Touted as the most diverse theater season in decades Broadway has assumed another dimension of relativity by addressing today’s hottest topic: immigration in no less than five productions so far.

 

This is a most prescient coincidence as all of these musicals were in development on their way to Broadway years before the issue usurped the headlines.

 

In some cases the provocative lines or songs drew such surprising and unanticipated responses shows had to be re-timed. And audience demographics are changing as a result. Hispanics, Asians as well as African Americans are rapidly filling up those seats.

 

The plays inspired by immigration and the American identity originated here in the 1920’s with Abie’s Irish Rose and since then most addressed waves of European immigrants: Jews, Italians, Irish, coming here.

Then the Latin influences emerged with that most graphic depiction, West Side Story, while Asians got a rare production in Flower Drum Song.

 

Here are the shows and their iconic moments:

 

Allegiance

“We Are Americans” they loudly sing in protest in this ground making musical which exposes the forced incarceration of loyal, patriotic Japanese Americans from their homes to internment camps after Pearl Harbor started WW II, the quest of the younger men to prove their loyalty by enlisting in a similarly prejudiced army that sent them on almost guaranteed death missions -a shameful example of racism and jingoism in our history – does that sound familiar

 

A View From The Bridge

The only play of this group, written by Arthur Miller in 1955, includes the desperate plight of illegal Italian immigrants seeking the American Dream in a wary, often dangerous and unwelcoming society.

 

On Your Feet

The struggle and eventual triumph of young Cuban immigrant musician Emilio Estefan, and Cuban American Gloria to have their Latin music accepted into American mainstream stops the show when a young Emilio shouts defiantly at rejection from a record company “You should look very closely at my face…because this is what an American looks like”. The show’s choreographer Sergio Trujillo entered Canada illegally from Columbia before becoming successful in America and most of the cast are of Spanish descent.

 

 The forced uprooting of Jewish families from their homes and villages in Russia to become part of a huge immigrant migration, the lucky ones to America, is most heartrendingly dramatized in the show’s closing number “Anatevka” as they bid farewell to their home for uncertain futures (which the audience knows will end in the most horrific immigration story – the Holocaust)

 

 Hamilton

The ultimate success story of one of our most celebrated immigrants, Alexander Hamilton, born out of wedlock, raised in the West Indies, and orphaned as a child, who rose to international fame and immortality as one of the Founding Fathers of the United States. An audience pleasing moment in the show written by Lyn Manuel- Miranda, himself the son of immigrants, “”Immigrants/We get the job done” always draws cheers from the crowd. Are you Listening Washington?

Perhaps in a few years we’ll be attending musicals and plays about immigrants from the Middle East (if they get here).