The Jewish 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Jews of All Time (42 page)

Mendoza came from Aldgate in London’s East End, the toughest and poorest neighborhood in England’s capital city. After his initial fights were won by the slimmest of margins, he sought to develop a winning combination of protection and aggression, retreating when danger came too near and closing in with his superior boxing skills when he noted an advantage. As Joe Frazier would be bested twice in three fights by Muhammad Ali—surely one of the greatest boxers of all time—Mendoza’s great rival, Richard Humphries, or the “Gentleman Boxer,” “done the Jew,” as he would later remark, in a twenty-nine-round fight, only to be roundly defeated by Mendoza in their second and third fights (which lasted only fifty-two and fifteen minutes, respectively).

Mendoza lost his championship when his flowing hair was yanked in a bout in 1795 by another “Gentleman,” Jim Jackson, who held the Jewish champion’s head in a tight lock and then pummeled him mercilessly. Mendoza attempted comebacks at ages forty-two and fifty-six (two hundred years before George Foreman!) to mixed results.

Mendoza died at the age of seventy-two, having revolutionized prizefighting with his concepts of scientific boxing, especially among amateur athletes. Not until “Gentleman Jim” Corbett would there be his equal.

Other Jewish boxing champions include Abe Attell, the world featherweight champion from 1901 to 1912, Jackie Berg (Judah Bergman), the junior welterweight champion in the early 1930s, Battling Levinsky, the king of the light heavyweight division during the First World War, the extraordinarily colorful light heavyweight champion “Slapsie” Maxie Rosenbloom, Barney Ross (Barnet Rasofsky), lightweight and junior welterweight champion during the Depression, and the true heir to Mendoza, the great Benny Leonard (Benjamin Leiner), who was the smartest boxer, greatest lightweight champion, and possessed the most remarkable scientific skills in boxing history. Like Mendoza, all these champions and many other Jewish fighters (similar to their Irish, Italian, black, and Hispanic brethren) pursued boxing as their route of escape from oppression, poverty, and persecution. Jewish boxers such as Mendoza and Leonard brought original techniques and approaches to boxing, enduring in their influence.

Bit by bit,

Putting it together…

Piece by piece—

Only way to make a work of art.

Every moment makes a contribution,

Every little detail plays a part.

Having just the vision’s no solution,

Everything depends on execution:

Putting it together—

That’s what counts.
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Permission granted by Tommy Valando Publishing Group Inc., ©1984 Revelation Music Publishing Corporation/Rilting Music Inc., A Tommy Valando Publication.

T
elling his work to contributors at a museum cocktail party, George, an artist, intensely reminds us, that “art isn’t easy.” Vision is not the solution; “everything depends on execution.” One’s work is sold “drink by drink,” “dot by dot,” “shot by shot,” “piece by piece,” “mink by mink.”
Sunday in the Park with George
brings us into the world of the artist as few, if any, stage works have before. Stephen Sondheim’s musical is about process, how the creative person starts a work, pieces it together, makes something out of many things—some related, others conflicting, the whole more or sometimes less than its parts—after which the public reacts to or ignores it.

Unlike that of most of the other figures in this book, Sondheim’s life thankfully is still a work in progress. While the influences of the others are in most cases clearly evident, Sondheim’s prospective impact on musical theater can at best be a guess. Some might argue that although Sondheim is a great figure, he is so unique, like Gershwin, that influence is beside the point.

In every musical he has written since
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum,
Sondheim has toyed with concepts and ideas, wandered down new paths, attempted to reflect our fears or glorify our follies. He has repeatedly said that he cannot write a song away from a dramatic context. A song simply cannot be imagined without thinking where the character will be onstage, how he will move, to whom he is reacting, and why he is singing, rather than talking or shouting or just being quiet. Sondheim’s concentration on the theater in musicals rather than just the show has enriched his work (while also mystifying those who come to Broadway only for dinner and a night out).
Sunday in the Park with George
and
Sweeney Todd, The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
pull audiences in with contrasts of low comedy and high drama, quasi-operatic arias side by side with musical comedy skits, the music propelled by the finest lyrics Sondheim himself can fashion.

Remarkably, this man of the theater writes along with his dramatic music the most exemplary lyrics. Sondheim’s work reflects an encyclopedic knowledge of the history of lyric writing. His verses often combine many styles. He can switch from a delicate, almost poetic manner to brassy burlesque all in the same song (sometimes the same line). His lyrics have been favorably compared to the poetry of E.E. Cummings and other modernist poets. To develop character and dramatic progression, Sondheim will choose unusually expressive ways to portray emotions and thoughts. For example, the juvenile lead in
Sweeney Todd
sings not that he loves his Johanna but that he “feels” her. In his New York musical
Company,
which examines in brilliant detail the relationships of contemporary men and women, the hustle of city streets and the parallel tensions of its inhabitants are portrayed in the restless song
Another Hundred People
—a rush of concentrated energy and sharply etched feeling.

The inner worlds and rhymes of Sondheim’s words are mirrored in melodies and rhythms sustained by pulsating accompaniments always mandated by theatrical impulse. Like his lyrics, his music sensitively reacts and exists only to develop the drama. Sondheim can compose in many popular styles, although his music often has a neoclassical irony and edge not usually encountered on Broadway.

Sondheim’s first attempt to write a show was, as for Jerome Kern, at school. Sondheim brought the score to his friend’s father, the renowned lyricist Oscar Hammerstein, a neighbor near the Sondheims’ summer home in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. The teenage Sondheim was sure Hammerstein would immediately seize the work for production on the Great White Way and therefore asked the older man to review the show on a professional level. The next day, Hammerstein tore the work apart, distilling in a few hours much of his theatrical experience in a sharp tutorial. Hammerstein became a mentor to Sondheim. The young composer also studied theory with the influential Princeton professor Milton Babbitt, a disciple of Arnold Schoenberg and a learned and affectionately humorous man.

Although his first musical as an adult,
Saturday Night,
failed to gain sufficient backers for production, Sondheim began to make a name for himself. After a brief stint writing scripts for the 1950s television show
Topper,
Sondheim, age twenty-seven, was asked to write the lyrics for a new musical to be produced by, among others, Harold Prince, directed and choreographed by Jerome Robbins, book by Arthur Laurents, and music by Leonard Bernstein. First called
East Side Story,
then
Gang Way, West Side Story
began a new era in the history of the Broadway musical. Sondheim considered himself a composer first and foremost and did not, after an audition with the charismatic maestro, wish to submerge his ego in that great ocean called Bernstein. Hammerstein advised Sondheim that the experience would be well worth it. However, his separation from the composition of music for the show may have affected Sondheim’s best theatrical impulses. He noted later that some of his lyrics were inappropriate for the characters. The complex inner rhymes of
I Feel Pretty,
for example, do not fit a young, inexperienced immigrant girl. Although well received by the critics, the show was not a box-office success. Only when the film was produced did the producers and creators reap financial reward and widespread acclaim. The musical, theatrically propelled by dynamic modern dance, soaring melody, and sharp lyrics, remains compelling, a contemporary Romeo and Juliet tale—cool and hot.

His next musical,
Gypsy,
featured Sondheim’s tart lyrics, the abundant music of Jules Styne, and the towering presence of Ethel Merman. Incredibly,
Gypsy,
like
West Side Story,
was not a financial success, achieving classic status only in its many revivals. The lyrics for
Rose’s Turn,
Merman’s revealing soliloquy, remain a model of penetrating insight and revelation. (Sondheim would write lyrics for just one other collaborator, Richard Rodgers, in
Do I Hear a Waltz?
—disastrously.)

Sondheim’s other shows of the early 1960s,
Forum
and the short-lived cult classic
Anyone Can Whistle,
were his first mature and individual turns on the musical comedy form.
Forum,
based on the wild tales of Plautus, the ancient Roman humorist, featured a brilliant cast led by the insanely funny and uncontrollable Zero Mostel.

After the unpleasant diversion with Richard Rodgers, Sondheim developed
Company.
The work, which opened in 1970, is less a straight play than a series of small character vignettes, building relentlessly to reveal the desperate and unhappy souls of urban-dwelling marrieds. The strong plot line of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical form was discarded for a searing dissection of modern life.

No other musical has become such a cult favorite as his next show.
Follies
examined the lives of aging actresses through elaborate production and arias laced with nostalgia and pastiche. Sondheim unravels his characters through the imagery, sounds, and styles of his great forebears, Gershwin, Berlin, Kern, and others, while expanding his range of expression and psychological unveiling.

His most popular musical,
A Little Night Music
(the English translation of Mozart’s
Eine Kleine Nachtmusik),
based on a film of Ingmar Bergman, followed. In this grand work, Sondheim attempted to merge in waltz time the insightful methods of character disclosure developed in his previous works with a more conventional linear plot.
Pacific Overtures,
his tribute to Kabuki theater, displayed a broader mastery of musical texture and formal design, but was not a commercial success.

First in
Sweeney
with Hal Prince and then in the musicals produced with James Lapine—
Sunday in the Park with George, Into the Woods,
and
Passions
—Sondheim achieved a total mastery of a new and entertaining art form, not quite Broadway show or operetta but somewhere in between (or beyond). These works, like George Gershwin’s
Porgy and Bess,
elevated the contemporary American musical to new and higher artistic levels.

Sondheim has been criticized for the lack of “memorable” tunes in his shows. Audiences do not leave the theater humming his songs. Others have noted that the “difficulty” of some of his music has alienated many from American musical theater and provided an opening to the spectacular productions of Andrew Lloyd Webber.

Despite these criticisms, no future composer or lyricist writer can create a musical or opera without absorbing Sondheim’s immaculately conceived works. Like his friend Leonard Bernstein, he is a great teacher and observer, imploring us to remember that “children and art” are what really matter in this world, that we should not make so much drama, should avoid sentimentality for its own sake, and feel more.

K
nown as “Red Emma” to millions of Americans before the First World War, she was at that time the most feared woman in the United States. An anarchist and one of the founders of the women’s rights movement, Emma Goldman, a Jewish immigrant from Russia, preached free love, assassination, women’s liberation (before and after the right to vote was granted), aggressive opposition to the draft and oppressive capitalists, and birth control. She developed twentieth-century feminism out of Victorian constraints toward what she called “true emancipation,” the freedom of the self after political rights and equality are achieved. She was the greatest agitator of the 1900s before Lenin, and despite a small number of writings, left an enduring brand on the role of women and men in our society.