Mon­ty Python’s Spa­malot was back on Broad­way this past sea­son, and with it, the infi­nite wis­dom impart­ed by Michael Urie as Sir Robin: ​“So, lis­ten, Arthur dar­ling, close­ly to this news: we won’t suc­ceed on Broad­way if we don’t have any Jews.” 

Fun­ny. But what exact­ly is Sir Robin saying? 

Well, it’s no secret that before the advent of the juke­box musi­cal, vir­tu­al­ly every suc­cess­ful Broad­way com­pos­er (Cole Porter being the most promi­nent excep­tion) was Jew­ish: Rodgers and Ham­mer­stein (and Hart), Kan­der and Ebb, Lern­er and Loewe, Berlin, Bern­stein, Weil, the Gersh­wins, Kern, Styne, Com­den and Green, Loess­er, Cole­man, Bock and Har­nick, Strouse, Her­man, Sond­heim, Ham­lisch, Schwartz, Menken, Shaiman, and even Les Mis­érables com­posers Bou­blil and Schoen­berg, and Rent cre­ator Jonathan Larson. 

And it’s also no secret that Broad­way audi­ences skew Jew­ish. Is there ever a Wednes­day mati­nee day when Times Square isn’t filled with tem­ple groups from Long Island? 

For my books—Noth­ing Like a Dame, A Won­der­ful Guy, and the lat­est, Here’s to the Ladies—I had the hon­or of talk­ing with some of the great­est per­form­ers, sev­er­al of them Jews, includ­ing Joel Grey, Bebe Neuwirth, Idi­na Men­zel, Judy Kaye and Marc Kud­isch. They have all played Jew­ish char­ac­ters on Broad­way, but of all of the peo­ple I spoke to, Judy Kuhn may have had the most oppor­tu­ni­ties to dig into her her­itage on stage. 

Kuhn is prob­a­bly best known as the singing voice of Disney’s Poc­a­hon­tas. (The film’s music was writ­ten by Menken and Schwartz.) But her first prin­ci­pal role on Broad­way, right before she hit it big as the orig­i­nal Cosette in Les Mis, was in the short-lived musi­cal Rags (Strouse and Schwartz), with a book by Fid­dler on the Roof author Joseph Stein. It was, as Kuhn describes it, a sort of sequel to Fid­dler. At the end of that show, Tevye and Golde set off for the new world. Rags begins when a boat of Jew­ish immi­grants, much like the one Golde and Tevye would have been on, hits Ellis Island. Kuhn’s char­ac­ter, Bel­la, gave the show one of its most mem­o­rable moments when she wailed the show’s tit­u­lar num­ber about the oppres­sion of the ghet­to before per­ish­ing in the infa­mous Tri­an­gle Shirt­waist Fac­to­ry fire. 

A decade lat­er, Kuhn starred in King David by Menken and Rice, and then, in 2016, she played Golde her­self, both on Broad­way and in London’s West End. This past year, she won an Out­er Crit­ics Cir­cle Award for her run in a revival of I Can Get It For You Whole­sale—the show that put Bar­bra Streisand on the map in 1962 — and she just con­clud­ed a run in Titan­ic, play­ing Ida Straus.

Kuhn told me that when she first con­sid­ered pur­su­ing musi­cal the­ater, she felt a sense of guilt. ​“My father … was an activist and civ­il rights lawyer. I said, ​‘I should do what you do and help change the world.’ He said, ​‘You should not feel guilty about doing what you want to do. You have to do what you love and what you’re good at or you won’t do any­body any good. But a lit­tle bit of guilt about the priv­i­lege that you’ve had and the gifts you’ve been giv­en is good, because that will make you give back and you will find ways to con­tribute.’ I have always tried to live by that mot­to. I can always be bet­ter but that was a gift.” Tzedakah may not be a con­scious guid­ing prin­ci­ple for most per­form­ers, but real­ly, what is a life in the the­ater if not one of ser­vice? An actor gives with her entire body and soul to serve the play­wright and cre­ators, the direc­tor, and, ulti­mate­ly, the night­ly audi­ences who come to be moved, awak­ened, and awed. Actors, like all artists, embody the very tenets of our faith. 

But don’t take my word for it. As the song goes:

There’s a very small per­centile who enjoys a danc­ing gen­tile.
I’m sad to be the one with this bad news.
But nev­er mind your sword­play, you just won’t suc­ceed on Broad­way,
If you don’t have any Jews.