Weekend America

The Show Could Not Go On

Ryan Scammell

APRIL 5, 2008

A Broadway show collides with history

(Courtesy Joshua Zavin)

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On the wall above the light switch, in the living room of the house where I grew up, there was a poster of a Broadway show, a musical that opened at the Alvin Theatre back in 1968. It wasn't just any show -- Benjamin Zavin, the man who wrote the play, was my stepfather's father.

"I feel like I grew up on the show," my stepfather told me, while sitting in the room that had been my bedroom growing up. "They were working on it from the time I was 7 or 8 years old. It was part of my life for the entire time I was in grade school and high school."

"The Education of Hyman Kaplan" was a comedy about an English-language class for immigrants applying for citizenship. The main character was Hyman Kaplan, an immigrant from the Ukraine. The humor of the play centers around his ridiculous misinterpretations of both American history and the English language. But in a deeper sense, the real message of the play was his unabashed love for America.

"It's a very American story -- of immigrants making it. The melting pot story," my stepfather says.

That belief in America and the American dream rang through in the music itself. "One of the main anthem songs of the show, and one of the big dance musical numbers, is where Hyman Kaplan -- under threat of deportation -- sings the very hopeful song that 'Anything is Possible.'"

For Ben Zavin, my grandfather, this theme was something very personal to him. He was the son of Russian immigrants himself, and this play was his chance at achieving the American dream.

On April 4, 1968, "The Education of Hyman Kaplan" opened on Broadway. "And we felt it was going to be something great." says Oscar Brand,
who with Paul Nassau co-wrote the music and lyrics to the show. "I don't know if you know what happened -- I think you know what happened."

History was a guest that night at the Alvin Theatre, but it wasn't the play that that audience would remember about the date. It was an assassin's bullet.

On opening night, my grandfather and Oscar Brand were pacing back-and-forth in the rear of the theater. The house was packed. New York Mayor John Lindsay was sitting in the middle of the orchestra. The house lights dimmed and the curtain came up and the show began.

And then something happened -- right in the middle of the first act.

"A policeman enters..." Brand closes his eyes as he speaks, trying to conjure the memories. "And he hurried across the room and he crawled down the aisle. And he crawls over through people to Mayor Lindsay. And the two of them crawled back out... In a little while, back comes Lindsay. Crawls down the aisle and his wife and daughter go with him. They all crawl down the aisle."

There was whispering in the audience, so much so that the actors were starting to lose the audience's attention -- "the kind of whispering when there's something wrong, and no one knows what it is," Brand says.

Tom Bosley, remembered by most as Richie Cunningham's father from TV's "Happy Days," was onstage playing Hyman Kaplan. "We heard yelling and screaming backstage," Bosley says. "We didn't hear it from the audience -- somebody said they had their radio on."

Donna McKechnie was backstage getting ready for one of her main numbers in the play. She played Kathy McKenna, an Irish immigrant in the play. As it turned out, it wasn't a radio at all that Bosley heard -- it was a little black-and-white television that McKechnie had playing in her dressing room. And just before she went onstage, there was a broadcast announcing the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.

In the meantime, Brand saw Ed Neumann, a man with whom he had worked at NBC, run down to the telephones to find out what was happening. "I said, 'Ed, what's happening? Tell me!' And he says 'He's dead.' And I -- not wanting to know the answer, said, 'Who's dead?' And he said: 'Martin Luther King. He was just killed. He was just assassinated today.'"

McKechnie was still waiting backstage for her entrance. As soon as she heard the news, her heart started racing. "That's the feeling I remember," she says. "'Oh my God -- How could this happen? Oh dear, this is a tragedy.'" And at the same time, her cue was swelling in the orchestra, and before she has the chance to let the news set in, she was onstage singing "Oh What a Pretty Night."

But by this point, no one in the audience was paying attention to the song -- they were wondering why the mayor of New York had just been pulled out of the theater. And at intermission, they found out from a man walking past the theater.

Brand remembers what the man said: "He saw the audience waiting outside the theater and he said very loudly, 'What are you people laughing about -- don't you know that Martin Luther King has just been killed and the whole country is coming down here and rioting?'"

By the time act two began, a quarter of the audience had left. But something else had changed too, something that became clear in a scene at the end of the play when immigrants head to the judge's quarters to be sworn in as citizens. One of the characters is waving an American flag.

"And everyone's singing, 'We're gonna be all American, all American, all American today.'" Brand sings the tune from memory, note for note. "They were so happy, and he had the flag and they were going to become citizens and the first thought that hit you was: 'Why?'"

And that was the problem. Hyman Kaplan is an American Dream show -- the whole focus is the dream of freedom and equality. And yet with the news of the assassination of a civil rights icon, many who were at the premiere felt those themes ran contrary to everything that everyone was feeling at that moment.

"We felt like a naughty country, to put it mildly -- a miscreant, a black sheep in the middle of the world. That's what we were. We had let this happen," Brand says. "There was a distaste. That must have communicated somewhat to a show which was talking about what a great country this was and this is. And could be."

McKechnie was heartbroken. "That hopelessness, that feeling, all the beautiful ideals were shot down," she says.

It was clear within the first week that if audience numbers didn't begin to pick up, the play was going to have to close. And it did, before the month was out.

In those months leading up to opening night, "The Education of Hyman Kaplan" was the most important thing in the world for my grandfather and everyone else who was involved in the show.

Even though my stepfather was 17 at the time, he wasn't entirely aware of who Martin Luther King, Jr., was. "In some ways, I was in my own smaller world and just realizing that this was affecting my father's show," he says. "I realize, in retrospect, what an event it was and why it caused such disruption -- in the days after, when Broadway was virtually brought to a standstill with fear of rioting. I started to absorb the impact of what had happened."

Usually we live in our own little worlds -- but on April 4, 1968 that all changed when a bullet struck down the man who was standing on the balcony of room 308 at the Lorraine Motel.

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