After college, Uhry moved to New York to begin his career in show business, where he continued to collaborate with Waldman. Uhry had worked on varsity shows at Brown with Robert Waldman Uhry wrote the script and lyrics, and Waldman wrote the music. He attended Brown University in Rhode Island, graduating with a degree in English in 1958. His father was a furniture designer and artist, and his mother was a social worker. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHYĪlfred Uhry was born in 1936 to an upper-middle-class German-Jewish family in Atlanta, Georgia. The Last Night of Ballyhoo was first produced at the Atlanta Olympic Games in 1996 and went to Broadway the following year its playscript is available from Theatre Communications Group. While The Last Night of Ballyhoo deftly explores this anti-Semitism, Uhry also intersperses his serious message with sparkling banter, comedic non sequiturs, and hilarious characters and characterization. The prejudice that they experience as a result of their religion does not deter them from embracing mainstream southern society or from replicating this discrimination within their own culture German-Jews such as the Levys and Freitags look down on “the other kind” of Jews-Eastern European Jews. All these trappings and conveniences of wealth, however, cannot change the fact that they are Jews who live in an overwhelmingly Christian society. Their children may attend prestigious private universities. They live in a large home on one of Atlanta’s finest streets. Uhry combined these two interests to create the privileged world of the Levy / Freitag families. As he told Don Shewey from American Theatre, “I went to one of the last Ballyhoos there was, when I was 16-it was like a German-Jewish debutante ball.” However, Uhry also had a keen desire to explore Jewish identity, including prejudice inflicted on Jews by other Jews. The setting and plot of The Last Night of Ballyhoo developed from stories Uhry heard growing up in a southern Jewish family, as well as his own experiences. In his second play, The Last Night of Ballyhoo, Alfred Uhry explores the lives of Jewish southerners, a society that he introduced to the American theater-going public with his Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Driving Miss Daisy.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |