By coincidence, two musicals with overtly Jewish themes have recently been revived on the New York stage: Harmony (music by Barry Manilow), which first opened in 1997 but is now having its Broadway debut, and I Can Get It for You Wholesale (music and lyrics by Harold Rome), which first appeared in the 1960s. Adam Kirsch examine what both reveal about American Jews’ preoccupations:
So much of American Jewish popular culture sets out to shame the audience in this way that we must have a communal appetite for it. Setting aside movies like Schindler’s List (“I could have got more out. I could have got more,” Schindler berates himself) and novels like The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (“Here he was, free in a way that his family could only dream of, and what was he doing with his freedom?” thinks the young refugee Kavalier in World War II New York), the best Jewish musicals have always made audiences feel good by feeling bad. In Fiddler on the Roof, the wedding of Tzeitel and Perchik, set to the bittersweet tune of “Sunrise, Sunset,” ends in a pogrom—a plot point copied in Harmony, in which a double wedding in a synagogue is shattered by Nazi vandalism. In Parade, the Jason Robert Brown musical about the lynching of Leo Frank, Leo goes to his death in the final scene with the sh’ma on his lips, like generations of Jewish martyrs.
Read more on Jewish Review of Books: https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/the-arts/15623/reprise-of-the-repressed/