The Great Performances production Broadway Musicals: A Jewish Legacy is a 2013 Peabody Award winner!
Zero Mostel performs “Tradition” in the 1964 Broadway production of Fiddler on the Roof. Photo: Photofest, Inc.
“Peabody Awards honor ‘stories that matter,’ so it is incredibly rewarding for Broadway Musicals: A Jewish Legacy to be recognized with this prestigious award,” said filmmaker Michael Kantor. “When you create a show working with David Horn and the team at Great Performances, you are aspiring to a very high standard, to create something truly great. So along with Executive Producers Barbara Brilliant and Albert M. Tapper, co-producer Jan Gura, editor Kris Liem and the rest of our team, I think we will all be gratefully singing along with Sheldon Harnick’s lyrics in “To Life” from Fiddler on the Roof: ‘How much more can we be joyful when there’s really something to be joyful for?'”
Ira Glass, host and creator of This American Life will host the 73rd Peabody Award ceremony on May 19, 2014, at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York City. In its announcement, the Peabody Award committee says this about Broadway Musicals: A Jewish Legacy: “Historically fascinating and grandly entertaining, it’s a tune-filled dissertation on the incalculable influence of Jewish composers – from Irving Berlin to Stephen Sondheim to Stephen Schwartz – and Jewish musical idioms on the evolution of a great American art form.”
Watch the Full Film Online
See for yourself by enjoying the full film, for free, online here: Broadway Musicals: A Jewish Legacy. The 90-minute documentary by Michael Kantor, creator of the Emmy-winning series, Broadway: The American Musical, originally aired on Great Performances on January 1, 2013.
