When Jay Kholos visited the Lower East Side Tenement Museum on Orchard Street in Manhattan about four years ago, the feelings that washed over him were “indescribable. It was almost like I had lived there before,” he said in a telephone interview.
But, in reality, Kholos, a former CBS staffer, grew up in Los Angeles and his parents were raised in Pittsburgh and Chicago. It was his grandfather’s experience that Kholos was “channeling” that day in New York.
“My grandfather, [Sam], came over in 1907 on [the ship] the ‘Gertie’ from Trieste and Liverpool. He came from a shtetl in Eastern Europe. He described it to me, [when I was] a child, as similar to ‘Fiddler on the Roof,’” Kholos said.
“When we walked out on the stoop [of the museum] I told [my wife] Paula, ‘This might be a good idea for a musical.’” This visit provided the inspiration for “A Stoop on Orchard Street,” the Off-Broadway musical that will come to Milwaukee’s Pabst Theater on Tuesday, Oct. 19, for two shows at 2 p.m. and 8 p.m.
But the final push to write and produce it came on Sept. 11, 2001, when two jumbo jets smashed into the twin towers of the World Trade Center.
Kholos, who was staying in a hotel in midtown Manhattan, was able to reach his former wife, who lived nearby, and they took to the streets in a frantic search for their 20-something-year-old son, Philip, a resident of the Tribeca section of lower Manhattan.
Miraculously, they found him as he walked toward his mother’s apartment. “We all ended up holding onto each other” for several days.
That experience, Kholos said, “had a major effect on everybody”; he started to think more about his family, especially his grandparents. Realizing that the movie about a college football scandal he had just completed was no longer appropriate, in light of the events of 9/11, he started to work on “A Stoop on Orchard Street.” And he finished it in six months.
Set on the Lower East Side of New York around 1910, the story follows the Lomansky family as they adjust to their new lives in America. Like Kholos’ grandfather, the main character is named Sam and like him, he left his sweetheart in Europe and worked to bring her to America.
“The stories are not atypical of the common immigrant story. We have people come up after the play all the time and stay, ‘That’s my story.’ There is a universal theme,” said Kholos in a telephone interview.
Most of the action of the musical takes place on the stoop outside the tiny rooms and dark hallways of the tenements where residents escaped to share their lives with one another. “If nothing else, I hope our story, the story that millions of immigrants lived, adequately portrays the hopes, dreams and aspirations of a generation so unique and influential you can almost feel their presence on every block and stoop. It was a time like no other,” said Kholos in a release.
The musical opened at the Mazer Theater, right in the neighborhood where it is set, in July 2003. Kholos said, “Many didn’t want to came back to the Lower East Side; they had wanted to leave there.
“But we have found that the people that come bring their children and grandchildren and we see them later walking through the neighborhood and finding their old apartments and enjoying a nostalgic moment.”
Since the opening of the musical there have been over 500 performances in New York City and a four-and-a-half month run in Ft. Lauderdale. It’s now on a national tour.
Tickets for both shows are $29.50 and $52.50. For tickets or more information, visit the box office at 144 E. Wells St.; call 414-286-3665; or visit www.pabsttheater.org. Groups of 20 or more can call 877-447-7849 for discounted rates.
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