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Edited by: Fern Sidman
“Leopoldstadt” and “Parade,” two productions about the horrors of anti-Semitism, took two major Tony awards on Sunday, making the topic a central theme of the night, according to a New York Times report.
Tom Stoppard’s “Leopoldstadt,” which centers on the destructive toll of anti-Semitism on a family of Viennese Jews and was inspired by Stoppard’s belated reckoning with his Jewish roots, won best play. The NYT also reported that earlier in the night, the play’s director, Patrick Marber, won for best direction of a play, and Brandon Uranowitz, one of the central actors in the ensemble cast, won a featured actor award.
“Thank you Tom Stoppard for writing a play about Jewish identity and anti-Semitism and the false promise of assimilation with the nuances and the complexities and the contradictions that they deserve,” Uranowitz said in his acceptance speech, the NYT reported. “My ancestors, many of whom did not make it out of Poland, also thank you.”
The Guardian of the UK reported that producer Sonia Friedman called it Stoppard’s “most personal masterwork”, and Stoppard said that throughout his career he has noticed “the theatre writer getting decreasingly devalued in the food chain”.
The play’s director, Patrick Marber, also won a Tony, as was reported by The Guardian. “I feel a little self-conscious up here,” the writer-director said, going on to call Stoppard his “beloved friend and still my hero”.
Leopoldstadt won two Olivier awards when it originally premiered in the West End. All together, Leopoldstadt collected four trophies, including best director of a play, costumes and featured actor, winning over “Ain’t No Mo’,” “The Cost of Living,” “Between Riverside and Crazy” and “Fat Ham.”
Tom Stoppard, an 85-year-old British playwright who is widely regarded as among the greatest living dramatists, and who had already won the best play Tony Award more times than any other writer, the NYT reported. He was also knighted by the late Queen Elizabeth II. This is his 19th production on Broadway since his debut in 1967, and his fifth Tony for best play, following “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,” “Travesties,” “The Real Thing” and “The Coast of Utopia,” according to the NYT.
“Leopoldstadt” is an unusually personal work for Stoppard, prompted by his late-in-life reckoning with his Jewish roots, and the realization that many of his relatives were killed in the Holocaust, the NYT reported. Stoppard was not yet 2 years old when his own family fled what was then Czechoslovakia, where he was born, to escape the Nazi invasion. He was raised in Britain and has said he only fully came to understand his family’s Jewish heritage when he was much older.
“Leopoldstadt” was first staged in London, where it opened in 2020, shortly before the coronavirus pandemic forced the shutdown of theaters, and then resumed performances in the West End after theaters reopened in 2021, as was reported by the NYT. Leopoldstadt won two Olivier awards when it originally premiered in the West End.
The Broadway production began previews Sept. 14 and opened Oct. 2 at the Longacre Theater. The NYT reported that the run is scheduled to end on July 2.
The play, named for a historically Jewish section of Vienna, begins in 1899 in the living room of an affluent and assimilated Austrian Jewish family and continues until 1955, after much of the family has perished in the Holocaust, the NYT reported. Some members of the family had mistakenly thought that their integration into Viennese society would somehow protect them.
Vienna in 1900 was the most vibrant city in Europe, humming with artistic and intellectual excitement and a genius for enjoying life. A tenth of the population were Jews. A generation earlier they had been granted full civil rights by the Emperor, Franz Josef. Consequently, hundreds of thousands fled from the Pale and the pogroms in the East and many found sanctuary in the crowded tenements of the old Jewish quarter, Leopoldstadt.
The show is quite large for a Broadway play, with a cast of 38, including several children, the NYT reported. It was capitalized for up to $8.75 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
The lead producer is Sonia Friedman, a prolific British producer who has notched an impressive set of wins on Broadway: The NYT reported that she was also a lead producer of the best play Tony winners in 2020 (“The Inheritance,” which was granted the award at a pandemic-delayed ceremony in 2021), 2019 (“The Ferryman”) and 2018 (“Harry Potter and the Cursed Child”).
“Parade,” a musical that tells the tragedy of Leo Frank, the Jewish pencil factory manager who was murdered by a mob in 1915, won best musical revival, the NYT reported. Its director, Michael Arden, won the award for best direction of a musical, urging the audience to battle anti-Semitism, white supremacy and other forms of hate. “We must come together, we must battle this,” Arden said, “or else we are doomed to repeat the horrors of our history,” as was reported by the NYT.
“Parade” dramatizes the 1913 trial of Leo Frank, who was accused and convicted of raping and murdering a thirteen-year-old employee, Mary Phagan. The trial, sensationalized by the media, aroused anti-Semitic tensions in Atlanta and the state of Georgia, according to a Wikipedia report. When Frank’s death sentence was commuted to life in prison by the departing Governor of Georgia, John M. Slaton, in 1915 due to his detailed review of over 10,000 pages of testimony and possible problems with the trial, Leo Frank was transferred to a prison in Milledgeville, Georgia, where a lynching party seized and kidnapped him, Wikipedia reported. Frank was taken to Phagan’s hometown of Marietta, Georgia, and he was hanged from an oak tree. The events surrounding the investigation and trial led to two groups emerging: the revival of the defunct KKK and the birth of the Jewish Civil Rights organization, the Anti-Defamation League.
The musical’s story concludes that the likely killer was the factory janitor Jim Conley, the key witness against Frank at the trial, as was reported by Wikipedia. The villains of the piece are the ambitious and corrupt prosecutor Hugh Dorsey (later the governor of Georgia and then a judge) and the rabidly anti-Semitic publisher Tom Watson (later elected a U.S. senator).
Director Harold Prince turned to Jason Robert Brown to write the score after Stephen Sondheim turned the project down, Wikipedia also reported that Prince’s daughter, Daisy, had brought Brown to her father’s attention. Book writer Alfred Uhry, who grew up in Atlanta, had personal knowledge of the Frank story, as his great-uncle owned the pencil factory run by Leo Frank.
