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New show highlights social consciousness of Broadway musicals
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Reviewed by FRAN HELLER, Contributing Writer
Most people think of Broadway musicals as great entertainment.
Less well known is how the popular American genre has served as a potent force for social change.
To illustrate the latter, musical theater maven Bill Rudman has created a new show appropriately called "Let Freedom Ring! The social conscience of the American musical.” Its world première jumpstarts the 2006-07 season at Ensemble Theatre, Sept. 1-17.
Conceived by Rudman with Cleveland playwright Eric Coble, the two-hour show will feature 40 songs spanning 75 years of musical theater history. Legendary composers include George and Ira Gershwin, Yip Harburg, Irving Berlin, and Frank Loesser.
Ninety percent of the composers represented in the show are Jewish. Most were either immigrants or the sons and daughters of immigrants.
"The interest of Jewish songwriters in socially conscious writing is a direct outgrowth of the immigrant experience,” explains Rudman.
Yip Harburg (1896-1981) is a case in point. The son of Russian Jewish immigrants, Harburg grew up in a tenement on New York's Lower East Side. It's the Irving Berlin story all over again, only ten years later, notes Rudman.
Harburg was raised on the Yiddish-language socialist paper The Forward. He also discovered the New York Public Library, which was so much warmer than his New York tenement, adds Rudman.
"Let Freedom Ring” has had a long gestation process.
The late 1960s and early 1970s was a period of great social ferment in the US. Rudman, who was then a student at Hiram College and already hooked on musical theater, was discovering a whole tradition of social protest in the Broadway genre, including the songs of Harburg and the political satires created by the Gershwin brothers in the late 1920s and early 1930s.
Discovery of such "edgy, satirical, moving and defiant material” (Rudman's words) was a personal revelation to the burgeoning musical-theater buff. He determined that someday he would put it all together.
That first opportunity came to pass in 1998 when Rudman was working at Great Lakes Theater Festival as education director.
GLTF wanted to do a big community-wide project on musical theater, and Rudman suggested a cabaret-type program that would bring the social conscience of the musical together. The show "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” toured 28 community venues, including the Jewish Community Center, and proved a hit.
An expanded version was next presented at Ensemble Theatre in its 1999-2000 season. It, too, was successful.
The show has metamorphosed from its cabaret origins into a story-driven theater piece, explains Rudman.
Eric Coble, whom Rudman describes as a "brilliant satiric playwright,” created the script for Rudman's material. Choreography and musical staging are by David Shimotakahara, artistic director of GroundWorks Dancetheater, and his dancer/choreographer wife Pandora Robertson.
The production, in association with Baldwin-Wallace College Music Theater Program, is directed by Eric Schmiedl with musical direction by the gifted Nancy Maier at the keyboard. Major funders include Peter B. Lewis, Susan L. Cohen, and The Cleveland Foundation.
The four vocalists in the show are all juniors in Victoria Bussert's Baldwin-Wallace musical theater program. A fifth, older character is being played by Mick Houlahan, a former Cleveland actor now based in Chicago.
The story is about this older character's attempt to pass the torch of social activism to a younger generation. The songs, rather than plot or dialogue, drive the multimedia presentation, explains Rudman.
Song medleys are clustered around various themes. These include the environment, intolerance and the economic gap between rich and poor. An example of the last is the song, "When the Idle Poor Become the Idle Rich” from "Finian's Rainbow,” written by Harburg and Burton Lane. This 1947 song resonates with Doonesbury creator Gary Trudeau's 1986 song, "It's the Right Time to be Rich” in the musical "Doonesbury” written four decades later.
The motivating force behind creating this show is Rudman's musical theater hero Harburg. Quoting Harburg, Rudman says, "Songs are the not-so-secret weapon that fights social injustice.”
Harburg's great 1932 song "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” which is included in the show, became the anthem of the Great Depression, says Rudman. According to the composer, that song helped get FDR elected. That song is important, explains Rudman, because the man or woman who is singing it is asking a profound question: "Why isn't the person who is producing the nation's wealth sharing in (that) wealth?”
While some songs and shows are instantly recognizable, others are less so.
Most people will recognize the song from Rodgers and Hammerstein's 1949 musical "South Pacific” on intolerance and how "You've got to be taught before it's too late,/ Before you are six or seven or eight,/ To hate all the people your relatives hate.”
Perhaps less known is Jerry Herman's song on the environment from his 1969 musical, "Dear World”: "There will be a sweet taste in the air. From industrial waste in the air,/ And your eyelids will smart from the sting of the smog in/ The spring of next year.”
Or, consider Ira Gershwin's brilliantly satirical and prescient lyrics about war in a song from the 1927 show "Strike Up the Band.” "We're in a bigger, better war/ For your patriotic pastime./ We don't know what we're fighting for,/ But we didn't know the last time.”
Rudman's favorite song is in the 1963 show "The Silent Spring” by Harold Arlen and Yip Harburg, written soon after the murder of Medgar Evers. It was performed by Lena Horne at Carnegie Hall following Martin Luther King's assassination in 1968.
The lyrics cry out for social change. "Children hide and roses tremble/Doors are dark and shades are down,/ And the rains of hate rust the garden gate/ As the ghost of spring stalks the town.”
The oldest song is "Strike Up the Band” (1927); the latest is from Jonathan Larson's posthumous 2001 musical "Tick Tick Boom.”
Rudman thinks his is the first musical-theater piece dealing with the issue of social consciousness. The family-oriented show is for high school and above, he says.
There is a missionary zeal behind Rudman's erudition and passion.
"I want people to come out of the theater saying, ‘Wow, the power of song. I feel like calling the ACLU tomorrow and see what I can do ... I feel like calling a political candidate's office and see what I can do ... How can I turn all of these feelings and thoughts I've just had into trying to be a force for change?'
"We hope these songs will wake up an audience in a new way and wake up several generations of an audience in a new way,” Rudman concludes.
"Let Freedom Ring!” will be produced by Ensemble Theatre at The Cleveland Play House's Brooks Theatre Sept. 1-17. Tickets: 216-321-2930.
Most people think of Broadway musicals as great entertainment.
Less well known is how the popular American genre has served as a potent force for social change.
To illustrate the latter, musical theater maven Bill Rudman has created a new show appropriately called "Let Freedom Ring! The social conscience of the American musical.” Its world première jumpstarts the 2006-07 season at Ensemble Theatre, Sept. 1-17.
Conceived by Rudman with Cleveland playwright Eric Coble, the two-hour show will feature 40 songs spanning 75 years of musical theater history. Legendary composers include George and Ira Gershwin, Yip Harburg, Irving Berlin, and Frank Loesser.
Ninety percent of the composers represented in the show are Jewish. Most were either immigrants or the sons and daughters of immigrants.
"The interest of Jewish songwriters in socially conscious writing is a direct outgrowth of the immigrant experience,” explains Rudman.
Yip Harburg (1896-1981) is a case in point. The son of Russian Jewish immigrants, Harburg grew up in a tenement on New York's Lower East Side. It's the Irving Berlin story all over again, only ten years later, notes Rudman.
Harburg was raised on the Yiddish-language socialist paper The Forward. He also discovered the New York Public Library, which was so much warmer than his New York tenement, adds Rudman.
"Let Freedom Ring” has had a long gestation process.
The late 1960s and early 1970s was a period of great social ferment in the US. Rudman, who was then a student at Hiram College and already hooked on musical theater, was discovering a whole tradition of social protest in the Broadway genre, including the songs of Harburg and the political satires created by the Gershwin brothers in the late 1920s and early 1930s.
Discovery of such "edgy, satirical, moving and defiant material” (Rudman's words) was a personal revelation to the burgeoning musical-theater buff. He determined that someday he would put it all together.
That first opportunity came to pass in 1998 when Rudman was working at Great Lakes Theater Festival as education director.
GLTF wanted to do a big community-wide project on musical theater, and Rudman suggested a cabaret-type program that would bring the social conscience of the musical together. The show "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” toured 28 community venues, including the Jewish Community Center, and proved a hit.
An expanded version was next presented at Ensemble Theatre in its 1999-2000 season. It, too, was successful.
The show has metamorphosed from its cabaret origins into a story-driven theater piece, explains Rudman.
Eric Coble, whom Rudman describes as a "brilliant satiric playwright,” created the script for Rudman's material. Choreography and musical staging are by David Shimotakahara, artistic director of GroundWorks Dancetheater, and his dancer/choreographer wife Pandora Robertson.
The production, in association with Baldwin-Wallace College Music Theater Program, is directed by Eric Schmiedl with musical direction by the gifted Nancy Maier at the keyboard. Major funders include Peter B. Lewis, Susan L. Cohen, and The Cleveland Foundation.
The four vocalists in the show are all juniors in Victoria Bussert's Baldwin-Wallace musical theater program. A fifth, older character is being played by Mick Houlahan, a former Cleveland actor now based in Chicago.
The story is about this older character's attempt to pass the torch of social activism to a younger generation. The songs, rather than plot or dialogue, drive the multimedia presentation, explains Rudman.
Song medleys are clustered around various themes. These include the environment, intolerance and the economic gap between rich and poor. An example of the last is the song, "When the Idle Poor Become the Idle Rich” from "Finian's Rainbow,” written by Harburg and Burton Lane. This 1947 song resonates with Doonesbury creator Gary Trudeau's 1986 song, "It's the Right Time to be Rich” in the musical "Doonesbury” written four decades later.
The motivating force behind creating this show is Rudman's musical theater hero Harburg. Quoting Harburg, Rudman says, "Songs are the not-so-secret weapon that fights social injustice.”
Harburg's great 1932 song "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” which is included in the show, became the anthem of the Great Depression, says Rudman. According to the composer, that song helped get FDR elected. That song is important, explains Rudman, because the man or woman who is singing it is asking a profound question: "Why isn't the person who is producing the nation's wealth sharing in (that) wealth?”
While some songs and shows are instantly recognizable, others are less so.
Most people will recognize the song from Rodgers and Hammerstein's 1949 musical "South Pacific” on intolerance and how "You've got to be taught before it's too late,/ Before you are six or seven or eight,/ To hate all the people your relatives hate.”
Perhaps less known is Jerry Herman's song on the environment from his 1969 musical, "Dear World”: "There will be a sweet taste in the air. From industrial waste in the air,/ And your eyelids will smart from the sting of the smog in/ The spring of next year.”
Or, consider Ira Gershwin's brilliantly satirical and prescient lyrics about war in a song from the 1927 show "Strike Up the Band.” "We're in a bigger, better war/ For your patriotic pastime./ We don't know what we're fighting for,/ But we didn't know the last time.”
Rudman's favorite song is in the 1963 show "The Silent Spring” by Harold Arlen and Yip Harburg, written soon after the murder of Medgar Evers. It was performed by Lena Horne at Carnegie Hall following Martin Luther King's assassination in 1968.
The lyrics cry out for social change. "Children hide and roses tremble/Doors are dark and shades are down,/ And the rains of hate rust the garden gate/ As the ghost of spring stalks the town.”
The oldest song is "Strike Up the Band” (1927); the latest is from Jonathan Larson's posthumous 2001 musical "Tick Tick Boom.”
Rudman thinks his is the first musical-theater piece dealing with the issue of social consciousness. The family-oriented show is for high school and above, he says.
There is a missionary zeal behind Rudman's erudition and passion.
"I want people to come out of the theater saying, ‘Wow, the power of song. I feel like calling the ACLU tomorrow and see what I can do ... I feel like calling a political candidate's office and see what I can do ... How can I turn all of these feelings and thoughts I've just had into trying to be a force for change?'
"We hope these songs will wake up an audience in a new way and wake up several generations of an audience in a new way,” Rudman concludes.
"Let Freedom Ring!” will be produced by Ensemble Theatre at The Cleveland Play House's Brooks Theatre Sept. 1-17. Tickets: 216-321-2930.
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