Last fall, two Broadway shows by Jewish-Irish collaborators, Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty’s “The Glorious Ones” and Mel Brooks and Thomas Meehan’s “Young Frankenstein,” opened on Broadway. These ethnic pairings would have no more significance than a Gallagher and Shean sketch were it not for the fact that the two groups have intersected again and again in our theatrical history, sometimes with results that changed its very course.
