing the two main genres of the Broadway musical: the musical comedy and the operetta. Now my co-host Albert Evans picks up the story.

Meanwhile, among the masses of desperately poor Jewish immigrants who packed the rag boats coming to America, was a five-year-old boy named Israel Beilin.

He was born in 1888 in a small shtetl near Russia's Siberian border, very much like the fictional town of Anatevka in Fiddler on the Roof. Only one memory of Russia would stick with him through his life: watching his family's house burn down during a pogrom as his mother held him and cried.

When he was five, the Beilins, fearing for their lives, joined the mass Jewish exodus to the United States, where he was destined to become Irving Berlin, America's songwriter laureate.

Now if you've seen the musical Ragtime, you know very well the world of Irving Berlin's childhood. Lower East Side push-cart peddlers and sweatshops, children dancing in the streets for pennies, large families crowded into airless tenements, not a promising beginning. But, like so many Jews of his generation, Berlin would go on to have a tremendous impact on American culture, and in many ways define what it means to be an American.

Young Izzy Beilin (he wasn't Irving Berlin yet) got a job selling newspapers, like in the musical Newsies. Izzy was one of those boys, but the few coins he brought home were not enough to pay for his keep. When he was thirteen, his father died, and not wishing to be a drain on the family economy, Izzy left home. He made the rounds of Bowery saloons singing for loose change, and although he didn't have much of a voice, he had plenty of energy and chutzpah, and he soon became a “song plugger.” Albert, help us understand what exactly was a “song plugger.”

Well, it can mean several different things, but in this case, sheet music publishers paid him to sit in a Vaudeville audience and applaud furiously for their songs, sometimes jumping up to spontaneously lead the crowd in a mass sing-a-long. The performers on stage would act very surprised, and audience members would purchase the sheet music. And because sound recording was still in its infancy, sheet music was the only way songwriters could make any money. Almost every home had a piano, and someone who could play at least moderately well, and in the evening the family would gather around and sing the latest tunes. That was their entertainment.

By 1907, Izzy had found a new job, as a singing waiter in a Chinatown dive. Now, a rival saloon was pulling in crowds with an Italian novelty song written by their pianist and their bouncer.

So, Izzy's boss commanded him and their pianist to write their own song, and they came up with a ditty they called “Marie from Sunny Italy,” and Albert, I bet you know how that song goes.

Well, I know how it begins at least.

[ALBERT SINGS] - “My sweet Marie from sunny Italy. Oh how I do love you. Say that you'll love me, love me too. Forever more I will be true.”

And so on and so forth.

They don't write them like that anymore.

They do not.

They didn't write them like that then.

It's really terrible. But somehow it got published, and on the title page our boy was credited as I. (the initial, I) Berlin. And this new name was carefully chosen really. It's close to his own name, but with a formal sort of Teutonic ring, which was very smart because the music business was run entirely by Germans.

Yes, and the song was enough of a success that Berlin decided to pursue songwriting full time, which took a lot more chutzpah, considering he couldn't read music and he could only play the piano in one key.

He wrote dozens of songs during this period, and he had some success. Then, in 1911, he wrote a snappy march, he fitted it out with lyrics and sold it to a producer who plugged it into his new show, which quickly flopped. But somehow the tune found its way to Al Jolson, the biggest star of the era who made it a hit. It sold half a million copies, then a million more, then two million, and with that one song, Irving Berlin became a songwriting superstar and a very wealthy young man.

[MUSIC]

Berlin made the transition from Tin Pan Alley to Broadway in 1914 with a full score for the show, Watch Your Step, which starred dancing sensations Vernon and Irene Castle.

Irving Berlin would go on to write 25 musicals and more than 1,000 songs, of which at least 100 have become standards: songs that have stayed alive in our culture, songs that you can't go to Starbucks without hearing.

Meanwhile, further uptown, another pioneering songwriter was coming of age. Jerome Kern was born in New York in Sutton Place, which at that time was the famous beer district. In contrast to Irving Berlin, Kern's parents were fairly prosperous, German-Jewish immigrants, and Kern received a substantial musical education, first at the New York College of Music, and later with private tutors in Germany and in England where he first began composing songs.

Jerome Kern returned to New York in 1904, and over the next decade he would contribute songs to more than two dozen Broadway musicals and revues. Now, musicals were so loosely put together in those days that they would often include tunes by various songwriting teams.

Then in 1914, Kern was hired to write just a few songs for a show called The Girl from Utah. This was the first musical about Mormons, although certainly not the most famous.

One of the songs in that show was called “They Didn't Believe Me,” and it would prove to be a groundbreaking step forward in the development of the Broadway musical.

[MUSIC]

The great singer Mel Tormé would later contend that when Jerome Kern composed this tune, he "invented the popular song."

Albert, explain to us what Mel's talking about, what made this song so revolutionary.

Well, most songs in those days were either "waltzes" in 3/4 time (one, two, three, one, two, three) or "marches" in 2/4 (like one, two). Like "I’m Yankee Doodle Dandy?”

Exactly. Everything was very peppy. Songs didn't really have room to expand lyrically, but Kern wrote “They Didn't Believe Me” in 4/4 time, which made a measure of music twice the length.

For example, if he had written it in 2/4 time, it might have gone…

[ALBERT SINGS AND SNAPS] – “and when I told them how beautiful you are, they didn't believe me.”

Not a lot of time to phrase and expand, whereas writing in 4/4 time, (one, two, three, four, one)…

[ALBERT SINGS AND SNAPS] – “and when I told them how beautiful you are”

You can actually make some notes a little bit longer, some a little bit shorter, and really phrase it according to the meaning of the song.

More like the way we talk.

The way we talk – it’s much more conversational. You're not just locked into this march rhythm, which makes the transition from the dialogue into the song so much more seamless.

Exactly.

It makes it much more… it belongs in a play more.

Really for the first time, the pace of the dialogue that precedes the song can now be carried into the song, because there's time to phrase both of them conversationally.

And this is, if I'm not wrong, the first love ballad in a musical written in 4/4 time.

Yeah, it is.

There are other types of songs written in 4/4, but they tended to be kind of jaunty, a little…

[ALBERT SINGS AND SNAPS] – “while strolling through the park one day (two, three, four).”

Which feels more like it's in two or something anyway.

It's still very locked into a rhythm.

So this 4/4 innovation of Jerome Kern’s really not only made the musical theater as we know it possible, but also pop music in general. People like Ella Fitzgerald do not feel like they're locked into what's written on the page. They can express themselves.

[MUSIC]

This song was a revelation to a 16-year-old aspiring musician named George Gershwin. He was attending his aunt's wedding at a New York hotel when the band began to play “They Didn't Believe Me” and George was completely captivated.

“Who wrote that?” he asked.

The answer inspired him to actually become a composer, and not for Tin Pan Alley, but just like Kern, for the stage.

Just a few years later, Gershwin was working as a rehearsal pianist on the Jerome Kern show, Miss 1917.

In collaboration with book writers and lyricists Guy Bolton and P.G. Wodehouse, Kern began a series of musicals at the intimate 299 seat Princess Theater. Because of the Princess Theater's small size, these productions aimed for an intimate and informal style of performance with plots and dialogue, that critics of the day favorably compared to those of well written non-musical plays. In fact, most of the Princess musicals were based on recently produced plays which provided a tangible framework for these musical versions to build upon. This established a pattern of musicals being based on pre-existing source material that would become standard practice for most musicals right up to this day.

And, because there were not enough seats at the Princess Theater to support star salaries, the writers could focus on telling coherent stories without having to tailor their shows to star performers who required their well-known personalities and abilities to be showcased.

In an interview from the period, Bolton explained what he and his collaborators were trying to accomplish: “Our musical comedies depend as much upon plot and the development of their characters for success, as upon their music, and they deal with subjects and peoples near to the audiences. We endeavor to make everything count. Every line, funny or serious, is supposed to help the plot continue to hold. Every song and lyric contribute to the action. The humor is based on situations, not interjected by comedians.”

These Princess Theater musicals - Very Good Eddie, Have a Heart, Oh Boy!, Leave it to Jane, and Oh Lady! Lady! - All of them were popular hits in their time, but they're almost never performed today. They had enormous influence, however, on the next generation of musical theater creators. For example, in addition to inspiring George Gershwin, 14-year-old Richard Rogers was so captivated by Kern's music, that he saw Very Good Eddie at least a dozen times.

It has been said that the Princess musicals began the shift between an era of musical theater that was dominated by producers and performers, to one in which the writers were the controlling force.

In many ways, the first two decades of the Broadway musical can be seen as a lively conversation and sometimes a fierce competition between the Irish, Jewish and as we will see in an upcoming episode, The African American Creators. Each of them were responding to and building on the inventions and the innovations of the others.

Hi, this is David Armstrong, and if you’re enjoying this episode, I strongly suspect that you’ll want to read my new book - Broadway Nation: How Immigrant, Jewish, Queer, and Black Artists Invented the Broadway Musical. Now, the official release date isn’t until July 24, but the book is on presale now at Amazon and everywhere books are sold. And, if you go to the publisher’s website, Bloomsbury.com, you can use this discount code (GLR BD8) for 20% off of my new book – Broadway Nation: How Immigrant, Jewish, Queer, and Black Artists Invented the Broadway Musical. Now, back to the show.

This period reached a climax when, in 1919, two first-generation Irish Americans, Joe McCarthy and Harry Tierney, created the biggest Broadway hit yet. It was called Irene.

[MUSIC]

Irene would run 675 performances, incredible for the time, far longer than any previous show, and 18 years would go by before another show could break its record.

What was it that made Irene so incredibly successful? Well, McCarthy and Tierney, along with their book writer James Montgomery, had incorporated all the best practices from the shows that came before it. Like the Princess Theater shows, Irene was based on a pre-existing play. The plot was a modern, rags-to-riches Cinderella story about a plucky Irish immigrant girl who falls in love with a wealthy Long Island society boy. And as the historian Ethan Morton has pointed out, her name is Irene O'Dair, which implies right from the start that she will dare to take a chance. She will dare to go out into the world and seize the day, like a female version of Cohan himself.

And Irene's songs are built on the templates that Kern, Berlin, Herbert and Cohan had established, and the songs are tied closely to the events of the story. The result is a delightful score which produced several hit songs, including the blockbuster “Alice Blue Gown.”

[MUSIC]

Irene was well crafted enough that even half a century later it could be resurrected in a hit Broadway revival, starring Debbie Reynolds during the nostalgia craze of the 1970s.

[MUSIC]

Now, Irene was McCarthy and Tierney's biggest Broadway hit, but it certainly was not their only one. During the teens, they worked together and sometimes in collaboration with Italian immigrant Jimmy Monaco to create a string of hit shows and timeless songs.

[MUSIC]

Of course, not all of the immigrants who went into the show business became composers, book writers, or lyricists. And writers were not even the only inventors of the musical. During this period actually, the producers and star performers had an equal, if not even greater impact on the content and style of musicals during this first decade.

In those days, producers were entrepreneurs who wielded total control over their shows and often oversaw every aspect of it. And although Broadway producers usually stay in the background, the names of three of the most powerful and successful early producers still have significant cultural currency more than a century later: Hammerstein, Shubert, and Ziegfeld.

Oscar Hammerstein I was born to German Jewish parents in an area of Prussia that's now part of Poland and he came to America in 1864. By the turn of the century, Oscar and his two sons Willie and Arthur, would create a theatrical empire that included twelve New York theaters where they became major producers of opera, vaudeville, musical comedy, and operetta. However, their greatest contribution to the musical theater is without a doubt Willie’s son Oscar Hammerstein II whose partnership with Richard Rogers 40 years later would lead the musical into its Golden Age.

The Shubert brothers, Sam, Jacob, and Lee, were Russian Jews who emigrated to America as children in 1882. By 1900 they had leased their first New York theater, the Harold Square, and within a few years they would own or control 31 Broadway theaters and 63 more in other cities all across the country. To keep their theaters filled, the Shubert brothers produced more than 500 plays and musicals. Even today, the Shubert organization remains the largest theater owner on Broadway.

Last, but certainly not least, Florence Ziegfeld was born in Chicago in 1867, the child of German and Belgian immigrants. Today, more than 80 years after his death, Ziegfeld is still arguably the most famous producer in the history of Broadway. His illustrious name and legendary creation, The Ziegfeld Follies, still epitomized Broadway at its most spectacular and glamorous. He mounted his first Follies in 1907, and produced a new edition every year through 1927.

These dazzling, extravagant musical revues showcased the most brilliant performers, the most beautiful showgirls, and the most captivating new hit songs of the day. With his impeccable taste and incredible gift for publicity, Ziegfeld has often been called “the greatest showman the theater will ever know.”

[MUSIC]

All of the top songwriters of the era, Herbert, Kern, McCarthy and Tierney contributed numerous songs to multiple incarnations of the Follies. Irving Berlin wrote the music and lyrics for nine editions, including this song, which became the Follies’ virtual theme song.

[MUSIC]

Perhaps even more than the producers, the star performers of that era can be considered just as important to the creation of the musical as the writers. Musicals were designed and built as showcases for the specific talents and dynamic personas of these stars. Almost all of the shows in those days are what we would call today “star vehicles.”

The biggest star of the era was without a doubt Al Jolson. He was born Asa Jolson in Lithuania and in 1891, at the age of five, he emigrated with his father (who was a rabbi and cantor) to New York City. Jolson made his Broadway debut in a show called La Belle Paree in 1911 at The Winter Garden and instantly established himself as a major Broadway attraction. The Shuberts quickly signed him to a seven-year contract and in almost every season from 1912 to 1921, they produced a new musical comedy built around and tailored to Jolson's dynamic talents.

[MUSIC]

The other great star of the era was Fanny Brice.

[MUSIC]

Born on the Lower East Side of New York, her parents were Hungarian, German, Jewish immigrants. She would headline ten editions of The Ziegfeld Follies, and 50 years later be immortalized as the central character in the Broadway and film musical Funny Girl.

[MUSIC]

Comic Ed Wynn was born in Philadelphia. His father was from Bohemia and his mother was Romanian and Turkish and came from Istanbul.

He made his debut in the Follies of 1914 and worked for both Ziegfeld and the Shubert's in a series of star vehicles for several decades.

There are also no recordings of Ed Wynn's Broadway performances, but his distinctive comic persona was captured perfectly when he played Uncle Albert in the original Mary Poppins film.

[MUSIC]

Jolson's greatest rival was Eddie Cantor. Born in 1892, in New York, he was the son of Russian Jewish immigrants. He made his Broadway debut in The Ziegfeld Follies of 1917 and would go on to star in 15 Broadway musicals and revues.

[MUSIC]

This unlikely collection of immigrants, Irish, German and Jews from all over Eastern Europe, many of them starting out destitute, uneducated and with English as their second language somehow became the writers, producers and performers who invented what would soon become America's signature art form: The Broadway Musical.

[MUSIC]

Broadway Nation is written and produced by me, David Armstrong. My co-host on this episode was the wonderful Albert Evans. Our recording technician is the indispensable Nick Tarabini and special thanks to preeminent voice actor Jeff Hoyt and to the entire team at the Voice of Vashon 101.9 KVSH on beautiful Vashon Island, Washington.

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