At last they were ready for a producer. Finding one made the haggling with Perl seem easy.
As the authors started to raise the subject with various contacts, they heard variations on the same dismissal: no producer could make money on a show that would appeal only to a small coterie audience. “What will we do when we’ve run out of Hadassah groups?” asked one of several who turned them down. He was only the most blunt about fears others shared: the show was “too Jewish.”
Were they kidding? Wasn’t worrying about Jews on Broadway just a wee step away from worrying about Jews in synagogue? The director Tyrone Guthrie once quipped that if all the Jews were to leave the American theater, it would “collapse about next Thursday.” What was so threatening about Tevye (as the show was now being called)? After all, whether or not one accepts the academic argument that a coded Jewish sensibility underlies almost every show since the invention of the musical, by the time Tevye was seeking a producer, the Great White Way was not a restricted neighborhood.
The very same week Stein was finishing his tentative first draft, in October 1961, Milk and Honey, the cheery Zionist musical by Don Appell (book) and Jerry Herman (music and lyrics), opened; it enjoyed a sixteen-month run. Soon after, Shelley Berman starred as the comic father in A Family Affair, a farce about plans for a big Jewish wedding by James and William Goldman (book and lyrics) and John Kander (music) that, savaged by the critics, lasted only a couple of months; somewhat more successfully, I Can Get It for You Wholesale, a bitter tale of greed in the garment industry with a loathsome hero, opened in March 1962, introducing the world to an explosive nineteen-year-old sensation, Barbra Streisand. Streisand went right from that show into her first blockbuster, the bio-musical about the comedian Fanny Brice, Funny Girl, which ran for three and a half years.
But potential producers sensed something different about Tevye even if they couldn’t quite put their finger on it. These other shows—even Milk and Honey—were about Americans. Their Jewishness was not hidden, but it was not thematically important, except insofar as characters moved away from it: the protagonists visiting Israel in the Jerry Herman show fall in love with each other, not with their putative homeland, and return to the United States at the end; Wholesale’s Harry Bogen (Elliott Gould) tromps on anyone in his path as he tries to get to the top; and Streisand’s Fanny Brice turns away from her background as she rises to stardom. At least as Harnick understood them, “those shows weren’t Jewish.” And producers who, after all, were investing in Broadway to make money hadn’t seen any Yiddish-related material make a killing in a good long while. If ever.
The Tevye team hoped that the young sensation of a producer who had enlisted Bock and Harnick for Fiorello! would take a chance on them again: they asked Hal Prince to direct their show. He read the script in the summer of 1962 and simply couldn’t connect. There was “something overall that bothers me,” he fumbled as he broke the bad news to Bock. He found the text “so languid” and full of “let-downs.” Could the material even accommodate a more dramatic shape? “Or is it all charm and warm humor?” he wondered. “It’s just so gentle,” he concluded, before suggesting that Bock spare Stein’s feelings and not share his remarks. Later, he allowed that the problem may have boiled down to a cultural difference. As the descendant of German Jewish forebears, Prince felt no attachment to the Yiddish world of Eastern Europe. He felt “as foreign to the shtetl as I am to Buckingham Palace.”
Prince did offer one piece of advice, though, attached to a promise: he recommended that they ask Jerry Robbins to direct and said he’d consider producing if Robbins came on board. Prince had watched Robbins reinvent the musical with West Side Story and had recently called him down to Washington, D.C., for a pre-Broadway repair of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, the frisky Plautine musical comedy by Burt Shevelove (book) and Stephen Sondheim (music and lyrics) best remembered for the outsize buffoonery of its star, Zero Mostel. Robbins had turned that flabby mess of funny material into a trim comic machine. Robbins’s fluency in the language of theatrical metaphor was what Tevye would need to move it beyond “being simply an ethnic folk tale” toward its promise of “larger things.” The more Prince thought about it, the more he was sure that Bock, Harnick, and Stein simply shouldn’t proceed without Robbins. And he so advised them.
But the writers didn’t wait. Arnold Saint Subber, who had produced (and, as legend has it, conceived of) Kiss Me, Kate fifteen years earlier, was interested. It turned out that he had been raised with Yiddish, having been taken in by a Jewish grandmother after his father was killed in an accident. “He knew Sholem-Aleichem better than we did,” Harnick marveled. Despite Saint Subber’s personal tie to the material, though, the authors perceived that he was having a rough time raising money after a couple of flops and they didn’t think they could count on him. On July 25, they played the score for Fred Coe, the rumpled southerner who produced work on stage, film, and TV. Bock cited the film director and producer Arthur Penn as having expressed interest, too. “Negotiating,” wrote Bock in his diary a short time after meeting with each of them, with no further comment.
On August 20, 1962, more than a year after the men had started to work on the project, an item in the New York Times made it official: “Aleichem Stories Inspire Musical,” the page 18 headline announced, noting that the production was being “considered” by Coe and would probably be presented in the fall of 1963.
Then nothing happened. Or not much apart from a presentation for friends two months later in Stein’s New Rochelle home, where Stein narrated events while Bock and Harnick sat at a piano and sang through the score. If any of the guests took out their checkbooks, their pledges didn’t amount to much. Coe, who had indeed signed on, needed to go out and raise money. Tevye simply had to wait.
The artists did not. Stein went off and wrote a new play of his own, an adaptation of Carl Reiner’s comic bildungsroman Enter Laughing. The “side-splitting,” “uproarious,” “marvelously funny” play—as the New York Times declared it—opened in March 1963 and played for a solid year. Meanwhile, Bock and Harnick responded to an invitation to adapt the film The Shop around the Corner (based on a play by Miklós László) for Hal Prince, and over the autumn and winter of 1962–63 they wrote and rehearsed their little gem of a musical, She Loves Me, which premiered in April 1963. Though appreciated, the small-scale charmer that tells the tale of a surprise romance couldn’t compete with splashier spectacles and it closed after eight months. At the same time, the song duo wrote what the New York Times called (in an otherwise negative review) “three snappy numbers” for a tame space adventure for children featuring puppets by Bil and Cora Baird, called Man in the Moon.
As for the possibility of Robbins, his schedule was packed all through the season. Coe had duly called him in December 1962, but there’s no indication that Robbins even accepted a copy of the script at that point. He was up to his ears with a trying production of Brecht’s Mother Courage (for which he adamantly refused Brecht’s instruction to use a turntable onstage). Soon after it opened in late March 1963—right between Enter Laughing and She Loves Me—Robbins was preparing a new Broadway opening. If the financial loss, mixed reviews, and miserable experience of Mother Courage disturbed him, he didn’t lose stride: he moved right into work on transferring Arthur Kopit’s mordant play Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feelin’ So Sad, which he’d staged Off-Broadway the previous season. And a project with Richard Rodgers was in the planning stages. But somehow a sliver of mental space opened long enough for Robbins to think about what would challenge him anew after the Kopit play.
In July, he wrote to his friend and erstwhile collaborator Leonard Bernstein to ask whether the composer had any further ideas about a ballet version of the mystical Yiddish play The Dybbuk, which they’d once talked about. Robbins thought they might pull it together in time for the next year’s Spoleto festival in Italy. (They finally got around to it in 1974.) Robbins floated a new
idea: “Also, have you read Another Country by James Baldwin?” he asked. “There’s a marvelous new and strange kind of musical theater to be evolved from the book [which] touches me enormously.”
Coe reached Robbins at this auspicious moment when thoughts of new forms, Yiddish material, and issues of racial tolerance were mingling in his mind. On August 15, Bock and Harnick came to his Upper East Side home office to play him the score. He didn’t have to be coaxed. On the twentieth, his lawyer called to tell him they’d come to terms with Coe—including the agreement that Robbins would be cut in as an uncredited author—but warned Robbins not to make any decisions about the Richard Rodgers collaboration on his docket until they had the Tevye deal in writing. Robbins wasted no time. Within a week, he wrote to Rodgers to withdraw from their plans, explaining that the Tevye material “is something I feel deeply related to. maybe it’s my heritage. I’m aware of the fact that a lot of people have considered this material and gave it up as impossible. but i want to try and have decided to. Both of you are creative enough to understand what is moving me, and believe me the background of my parents and their parents plays a big role.” The next day he heard back from Rodgers. Expressing “deep disappointment” and the “equally deep hope that we’ll work together some time soon,” Rodgers allowed how “this sort of decision has to be made on a personal and emotional basis.”
When Robbins cabled his favorite stage manager, Ruth Mitchell, on August 23, to entice her to join the project, he gushed, “I’m going to do a musical of Sholem Aleichem stories with Harnick and Bock. I’m in love with it. It’s our people.” A few days later, Robbins wrote to his longtime close friend Nancy Keith: “I’m going to do a musical which should really star my father,” he happily announced. “It’s all about the background he comes from.” And then he added, with the sort of winking self-criticism only an intimate could appreciate, “So I have to start getting into my usual black mood for work.”
The Tevye team had heard of Robbins’s notorious “black mood” and, as delighted as they were to have won the musical stage’s greatest living director, they stashed away some caution. When they were about to offer the helm to Robbins, Harnick checked in with Robbins’s friend Sondra Lee. She told him they couldn’t do better than Robbins for the project but should give him a wide berth as the opening approached. “He becomes obsessed by his demons,” she told Harnick. “He is so worried about failure.” And since Robbins’s father had imbued him with the fear that if you’re Jewish everything you’ve accomplished will be taken away from you, she thought he might feel especially vulnerable on this show, perfect as she felt they were for each other. If he starts brooding under a cloud, she cautioned, you can expect terrible thunder. If you hear it rumbling and you can’t reach him with humor, she said ominously, “stay out of his way.”
In the summer of 1963, when Robbins stormed into the project, he blew in like a gale force, bringing fresh perspective and exhilaration—and a slew of precise, rigorous demands.
* * *
Robbins immediately threw himself into preparing for Tevye, despite rehearsals for reopening Oh Dad. Robbins always conducted extensive background research where a project warranted it, but never before with as much fervor. He started amassing books, articles, photographs, records, and films about Jewish history, culture, and practice. Early on, he rented Maurice Schwartz’s movie Tevye der milkhiker. Perhaps Schwartz’s knack for shifting nimbly between humor and poignancy, his ability to be at once grand and pitiable, helped shape the image of the Tevye that Robbins would want center stage, but his working notes don’t discuss the heartrending movie or Schwartz more generally. It’s a telling omission: Robbins had made his own acting debut under Schwartz’s direction at the Yiddish Art Theater in 1937.
Robbins’s first serious dance teacher, Gluck Sandor, had been hired by Schwartz as a choreographer and he brought Robbins (as well as his sister, Sonia) along with him. The show was I. J. Singer’s Di brider ashkenazi (The Brothers Ashkenazi), an epic novel adapted for the stage the moment it came off the press. Sprawling and full of twists, rises, and falls, the plot traces the fate of Poland’s Jews—and of the industrializing city of Łodź—from the late nineteenth century to the First World War by telling the story of enterprising brothers who become rivals in business and romance. Robbins danced in two numbers, served as supernumerary in the many lavish crowd scenes, and, just shy of his nineteenth birthday and appearing much younger, played a boy in a two-word walk-on. “Yoh, tata,” he had to say—“Yes, Dad.”
Playing eight or nine times a week for six months (to packed houses) could have provided Robbins with a solid sense of at least one big slice of Eastern European Jewish life (albeit in melodramatic form), despite his not knowing Yiddish. The novel had been published in English, but even if Robbins hadn’t read it he could have followed the stage action, with all its pomp and pious protocol, easily enough. But that was the last thing that interested him at the time—the first instance in which young Rabinowitz was listed in a program under the name Jerome Robbins. He focused, instead, on Schwartz’s technique and showmanship. He found the maestro to be “stern, serious, not smiling except when the play called for it,” and “autocratic” but also a tremendously skillful and compelling actor. Robbins particularly liked to watch the climactic scene in which Schwartz, playing the assimilating brother, cuts off his payess—his ritual side curls—“in an act of defiance,… puts on a tie & with a deep determined breath & chin lifted, he strides out to meet the world. (End of act 1.)”
Apart from projecting into his admiration of the scene his own teenage desire to separate from his Jewish heritage, Robbins likely picked up some early lessons in pacing and the power of a portentous first-act curtain. As Robbins would be, Schwartz was a stickler for realism and ensemble playing, and he knew how to build, and milk, big flashy scenes. He gave plenty of stage time and meticulous attention to dramatized religious rituals. The Brothers Ashkenazi featured a solemn, extravagant wedding—one Robbins nowhere mentions in his notes even as he is called on to create one himself.
Perhaps Robbins was so resistant to Yiddishkayt in his youth that the substance of The Brothers Ashkenazi bounced off him and genuinely made no lasting impression; perhaps he needed to engage the artistic project of cultural recovery as a parallel process of personal retrieval, with no interference from another domineering theatrical imagination. Whatever the reason, he approached Tevye research as if he’d had no exposure to the century-long history of Polish Jews recounted in the Singer work—or to the culture of the scrappy company at the Yiddish Art Theater. It was Tevye that provided him a chance to fill in a wide and aching gap in his understanding, to make up for his father’s teaching him “nought about the religion, Torah, traditions, language or most of all the WHY of it … fasting, davening [praying], payess, tzitzis [fringes] or any pride or history of our tribe.” Among the books Robbins bought: A Treasury of Jewish Folklore, Nine Gates to the Hasidic Mysteries, The Jewish Woman and Her Home, Great Ages and Ideas of the Jewish People, The Lifetime of a Jew: Throughout the Ages of Jewish History, The Jewish Festivals, Everyman’s Talmud, Maurice Samuel’s Little Did I Know.
But the first item Robbins looked for was a photograph. He wanted a portrait of Sholem-Aleichem. By the time the New York Times reported on August 29 “Robbins to Direct ‘Tevye,’ a Musical” (a full year after the paper’s last mention of the project), Robbins had already put in some calls to experts at New York’s Jewish Museum and the Jewish Educational Committee. With a long-standing, serious interest in photography, Robbins may have expected to glean some insights by gazing into the wide, bewhiskered face of his onetime namesake. Or perhaps he simply wanted to see what the debonair voice of the people looked like. Or to keep the author’s smiling eyes nearby as a sort of charm as he worked on the show. In any event, a picture of Sholem-Aleichem would have served as a strong visual rejoinder to a photograph that characterized Robbins’s feelings about Jewishness heretofore.
Hebrew Lesson, a haunting image by Cornell Capa, had been hanging in Robbins’s home office for at least a few years, depicting a teacher with pointy beard and spiraling side curls leaning like an ominous shadow over boys reading in a kheyder. The photo, made in 1955, may have struck sentimental chords for some viewers, but Robbins’s own brief experience with a bar mitzvah tutor had been traumatic and the appeal of this picture, though beautiful, was complicated, to say the least. The hovering figure in the photo evokes the “old wizened, decrepit white bearded, unshaven man [who came] to the house every afternoon to train me to read the Torah, that part of the Torah I had to learn.” But the scarring lesson Robbins took from him was “Jewish submissiveness.” Neighborhood boys taunted Robbins through the window while he had his lesson. The teacher did nothing. “If he’d taught me to fight—if he’d stood up and yelled at them back, but no, he accepted the fact that we were curs and we got off the sidewalk when we were commanded to.” Yet here on his wall Robbins had prominently displayed a reminder of “the horror, the embarrassment and the shame” of Jewish wimpiness.
Jerome Robbins at home with Cornell Capa’s “Hebrew Lesson” looming behind him.
Even if Robbins never obtained or never hung up a portrait of Sholem-Aleichem, his work on Tevye would mitigate the fear and frustrated desire evoked by the Capa image. With this show, at last, he would stand up for Jews; he would stand up as a Jew. “The play must celebrate and elevate the life of the shtetl and its people,” Robbins scrawled on a yellow legal pad in early September, as he jotted down his preliminary reaction to the material. And he quickly added a corollary: “We must keep away from the sentimental.” This imperative guided Robbins’s work on the play as much as any of the research he was soaking up.
This principle was at odds with much of the background material he was consulting, which included the mawkish paeans to the hermetic, homogenous, poor-but-pious shtetl invented in the 1940s and 1950s: Samuel’s The World of Sholom Aleichem, Herzog and Zborowski’s Life Is with People (Robbins called it “our guide and our Bible”), and Roman Vishniac’s Vanished World. (He purchased at least six copies to distribute to his designers once he had assembled them.) For all the heat Robbins and the Fiddler team would take later for “discard[ing] the richness of texture that is Sholem Aleichem’s greatest achievement” (as Irving Howe put it in a famously cranky Commentary essay) and for “falsifying the world of Sholem Aleichem, not to mention the character of the East European Jew” (as the theater critic Robert Brustein chided), in truth, Robbins labored mightily to burn away the shmaltz that for two decades had encased the world of the shtetl like amber.
Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof Page 14
