September 22, 1964—Fiddler on the Roof arrived at a watershed moment in American culture and swept all before it when it premiered on this date at Broadway’s Imperial Theatre.
Set in a Jewish shtetl in Czarist Russia, it came toward the end of the Golden Age of the Broadway musical and the Great American Songbook. But it also served as a leading indicator of both the generation gap of the Sixties and Americans’ rediscovery of their immigrant heritage in the following decade.
From commercials for Broadway greatest-hits soundtracks to the hilarious All in the Family episode in which Edith Bunker poses a key question from the musical to husband Archie—“Do You Love Me?”—I felt like I knew Fiddler long before I actually saw it nine years ago at the Stratford Festival of Canada.
As it happened, I was only half right. After the Stratford production, I came to look at the show in a new way—partly because of the unconventional but absolutely appropriate casting of Brent Carver as Tevye, but also because, oddly enough, my Irish-American Catholic background helped me identify with the Russian Jewish milk vendor.
The creators of that unique artform, the American Musical, were disproportionately Jewish: Berlin, Kern, the Gershwin brothers, Weill, Fields, Arlen, Bernstein, Loesser, Comden, Green, Rodgers, Hart and Hammerstein (and I’ve probably missed a few!). They had been largely concerned with erasing their ethnic distinctiveness, however, or at least merging it into the larger American consciousness, with subject matter such as the settling of the West.
By 1964, the day of the Great American Songbook had reached its glorious twilight, though nobody knew this at the time. At this very moment, two more recent Broadway tunesmiths, Sheldon Harnick and Jerry Bock, chose to look back—and outside American shores, at that.
A decade before Alex Haley’s Roots ignited Americans’ interest in their forebears, and before critic Irving Howe examined the passage of East European Jews to the U.S. in World of Our Fathers, the creators of Fiddler considered the joys and turbulence of life in a changing Old World. By the time they conceived the project, American Jews—now, by any standard, among the most successful of American religious-ethnic groups—were in the throes of wrestling with issues of identity, particularly in the novels of Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud and Philip Roth.
In molding the show, director-choreographer Jerome Robbins put his finger quickly on its central theme, expressed in the title of one tune: “Tradition.” Everything then coalesced around that concept.
Joseph Stein’s book used as its source material the stories of Sholom Aleichem, sometimes described as a “Jewish Mark Twain.” Stein focused especially on two forces impinging on the milkman of Anatevka: the shift from arranged marriages to ones based on love, and the expulsion of Jews from their village by the Czar’s troops—and the paroxysm of violence in the form of pogroms that this portended.
Harnick and Bock, having already created the Pulitzer Prize-winning Fiorello and the highly regarded She Loves Me, reached the zenith of their songcraft with tunes such as “If I Were a Rich Man,” “Tradition,” “Sunrise, Sunset,” and “Matchmaker, Matchmaker.” The audience response was overwhelmingly favorable, as the show not only settled in for a long run but the original cast album reached platinum status.
Fiddler closed in 1972 after 3,242 performances that made it the longest-running musical of all time. (That mark has since been eclipsed, of course, by, among others, the wonderful A Chorus Line and the egregious Cats and Phantom of the Opera.)
The run coincided with the period of the most intense clashes in American history between the older and younger generations. In the struggle of Tevye and wife Golde to come to terms with the new social norms of their five daughters (Aleichem had a more Biblical-resonant but theatrically-daunting seven in his tales), middle-aged fans glimpsed a suddenly not-so-distant mirror of their own struggles.
Unfortunately, the first Tevye, Zero Mostel, thought the success was all about him. His constant improvisations, which had previously driven crazy the creators of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, had the same effect on his new creative partners. Eventually, all the eye-rolling, all the ad-libs became so outrageous that, despite winning another Tony as Best Actor, Mostel was stunned when his nine-month contract was not renewed.
Faster than he knew it, Mostel went from ZERO!!!! to zer-r-r-o-o-o…--and he continued not to feel the love when Norman Jewison cast, in the movie version, Topol, hoping for a more realistic, less vaudevillian interpretation of the role.
(Mostel enjoyed a revenge of sorts on his 1976 national tour, when he received an extremely healthy $30,000 a week. Of course, the repetition of his old antics—this time, the turn-of-the-century Tevye joked about candidate Jimmy Carter—just proved the original makers of the show had been right in not renewing his contract.)
Four years ago, a “revisal” (a revival featuring altered elements, usually in the book) of Fiddler was mounted on Broadway. Too bad the producers made the same mistake committed four decades before in hiring an over-the-top lead as Tevye: Harvey Fierstein, the replacement for the noticeably restrained Alfred Molina.
From commercials for Broadway greatest-hits soundtracks to the hilarious All in the Family episode in which Edith Bunker poses a key question from the musical to husband Archie—“Do You Love Me?”—I felt like I knew Fiddler long before I actually saw it nine years ago at the Stratford Festival of Canada.
As it happened, I was only half right. After the Stratford production, I came to look at the show in a new way—partly because of the unconventional but absolutely appropriate casting of Brent Carver as Tevye, but also because, oddly enough, my Irish-American Catholic background helped me identify with the Russian Jewish milk vendor.
The creators of that unique artform, the American Musical, were disproportionately Jewish: Berlin, Kern, the Gershwin brothers, Weill, Fields, Arlen, Bernstein, Loesser, Comden, Green, Rodgers, Hart and Hammerstein (and I’ve probably missed a few!). They had been largely concerned with erasing their ethnic distinctiveness, however, or at least merging it into the larger American consciousness, with subject matter such as the settling of the West.
By 1964, the day of the Great American Songbook had reached its glorious twilight, though nobody knew this at the time. At this very moment, two more recent Broadway tunesmiths, Sheldon Harnick and Jerry Bock, chose to look back—and outside American shores, at that.
A decade before Alex Haley’s Roots ignited Americans’ interest in their forebears, and before critic Irving Howe examined the passage of East European Jews to the U.S. in World of Our Fathers, the creators of Fiddler considered the joys and turbulence of life in a changing Old World. By the time they conceived the project, American Jews—now, by any standard, among the most successful of American religious-ethnic groups—were in the throes of wrestling with issues of identity, particularly in the novels of Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud and Philip Roth.
In molding the show, director-choreographer Jerome Robbins put his finger quickly on its central theme, expressed in the title of one tune: “Tradition.” Everything then coalesced around that concept.
Joseph Stein’s book used as its source material the stories of Sholom Aleichem, sometimes described as a “Jewish Mark Twain.” Stein focused especially on two forces impinging on the milkman of Anatevka: the shift from arranged marriages to ones based on love, and the expulsion of Jews from their village by the Czar’s troops—and the paroxysm of violence in the form of pogroms that this portended.
Harnick and Bock, having already created the Pulitzer Prize-winning Fiorello and the highly regarded She Loves Me, reached the zenith of their songcraft with tunes such as “If I Were a Rich Man,” “Tradition,” “Sunrise, Sunset,” and “Matchmaker, Matchmaker.” The audience response was overwhelmingly favorable, as the show not only settled in for a long run but the original cast album reached platinum status.
Fiddler closed in 1972 after 3,242 performances that made it the longest-running musical of all time. (That mark has since been eclipsed, of course, by, among others, the wonderful A Chorus Line and the egregious Cats and Phantom of the Opera.)
The run coincided with the period of the most intense clashes in American history between the older and younger generations. In the struggle of Tevye and wife Golde to come to terms with the new social norms of their five daughters (Aleichem had a more Biblical-resonant but theatrically-daunting seven in his tales), middle-aged fans glimpsed a suddenly not-so-distant mirror of their own struggles.
Unfortunately, the first Tevye, Zero Mostel, thought the success was all about him. His constant improvisations, which had previously driven crazy the creators of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, had the same effect on his new creative partners. Eventually, all the eye-rolling, all the ad-libs became so outrageous that, despite winning another Tony as Best Actor, Mostel was stunned when his nine-month contract was not renewed.
Faster than he knew it, Mostel went from ZERO!!!! to zer-r-r-o-o-o…--and he continued not to feel the love when Norman Jewison cast, in the movie version, Topol, hoping for a more realistic, less vaudevillian interpretation of the role.
(Mostel enjoyed a revenge of sorts on his 1976 national tour, when he received an extremely healthy $30,000 a week. Of course, the repetition of his old antics—this time, the turn-of-the-century Tevye joked about candidate Jimmy Carter—just proved the original makers of the show had been right in not renewing his contract.)
Four years ago, a “revisal” (a revival featuring altered elements, usually in the book) of Fiddler was mounted on Broadway. Too bad the producers made the same mistake committed four decades before in hiring an over-the-top lead as Tevye: Harvey Fierstein, the replacement for the noticeably restrained Alfred Molina.
The New York Times’ Ben Brantley spoke for many in noting, “it would seem that this ‘Fiddler’ has gone from having too little of a personality at its center to having too much of one.” (Naturally, the producers compounded their problem by casting Rosie O’Donnell as Golde.)
The more recent producers would have been far better off if they had secured the services of Carver. When I saw the show at Stratford’s Festival Theatre nine summers ago, the difference in physicality between Mostel and Carver struck me with the same kind of force that it had when I compared Lee J. Cobb’s Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman with Dustin Hoffman’s. It made eminent sense to have Tevye as a small(er) man beset—sometimes comically, sometimes not—by forces outside his control.
This production also left me, toward the end of the play, gasping at its sudden but necessary lurch into more serious territory. The Russian troops’ brutalization of Tevye and the resulting tearful scattering of the family reminded me more than a little of how Irish tenant farmers were driven off their land because of discrimination, confiscatory land practices, and British troops during the Great Famine of the 19th century.
I suspect that members of other ethnic groups had similar experiences—making the show unexpectedly relevant to an America grown suddenly more introspective in the 1960s.
The more recent producers would have been far better off if they had secured the services of Carver. When I saw the show at Stratford’s Festival Theatre nine summers ago, the difference in physicality between Mostel and Carver struck me with the same kind of force that it had when I compared Lee J. Cobb’s Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman with Dustin Hoffman’s. It made eminent sense to have Tevye as a small(er) man beset—sometimes comically, sometimes not—by forces outside his control.
This production also left me, toward the end of the play, gasping at its sudden but necessary lurch into more serious territory. The Russian troops’ brutalization of Tevye and the resulting tearful scattering of the family reminded me more than a little of how Irish tenant farmers were driven off their land because of discrimination, confiscatory land practices, and British troops during the Great Famine of the 19th century.
I suspect that members of other ethnic groups had similar experiences—making the show unexpectedly relevant to an America grown suddenly more introspective in the 1960s.
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