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Ancestry Daily News
7/22/2003 - Archive
Honoring Our Ancestors: A Stoop on Orchard Street
It was his turn to reciprocate. Jay Kholos's new bride had good-naturedly tolerated
seven hours in the baking sun the day before at a Yankees game, and now she
wanted to go to the Lower East Side Tenement Museum (tenement.org
). As an entertainment industry veteran, this wasn't Jay's idea of a good time.
He could think of plenty of other activities he'd rather pursue during this
jaunt to New York City, but it was the least he could do.
If you've ever been to this museum, you know that it's something of a time machine
that whisks you back to the tenement world that many of our immigrant ancestors
experienced. Guided tours through 97 Orchard Street allow you to explore the
meticulously restored apartments of actual families who lived at this address
from the 1870s to the 1930s. As you navigate the dark, cramped staircase and
try to adjust to the sweltering heat, you get a small taste of what the Gumpertz,
Levine, Rogarshevsky, and Baldizzi families endured on a daily basis.
When Jay walked into the building for the first time, he instantly felt as if
he had lived there. And as he continued the tour, he developed a deep appreciation
for the reality of tenement life. By the time he arrived back at the front stoop,
he remarked to his wife, "This would make a good musical." And so—in
one of those moments when inspiration intersects with motivation and skills—A
Stoop on Orchard Street was born.
Post-Fiddler
Jay immediately set about writing the words, music, and script for a musical,
which he describes as "post-Fiddler—what happens in 1910 when the
family comes to America." Blending his own grandfather's stories with nuggets
of the reality he had witnessed at the Tenement Museum, Jay created characters
that might have passed a few years at 97 Orchard Street. Given that his grandfather
had lived in the Lower East Side, it was a natural fit.
He peppered the script with other details from his own family's history, bestowing
characters with relatives' names and borrowing specifics, such as the name of
the ship they arrived on (the Gerty). Consequently, A Stoop on Orchard
Street will introduce you to twenty-two Lower East Siders, including Benny,
Sam, Sarah, Mrs. Lipschitz, and of course, Bubbe.
But Jay's aim was to create an uplifting musical that would express the universality
of the immigrant experience and emotionally appeal to a wide spectrum of theatergoers.
Just as My Big Fat Greek Wedding captivated audiences of all stripes,
Jay hopes that the ups-and-downs of the Russian-Jewish family featured in Stoop
will resonate with "all whose ancestors didn't come over on the Mayflower."
Stoop opens with a song appropriately called "Melting Pot,"
which weaves its way through a variety of moods and immigrant life circumstances.
"In the Hands of Strangers" is a melancholy rendering of the struggle
to bring loved ones over from the old country, while the comical Lipschitz captures
the name-change dilemma that many of our ancestors confronted. And the Bubbe
song is one almost all of us with an old-world grandmother can relate to: "Four
foot nine of sanity, the backbone of the family . . ."
Even the set—a replication of the stoop at 97 Orchard Street and one of
its apartments, down to the exact wallpaper—is designed to invite the audience
into the lives of Ellis Island-era immigrants, who appear at least once in the
family trees of more than 40 percent of Americans.
If you've ever wished that you could journey back through the generations to
peek into the lives of your ancestors, here's one of the best opportunities
you will ever have (short of subjecting yourself to months of privation as a
participant in one of those time-travel reality shows such as Frontier House
or The 1900 House!). Why not plan a quick trip to New York City to visit
the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, see A Stoop on Orchard Street, and
perhaps take the ferry over to Ellis Island? Better yet, snag a few buddies
from your local genealogical society and make a special event of it for Family
History month (coming up in October).
Off-Broadway on Broadway
This so-called off-Broadway musical will be housed in the Mazer Theatre, which
happens to be located on Broadway (197 East Broadway). It's hard to imagine
a more fitting venue, as this building—just six blocks from the Tenement
Museum—is also home to the Educational Alliance, where many of the tenement's
residents would have gone to learn English and American ways. It was not by
design, but just a happy accident that our immigrant ancestors' lives will be
commemorated in the very building where many of them made their first attempts
to adjust to the New World.
A Stoop on Orchard Street opened on July 8th and is scheduled for an
indefinite run. Tickets are on sale now via www.ticketweb.com
or by calling 800-965-4827 (the surcharge is lower via the Internet). There
are nine shows a week: Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday at 2:00 p.m., Sunday
at 3:00 p.m., and Tuesday-Saturday at 8:00 p.m. Tickets can also be purchased
at the Tenement Museum's Visitor Center at 90 Orchard Street, at the corner
of Broome Street, and Museum tour and show packages are available for groups
of ten or more people by calling the Group Scheduling Department at 212-431-0233,
extension 241. For those who can't make the trip, you might want to consider
book marking www.tenement.org so you can
order the CD when it becomes available shortly
Megan Smolenyak Smolenyak, author of Honoring Our Ancestors (HOA)
and In Search of Our Ancestors, can be contacted through
honoringourancestors.com. Resources
for rescuing orphan photos can be found at honoringourancestors.com/orphanphotos.html
and information about her monthly HOA grants can be found at www.honoringourancestors.com/grants.html
.
Upcoming Events
In upcoming weeks, Megan will be at:
— Family History Fair
(12 October 2003, New York City)
— New York Genealogical & Biographical Society
(14 October 2003, New York City)
— NGS Gentech04
(22-24 January 2004, St. Louis, Mo.)
Details and links to upcoming events are at: www.honoringourancestors.com/schedule.html
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