And so Robbins found another detail to fuss over. “The height of the house isn’t right,” he told Aronson. Changing it threw off the relationship of the rooftop to the moon behind it. Aronson’s crew had to paint the drop again.
Still, Robbins had obsessiveness to spare. Casting continued at an accelerated pace in the new year. So did research—more weddings, more reading, more poring over pictures. Robbins purchased another five copies of Roman Vishniac’s book of photographs to share with collaborators; he rented Laughter through Tears again. He was on the phone or in a meeting with Joe Stein every couple of days, and almost as often with Bock and Harnick. He was hounding the designers, coaching hopeful actors, and, apparently, dodging phone calls from Hal Prince, who was leaving messages every day or two. When Robbins retreated for a weekend to his secluded house at heavily forested Snedens Landing, about a thirty minutes’ drive north of his city apartment, he brought along background reading and notes to “mess around with” and sometimes he brought Stein himself for an intensive session on the script. When Robbins dashed to London for five days the last week of January, his return flight was due in New York at 1:55 p.m.; he scheduled auditions for 4:00 that afternoon. He would have had to go straight from the airport to the theater.
The show was taking firmer shape in his mind’s eye. Though his activity speeded up, his ideas seemed to coalesce. “The drama of the play,” he scribbled down on the first day of the new year, “is to watch a man carefully treading his way between his accepting of his sustaining belief (that way of life that is centuries old, practiced as if it were still in the middle ages, which protects & defends him & makes his life tolerable)—& his wry questioning of it within the confinements of the belief. He always asks why. He ducks & weaves with the events around him still managing to straddle both sides—his traditions & the questioning of it.” The tests of Tevye’s ability to stay astride the widening gulf become more difficult and finally, when Chava chooses Fyedka, “he is forced either to move forward into being a new Jew or embrace the strict traditions of his life.” Robbins was clearly siding with the “new Jew” option, an interpretation of Tevye befitting midcentury America. From a liberal standpoint that holds tolerance and equality as supreme values, Tevye’s crisis over Chava’s non-Jewish spouse comes across as old-fashioned indeed. Sholem-Aleichem’s Tevye is most undone by Chava’s apostasy, but that simply does not register on Robbins’s radar as such, so the high-minded director has to conclude, “The conditions that [Tevye] has lived under have made him become as prejudice[d] as his attackers.”
Robbins seems to have been rereading Sholem-Aleichem’s stories that winter. Little wonder, given the story’s agonizing sadness, that “Chava” was stirring him deeply. As he describes Tevye’s torment, Robbins seems to merge emotionally with the character. He slips into Yinglish syntax in his notes: “Underlying all his actions is the frightening question ‘Why?’—Why? Why Chava? Why on me is this visiting?” And he could well have been describing his own decades-long anguish when he continues in Tevye’s voice: “Why Jew & Gentile,” as the dairyman allows himself to wonder in Sholem-Aleichem’s story and, in turn, in Stein’s script. “It is a fearsome question, with terrifying ramifications—& it is this which so deeply flings him into a panic.” Robbins began to picture a surreal scene in which Tevye would “careen and come apart” as he tried to win his daughter back and would be shown confronting “an event too large & catastrophic for his capabilities.” Book musicals in the 1960s still sometimes featured “dream ballets”—dance sequences in which a character expresses in movement a fantasy that can’t be put into words, or even into song. Robbins imagined giving Tevye a nightmare ballet.
The schedule barely let up even as Robbins answered the call for a rescue mission on another show. Funny Girl—which he was originally to have directed—was foundering in Philadelphia and in late February and early March Robbins spent extended periods there cleaning up the mess. (Robbins loved working with Streisand. “Her performances astound, arouse, fulfill,” he noted later. “When she sings she is as honest and frighteningly direct with her feelings as if one time she was, is, or will be in bed with you. The satisfactions she gives also leaves one with terrible and pleasurable hunger.”)
Robbins arrived for a March 18 read-through of Tevye at the Hellinger Theater with Funny Girl’s unwieldiness and five postponed opening dates curdling in his mind. The main problem with Isobel Lennart’s book, he thought, was that “it was not written within the time and tempo schedule of a musical, and when it was ripped to pieces to bring it down to size, only a soap opera paste job could be done to make anything recognizable and tell the story.” He listened to Bock and Harnick’s new numbers, Stein’s new scenes, and, especially, the overall movement of the play, with sharpened attention.
About twenty actors were on hand to help, many of them already cast—Pendleton, Merlin, Everett among them—and others willing to pitch in for the fifteen-dollar fee required by Equity for their unrehearsed labors. (That wasn’t enough to conjure Mostel, apparently. Jack Gilford read Tevye.) Now the script began with the milkman’s direct announcement of the theme Robbins had pulled out of the script conferences: “Good evening. My name is Tevye. I may be a stranger to you, but I am very well known to those who know me well. We live in the little town of Anatevka and I’d like to tell you about our life there.… The main thing is that we live as our fathers before us and their fathers before them. (Sings) Tradition, tradition!” Bock and Harnick had taken a stab at a song addressing their central theme.
At the end of a couple of hours, the writers felt pleased. Robbins said little as he dashed away for a three o’clock meeting with Aronson. That night, he grumbled his reactions into a Dictaphone, noting that he felt he had “the treasure of the season” and then launching into lengthy explanations of cuts, tucks, and rearrangements the script required. Before those remarks could be typed up by Robbins’s secretary and then shaped into what he wanted to present to the authors, Bock and Harnick had left the country. She Loves Me—produced by Hal Prince—was opening on London’s West End at the end of April. They were going to attend rehearsals and also make some adjustments to the score.
Robbins came down with a nasty case of bronchitis. But a raging fever didn’t stop him from working. He used the time he was laid up to go over the script even more minutely and to build on those recorded remarks to prepare a document of several pages outlining “book changes to be completed by author in April.” He sent it to Stein on April 3. The next day, he dispatched an even longer set of “notes on the score” to London.
His experience on Funny Girl—now selling out nightly at the Winter Garden—made Robbins push Stein all the harder to produce a performance-ready script before rehearsals started. “Having been through terrible fire and insolvable problems with Funny Girl,” he told Stein, “I absolutely refuse to repeat the same experience and have anyone else suffer from it.” Forty pages had to come out of Tevye right away, Robbins commanded. “If this means reconstructing of scenes and events it has to be faced now.” Changes affecting scenery especially had to be made immediately. If there’s anything that would have “ramifications for Boris,” Robbins ordered, “let’s solve it now and save screaming later.”
His specific demands were mechanical—in the way that building a Swiss watch is mechanical: refining all the delicate parts and fitting them together efficiently and gracefully. But making material tick according to Broadway clockwork always means interpreting it in a particular way. That he wanted Stein to let audiences get to know the daughters better—who Tzeitel is, “what she is, what she wants and what she is like,” Hodel changing “from a traditional girl with a mind to one who weds the revolutionary idea,” Chava as an individual rather than someone “colorless until her meeting with Fyedka”—mattered not only because stick figures bore audiences. Just as important was what they represented: coming social upheaval, a resonant matter at a time when Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique had just
spent six weeks on the best-seller list and Congress was about to outlaw discrimination on the basis of sex. In the context of 1905, the daughters’ rebellion remained in the still restricted realm of marriage (Hodel, after all, does not run off on her own to join the revolution) but they and their suitors were the means by which modernizing forces assailed Tevye from outside and within. “This should be the most vital part of our show,” Robbins correctly argued. Instead it remained “ordinary, conventional and colorless.”
Tevye’s relationship to the daughters had to be richer and more focused, his reaction to Perchik and Hodel played not in the current script’s “passive humorous nebbish terms” but more substantively. Stein had made an “essential error” in the Chava sequence: “its climax is now the cliché lamenting and agonizing scene by a Jew whose daughter married a Christian. Let’s throw all that out and put there instead the trial of his ability to swing with the times, and the climax of that trial is his denial of Chava. Get out after that immediately.”
The director saw the potential wide appeal of the Tevye musical in its “vital and universal” story about “the changing with the times we all have to make, and the conflicts and tensions made by these changes.” And he understood that the universalism would emerge most potently from Tevye’s anguish. Unless the play traced his “attempts to keep his tradition and still follow his heart,” Robbins enjoined, “we are back with a better ‘Rise of the Goldbergs.’” Plus, he added in an especially telling complaint, the script was “still terribly anti-Gentile and Jewish self-loving.”
Robbins had been pounding these points for months with Stein and the notes betray his impatience. He calls sections of the script “muddy,” “boring,” “bland,” “killing with monotony.” As if to soften the blow, his cover note offers some stroking lines about how “diligent” Stein has been and assures him that “all we need is this final two months’ energy to get set and go.” Perhaps he meant to make Stein feel better by revealing that he worried even more about Bock and Harnick’s work: Robbins was “pleased” with “the shape of the book at the reading and not so much with the score.”
In his letter to the songwriters, Robbins began, “Dear Boys,” his typical form of collective address that at once expressed affection and reminded them who was boss. In a single paragraph he carped, chided, nagged, even threatened. He found it “incredible and unforgivable” that they were overseas writing new songs for She Loves Me and had also taken time to churn out several songs for To Broadway with Love, an extravaganza at the World’s Fair. He warned that the project would require “another, and this time, much more lengthy postponement” if the writers didn’t hop to. A handwritten postscript made a wan effort to dull his bite: “The tone of this letter is nasty I know—I’m sorry for it. But the points I believe in firmly all around.”
“Though most of the songs are charming even the charm wears thin,” Robbins slammed with faint praise. Instead, the show had to convey the “toughness, tenaciousness, robustness, virility and hard core resilience of the people.” In his most emphatic assertion of the image he wanted to produce—and, most of all, the image he wanted to avoid—Robbins explained: “We err in begging for love for our ‘kindness,’ ‘sweetness,’ ‘gentleness,’ ‘understanding,’ ‘patience,’ ‘pixie humor’ and boy scout virtues. What we should be asking for is admiration for our tenacity, effort, frailties, vigor and not holier than thou qualities.” What that could possibly mean in musical terms, Robbins didn’t say. But one thing was certain: “If every song is sweet, sentimental sad, touching and nostalgic, all will come off as Second Avenue.”
Bock and Harnick tried not to bristle. “Please, Reb Robbins, don’t holler or we’ll come home by horse,” they answered, affecting some banter on thin blue airmail stationery. Though Bock was keeping an eye on the London show, he had plenty of time to work on the Tevye score, he explained—he even had a piano in his flat—and Harnick was working on it all day. In fact, the situation was “ideal for writing” and they wanted Robbins to feel “it’s both credible and forgivable!” But either way, they could get more done without his microscopic meddling. Their letter was blunt: “any more talk and conferences at this time” would be counterproductive.
Still, they trusted Robbins. They knew he was motivated by artistic considerations, not by ego. Or at least not by ego alone. After they returned—Harnick on April 29 and Bock on May 5—they cut an amusing song for Lazar about “a butcher’s soul” because it stole focus away from what the scene was supposed to be about—Tevye’s difficulty in deciding whether to give Lazar Tzeitel’s hand (“What gave you the idea / That a man who makes his living / Handling liver, lungs and kidneys / Has no heart?”). They dropped a rousing number called “Make the Circle Bigger” because it was “agitprop.” They ditched a short tune called “Baby Birds” for reiterating the ideas of “Sunrise, Sunset.” A minor but beautiful script change had gone in. In the early scene when the men gather to hear the newspaper read by Avram the Bookseller, he tells them about a shtetl whose residents have been evicted. In the earliest drafts, the town was called Graznia; now it was Rozhanka.
By then, Robbins’s overall point had been vindicated. Cafe Crown, Hy Kraft’s adaptation of his own 1942 play, had opened at the Martin Beck Theater on April 17, proving true what its composer, Albert Hague, had boasted to Joe Stein: that their Jewish musical would make it to Broadway before Stein’s. The show offered an affectionate, humorous peek inside a bygone Second Avenue eatery where the royalty of the 1930s Yiddish theater assembled to brag, bicker, and vie for glory. It was packed like a pickle barrel with waiters’ slow-burn wisecracks and impresarios’ bumptious speechifying (the protagonist, based on Jacob Adler, is preparing an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Lear called The King of Riverside Drive). The characters are rehearsing a musical within the musical, Au Revoir, Poland—Hello, New York, which offers some ample opportunities for wry and wacky songs. And in a heartwarming, only half-mocking act 1 denouement, the ingenue’s beau, so troublingly named Logan, turns out to be the son of a rabbi.
This thickly layered shmaltz fest played thirty preview performances on Broadway. Holding tryouts in town, the producers figured, not only saved travel expenses but kept the show close to its target audience—more than 42 percent of America’s Jews still lived in the New York metropolitan area at the time. Even so, the show attracted Jews at about the rate of Easter Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. The deterrent wasn’t just musty writing or actors fumbling their lines or Theodore Bikel (in the role modeled on Adler) failing to keep his wig on straight. Jews who came of age in the postwar period—now the adults making up much of the Broadway audience—were, for the most part, fleeing from neighborhoods like the Lower East Side and their nostalgic representations. If they were going to splurge on a night on Broadway that month, they were more likely to choose ethnically neutral (i.e., Anglo-Saxon) entertainments like Hello, Dolly! or a new, lightweight musical called High Spirits based on a Noel Coward play. Funny Girl was also an option, its irony and assimilationist plot enough to keep it on the far side of the sentimentally “Jewish”—a category that Streisand was brashly blasting open in any case.
Some nonmusical, more high-brow offerings invited theatergoers to explore current liberal concerns: the modern-dress Hamlet directed by John Gielgud and starring Richard Burton (opening less than a month after he’d married Elizabeth Taylor amid a media frenzy); James Baldwin’s Blues for Mister Charlie, the time-fluid crime drama about the murder of a black man by a white man in the South; and Rolf Hochhuth’s The Deputy, the theatrical J’accuse of Pope Pius XII for having failed to speak out against the Nazi genocide of the Jews. Its telling subtitle was A Christian Tragedy. The play stirred enormous controversy in New York (as it had done in earlier productions in Europe)—and no small measure of anxiety among mainstream Jewish institutions, which feared it could tear a rift in hard-won “harmonious interfaith relations,” as an American Jewish Committee representative put it. Opening night was
picketed by a joint group of 150 Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish protesters objecting to alleged bigotry against Catholics—and they were joined by a dozen American Nazis in storm trooper uniforms. Hamlet, in contrast, drew throngs into the streets night after night that spring, well beyond the premiere, but in this case the thousands who turned up each evening from April through August were trying to catch a glimpse of glamour and express their adoration of Burton and Taylor, who met her new husband at the theater after the performance most nights; the crowds more than compensated for an Ohio congressman’s earlier effort to have Burton’s visa revoked on the grounds of his “moral turpitude.”
All three plays dealt with the question of an individual’s responsibility to the claims of history—whether the ghost of his father calling Hamlet to action, racist violence illuminating the moral crisis of white America in Mister Charlie, or the pope choosing silence in the face of cataclysm—and did so with a crescendoing demand for civil rights and sexual liberation gathering outside the walls of the theaters. This was the tide Robbins wanted to catch, at least to the extent possible in a musical form. As for Cafe Crown, before its official opening on April 17 the producers posted a closing notice; its curtain came down for the last time on the nineteenth. Robbins could not have invented a clearer object lesson.
* * *
Robbins was slowly assembling the rest of his cast. To the amazement of his colleagues—and even surprising himself—he offered the role of Golde, Tevye’s down-to-earth wife, to his dance colleague and Ballets: USA member Maria Karnilova. Slender and sturdy, with high cheekbones and smiling eyes, she projected the motherly groundedness the character needed. She had never carried a major Broadway role before, but under Robbins’s direction she had bumped to great acclaim in Gypsy as the stripper Tessie Tura, advising, “If you wanna grind it, wait till you’ve refined it,” in the song “You Gotta Get a Gimmick.” She was a friend, a known quantity to Robbins. He knew that physically she could do anything and that she was a reliable, low-maintenance company member. And, no small thing, perhaps an ally in what was sure to be an endless battle with Mostel.
Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof Page 20
