![]() ![]() It also had anti-Semitism as a central focus. In 1998, he wrote the book for the musical Parade, which played at Lincoln Center in New York. The Last Night of Ballyhoo went on to win Uhry another Tony Award. He revisited Atlanta’s Jewish milieu that he knew so well to create his story about intra-ethnic prejudice. Uhry also wrote the adaptation for the film version of this work.Īfter his surprise hit, Uhry was approached by the Olympic Games’ Cultural Olympiad to produce a play for the 1996 Olympic Games that would be held in Atlanta. Uhry won a Pulitzer Prize in 1988 for it. Driving Miss Daisy, Uhry’s first play, was an instant success, running for three years in New York. ![]() The characters in Driving Miss Daisy(1987) are based on people that Uhry knew growing up, including his grandmother and her African-American chauffeur. In 1984, as Uhry was struggling to get a musical about Al Capone off the ground, the idea came to him to write a play instead. Uhry began to write comedy scripts for television shows and lyrics for commercials and also taught English and drama at a New York high school. Uhry continued to work on other musicals, but these projects were unsuccessful, either closing on opening night, or soon thereafter, or never opening at all. It earned Uhry a Tony Award nomination and a Drama Desk nomination. The play was a surprise hit off-Broadway and moved to Broadway for the 1976-1977 season. Uhry wrote the script and the song lyrics. Their musical, The Robber Bridegroom(1975), was based on a novella by southern writer Eudora Welty. ![]() 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. ![]()
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