‘…I was also a good shortstop’

“The Ice Man Cometh.” “Children of a Lesser God.” “‘Master Harold’…And the Boys.” “Sunday in the Park with George.” “The Brighton Beach Trilogy.” “Lost in Yonkers.’

The list goes on, plays and musicals that lit up the Great White Way when theater was a thriving art form. And these shows all had one common denominator: they were produced by Emanuel (Manny) Azenberg.

Mr. Azenberg’s Broadway productions— he estimates close to 70 over the course of his career — have earned him 10 Tonys and 10 Drama Desk awards, plus honors from both organizations for lifetime achievement.

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Oh, yes. He’s also won a place in the Bronx Hall of Fame, an honor (I say as a fellow Bronxite) not to be scoffed at, since it and his family very much shaped him, both professionally and in his relationship to the state of Israel.

His father, Charles, was a Zionist. “My father emigrated from Poland when he was 16 and went to London,” Mr. Azenberg said in a Zoom interview. “He had family in London and lived there from 1910 to probably 1929. We’re not quite sure. He worked for the World Zionist Organization, directly for Chaim Weizmann. And he was a delegate to the 1920  postwar Zionist Congress in London.

“At some point, he came to the United States for some reason and decided this is where he wanted to live. We don’t know how, but he became a citizen.

“He went back to Poland to visit his family, where he met my mother, who was 12 years younger than he was. But my grandfather — who was later killed by the Nazis — wouldn’t give permission for them to marry. But he said, if you come back in a year and still want to marry, it would be okay. And that’s what happened.

“So he and my mother came to the Bronx in 1929.”

Mr. Azenberg worked for the Yiddish Natsionaler Arbeiter Farband (the Jewish National Workers Alliance) and ran the organization’s camps, called Unzer Camp and Kinder Welt. “We grew up with that,” he said. “L’shana haba’ah b’Yerushalayim. You know, next year in Jerusalem.

“When Israel became a state, we sat in at 760 Grand Concourse.” The family gathered, listening to the radio, as “my father, with a pencil in hand, checked off the countries as they voted. When the United States voted, my father put down his pencil and said, ‘It happened in my lifetime.’”

The idea of aliya was always part of the family discussion, but by the time of statehood, “we were too old,” he said. “My father was in his 50s and we were teenagers. We were Americans.”

And Mr. Azenberg lived the life of an American — or at least a Bronx-American. “Playing stickball was more important than anything I did,” he said.

“I went to Hebrew school after public school” — he underplays that fact that he went to the Bronx High School of Science — “until probably a little after my bar mitzvah. Then my mother wanted me to take piano lessons. My father wanted me to take Yiddish. But I wanted to play stickball, and this is one argument I actually won. I did take Yiddish for a while and I did study piano for a while. But from age 14 on I was in the street.”

Theater played a relatively minor role in his life at the time. “My sister and I both went to the Yiddish theater and to the American theater on occasion. That was our introduction to the fact that theater existed. It was a schlep from the Bronx down to Broadway. As you know, going to Manhattan was an event. It was an adventure.”

He remembers seeing his uncle Wolfe Barzell, a Polish-born stage, screen, and television actor, in a major Broadway role in the play “Next to God” and in the Yiddish theater opposite Zero Mostel in “A Stone for Danny Fisher.”

After graduating from NYU and serving in the army as a first lieutenant and platoon leader, Mr. Azenberg worked for two legendary producers, David Merrick and Alexander Cohen, before producing his first play, “The Lion in Winter.” A succession of hits and an occasional flop followed.

Fortunately, there were far more hits than misses, many fueled in part by his relationship with Neil Simon, which started, at least sort of, as an outgrowth of skills he learned playing stickball.

“If there is one thing I was capable of, it is that I was a good baseball player,” Mr. Azenberg said. “In 1960-something, I was the company manager for David Merrick of a play called ‘Sunday in New York,’ whose featured player was an actor named Robert Redford.

“Redford got $300 a week. I got $225 a week. We were friends, and we remain friends. We played on the same baseball team. Redford played first base, and I was the shortstop.

“When Redford came back to New York in ‘Barefoot in the Park’ in 1963, he recruited me to play softball in the Central Park show league. Neil Simon played second base. And that’s how I met Neil Simon.”

In 1969, Mr. Simon invited Mr. Azenberg to his 62nd Street townhouse and asked if he — Manny — would like to produce his shows. “I was a clown. I said, ‘Why don’t you let me think about it?’ He threw the script at me, which was ‘The Sunshine Boys.’”

Why? There had been tension with the previous producer. “Neil had just gotten word that his wife’s breast cancer had metastasized, and she was going to die. And he was clearing the decks of anything that gave him unhappiness.

“We knew each other. And by then, I had produced ‘The Lion in Winter’ and a play about Auschwitz called ‘The Investigation,’ a play with Carl Reiner called ‘Something Different,’ and Hal Holbrook doing Mark Twain.

“Beyond that, I also was a good shortstop.”

Of course, that raises the question, what does a Broadway producer do?

“That’s a question asked endlessly, and the easy answer is you raise money. In the case of playwrights like Neil and Athol Fugard and Tom Stoppard, you can’t pretend that you are the creative entity. But there is a sensibility required that you have to understand.”

Essentially, he continued, there is no one-size-fits-all job description. You have to develop a relationship with the playwright, and each playwright is different. “When we did the Stoppard play ‘The Real Thing’, I hid because I didn’t want him to ask me any questions.” He was afraid any criticism of the work would anger the playwright. “But when we were in Boston for tryouts, there was a tap on my shoulder during rehearsal, and Tom asked me, ‘What do you think?’

“I blurted out, ‘10 minutes into the second act, I wasn’t paying attention. I was looking at the scenery.’ He nodded his head, and five days later gave me a revised script and said, ‘Is this any better?’

“I tell students a producer’s job is not to tell playwrights what to write, but to tell them when the play is not engaging you.

“With Neil, it was different. Remember, we grew up in the same neighborhood, and I knew more about where those plays came from and what his life experience was. So I could participate. We had a routine. He would write 30 pages and give them to me and ask me what I thought. I told him, ‘This is good. But what happens next?’ And he’d say, ‘How the hell do I know?’

“So to answer your question, a producer does all the mechanical things, raises money, participates in casting, and helps pick the director — but your main job is to gain the confidence of the creative artist, the author.”

He concedes it may be a generational issue, but he is not happy with the direction Broadway has taken of late. “There are some successful shows I go to see that are just totally mysterious to me.”

“If you look back at history, there were something like 270 openings a season in the 1920s. There were 90 theaters. The theater was the queen of the arts in those days. I think it hit its peak in the ’50s and ’60s with playwrights like Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller and William Inge and Tom Stoppard.

“There were actors who respected their work on the stage, Lawrence Olivier and Peter O’Toole and Jason Robards. But over a period of time, talkies started to compete for talent, and then television, and now Netflix, and you get all your information on a computer. Musicals like ‘King Kong’ or ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’ and even ‘Harry Potter,’ which is nice, belong in Orlando, not here.

“Price has something to do with it, too. When ‘A Chorus Line’ first opened, the top ticket price was $15. Now if you want to see Othello, it’s $600. You’re not going to nurture a young audience at those prices.”

Ironically, just a few days after this interview, the Broadway League, the trade organization that represents producers and theater owners, trumpeted that Broadway grosses reached $1.801 billion, up from the record-setting pre-pandemic year of 2018-2019, when sales were $1.79 billion. But those figures are not adjusted for inflation, and total attendance is down about 3%.

Mr. Azenberg isn’t sure what the answer is, but he is certain that it “will depend on the artists, not management.”

Meanwhile, for some, Mr. Azenberg will be remembered as much for carrying on his father’s legacy as for all the theater awards he’s won.

“My first trip to Israel was in the ’80s,” he said. “I went with my wife and two friends. Sometime a few years later, I decided I should bring the people in the theater to Israel. We did that for 30 years.

“Every summer, we took a group, sometimes two groups. We had our guide, who was brilliant. We did not proselytize. There was no religious pressure. We took Jews and non-Jews, and the idea was to introduce them to how complicated that country is, politically, religiously, and how in the Galilee, for example, they made the desert bloom. We met many interesting people. And it became a tradition. I would say that we took 500 to 600 people, and I think it affected many of their lives.”

One of those lives belongs to Jeffrey Seller, who has become an uber producer in his own right; he’s produced “Rent,” “Hamilton,” and “Avenue Q,” among others.

Mr. Seller and his then-partner, Kevin McCollum, were just starting out booking road shows of Broadway hits. “He hired us to do the national tour of ‘Lost in Yonkers,’” Mr. Seller said. “He was taking a chance on us because we were the new kids on the block.

“I remember, he was standing in his office with his whole wall filled with pictures of his kids. Then he got up and started practicing swinging his baseball bat. I think the implication was we better do a good job.”

They did, and Mr. Azenberg became a trusted advisor when the pair added producing to their resume. He also became a friend.

Mr. Seller, his husband, and their son, Thomas, took the first of their two trips to Israel with the Broadway group in 2016. “My son loved it so much that when he came home, he said, ‘I want to do my bar mitzvah in Israel.’ That’s the powerful impression the trip made on our son.”

Mr. Azenberg, of course, was invited to the ceremony, which took place on Masada.

He impacts lives that way. Mr. Stoppard, the sensitive playwright of ‘The Real Thing,’ was in his 50s when he discovered that both his parents — and all four grandparents, who died in the Holocaust — were Jewish. But he didn’t reveal his Jewish identity publicly until a decade later.

He went on to write “Leopoldstadt,” a moving play about Jewish life in Vienna during the first half of the 20th century. When he finished, he called Mr. Azenberg and asked him to read it.

Mr. Azenberg said no. Plays are meant to be seen, and he felt reading it first would ruin its emotional impact, he said.

“But I’m going to come,” Mr. Azenberg told Mr. Stoppard. “I’ll be there for the first performance. Then Tom told me, ‘I want you to know that I thought of you when I wrote this play.’”