Let Us Tell You A Story How Jewish people built the American theater as we know it. [View all]

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'HOW ARE THINGS in Glocca Morra?” is a song from the 1947 musical “Finian’s Rainbow,” which is about, among other things, a leprechaun. Glocca Morra doesn’t exist, and if it did, it wouldn’t be in, say, Poland. The song is sung by a homesick Irish lass in the American South; like the show overall, it is the most goyish thing that ever happened on Broadway, unless that would be “Brigadoon,” which opened the same year, with its highland heather and men in kilts. That one’s about a town that awakens only once every hundred years, also not in Poland.

Or is it? Like the score for “Brigadoon,” by Lerner and Loewe, the score for “Finian’s Rainbow” was written by two Jews: E.Y. Harburg (né Isidore Hochberg; the “Y” stood for “Yipsel”) and Burton Lane (né Burton Levy). The show was produced, stage managed and for the most part designed by Jews. The musical director, dance arranger and press reps were Jews. In a city then home to more than two million Jews — even now, the most Jewish city in the world, by sheer numbers — so were a lot of the ticket buyers. (Twenty years later, the playwright and screenwriter William Goldman estimated that Jews made up half the Broadway audience.) Did they hear something familiar in the tune of “Glocca Morra,” even as the lyrics, saluting “Killybegs, Kilkerry and Kildare,” denied it?

Of course, many gentiles also appreciated the yearning-for-a-simpler-time song, which reached deep into American culture in those postwar years. Along with several other tunes from the show — “Old Devil Moon,” “Look to the Rainbow,” “If This Isn’t Love” — “Glocca Morra” was a popular hit, covered by Sammy Davis Jr., Julie Andrews, Connie Francis, Rosemary Clooney, the Tommy Dorsey band and, over time, some hundred others. Davis, a convert, was the most Jewish among them.'>>>

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/11/29/t-magazine/jewish-theater-antisemitism-maestro.html?