Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof

by Alisa Solomon

  From underwear to overcoats, Zipprodt used natural fibers that would have been available in 1905 for the 165 costumes she made: silks and cottons for the shells and pink knee-length bloomers, belted calf-length shifts, and striped camisoles with skirts that the three sisters wear as they change into their Sabbath clothes and sing “Matchmaker”; various grades of wools for the buttoned cloaks, patterned shawls, and heavy jackets the Anatevkans bundle into after the order of expulsion. It may have been July in New York, but when the play ends it’s winter in Anatevka. There was no scrimping on the heavy layers.

  As the actors walked around in the clothes and saw their Anatevkan neighbors in full attire for the first time, their world started to come to life in a newly thick, visual way. The cast had yet to work with Aronson’s set pieces, which were already packed into shipping crates and on their way to Detroit. The costumes would join them that night in the ten trailers heading west at the outrageous cost of $9,000. When Prince signed up the trucking company, he figured they’d need six trailers. “It never occurred to me that we would have one of the biggest monsters ever sent out!”

  Robbins knew how much work he’d have to do in Detroit. Days before departure, Robbins told his assistant to ask his doctor for eight weeks’ worth of “those very mild pickups with SKF printed on back” (no doubt, Smith Kline French’s readily dispensed Dexedrine). It would be the work of clarifying, fine-tuning, trimming, and shaping—the kind that could be harder than a major overhaul.

  According to Fiddler lore, the show was overhauled on the road. But satisfying as the mess-to-megahit narrative may be, that’s not what happened. Unlike Man of La Mancha or Funny Girl or other shows that saw changes like major characters jettisoned and whole plot lines rerouted, Fiddler basically remained intact. Although half a dozen songs that were performed on opening night in Detroit were replaced by new ones, when the show returned to New York in September it told the same story it had told in July—but with more emotional depth and more theatrical high points. It didn’t change so much as become more fully itself. And like any sincere process of self-realization, getting there was grueling.

  The first on-the-road rehearsal was called for noon the day after the company arrived in Detroit. The set crew was installing the scenery on the stage, so Robbins and the actors—having abandoned an alternative space that had no air-conditioning—worked in the Fisher Theater’s lush lobby. The building, designed by Albert Kahn and erected in 1928 as a “cathedral to commerce” by the seven Fisher brothers, who had made a fortune by developing a covered body for automobiles, stood as an opulent reminder of the city’s industrial heydays—first in the early, pre-Depression years of car manufacturing, then during the war as the “great arsenal of democracy,” and finally for a time after the war, when the economic boom raised the demand for cars and America dominated the world market. The twenty-eight-story art deco structure, faced with pink granite at the base and with marble the rest of the way up, housed offices and retail space and, in its first decades, a grand movie palace on its ground floor, fitted out in a local notion of Mayan decor: spewing fountains, live macaws, and banana trees in the lobby, bright red and yellow fixtures in the auditorium, gilded frog ashtrays in the restrooms. When it was renovated as a playhouse in 1961—modern neighborhood cinemas and proliferating televisions having commandeered the clientele of the extravagant old movie palaces—the birds and fruit and decorative waterworks gave way to designs more modest only in relative terms. Audiences in the 1960s still came into the building through a high arched entryway lined with bronze and granite reliefs and passed through part of the vast interior marble arcade, its vaulted ceiling covered in elaborate murals and mosaics and bedecked with gilded chandeliers.

  The Fisher’s sheer extravagance drew the public as powerfully as did the chance to see road companies playing New York’s latest hits—and the tryout shows that could be Broadway’s next ones. Even if audiences weren’t so keen on spending an evening with a work in progress, the pre-Broadway productions were part of the subscription they had to buy if they wanted to secure seats for the visiting blockbusters. Between those deals and steady sales in group benefits, the Fisher could guarantee decent houses for at least the first couple of weeks of a tryout. That gave Prince some solace. Robbins wanted to go to Boston instead of traipsing to what he called the “milk towns,” but Prince couldn’t make the switch. Boston theaters were not available and besides, Prince told him when he signed for the midwestern house in February, “The subscription in Detroit is hefty, but only available if we book for a full four weeks. I think we need this protection.” By July, the protection felt thin. The Fisher had booked moderate audiences for the first two weeks of the Detroit run; the other two would have to build from good word of mouth. Harnick, for one, found the situation scary: even if the show were in good shape, “we could die in Detroit.”

  The company set up for rehearsal in the theater’s lounge, entering under the watch of naked Muses with flaming orange hair who floated on overhead frescoes with harp or tambourine on a background of hemlock branches and starry skies. One cast member who had taken a small detour came rushing back, squealing, “You should see this ladies’ room!” and the troupe, male and female, marched in to admire the thick purple carpets, the velvet princess couches, and the gold-plated faucets. The Fisher’s flamboyance made for an amusing foil to the tattered grays of the fictional world of Anatevka the troupe inhabited in a day’s work, but it disturbed some company members, too. The city’s entrenched segregation was obvious enough to anyone who noted who filled up the 2,100 seats at Fisher performances—and who cleaned underneath them in the morning. To the extent that Fiddler evoked nostalgia—as some of its critics would charge—it may have been not only for the benighted life of the shtetl but as much for a guileless, giddy moment in America when, as Michael Harrington had just recently put it, if you didn’t make a point of looking for “the other America,” then it was “easy to assume that ours, indeed, is an affluent society” that anyone who works hard can enjoy.

  For that first rehearsal in the lounge the musical director and vocal arranger, Milton Greene, led the actors and orchestra through all the songs. The musicians’ easygoing response to adjustments in accents and phrasing set the tone for the afternoon’s labor—intent but unruffled professionals simply getting the work done. When everyone moved into the theater at around 4:30, however, the collective good mood began its monthlong collapse. Initially, the culprit was the usual suspect that always frays nerves: the incorporation of all the show’s technical elements. The eight-hour tech rehearsal that Wednesday night—it ran until 1:00 in the morning, with the company getting through just the first act—gave Robbins new reasons to abhor Aronson’s turntable. Teaching the actors to step onto the revolving piece of floor without falling down—and then while maintaining a natural gait or a dance step—ate up two days of rehearsal. The snaking line of dancers in “Tradition” had to time their movements to the pace of the turntable, and they spent much of that first day marking out the moves. Sandra Kazan was the first to tumble to the floor and she learned shortly thereafter—through a backstage pay-phone call to a local doctor she’d seen that morning—that she was pregnant. Fear of falling again almost forced her to leave the show, but her doctor back home in New York reassured her that she could keep working and, more important, Aronson slowed down the speed of the rotation. Robbins made the troupe walk through the blocking again and again, and by Friday the cast had finally gotten the hang of it.

  Not a moment too soon. The first preview audience was due on Saturday, and Robbins’s dread was spreading. On Friday night, he upbraided Greene for the mushiness he alone heard in the music. Dismissing the orchestra for the night, he turned his attention to the actors, all of whom he felt fell short—Motel couldn’t sing, Perchik lacked urgency, Fyedka was too meek. Not one cast member, he complained, seemed capable of walking across the stage without bumping into the scenery. And that, of course, had to be Aronson’s
fault, as Robbins did not hesitate to tell him. In a fit of frustration, he called a halt to rehearsal and sat, silently, in the auditorium with his head hanging low. The actors milled quietly backstage, afraid to move or speak. After five awkward minutes, Robbins beckoned Prince to his side. “What are you going to do about this, Hal?” he asked, loud enough for the company to hear, more plaintive than angry. “In my entire career, I have never put on a show in this condition.”

  Prince kept his affable cool. “Whatever it is, Jerry, just tell me and I’ll take care of it.” The two whispered together briefly and then Prince moved away. Robbins sat, quiet and motionless, for five minutes more, then suddenly clapped his hands to call the actors back to work. They instantly assembled onstage and rehearsal went on as if nothing had happened.

  The first preview did its job: it began to show the creators where audiences were responding and where their attention flagged, where the play’s emotions gathered and where they failed to materialize, where the laughs landed and where they died. Most of all, it showed the whole company that they had something that could hang together. Until that evening, they had never played the entire second act from beginning to end, in costumes and with all the light cues and set changes. Though the performance lasted nearly four hours that first evening and suffered some technical glitches—noisy stagehands in the wings, a drop entangling itself in a set piece, crew members caught in the light—most of the audience stayed to the end and then applauded heartily. A few walked out during the long, loose second act, but Harnick found a silver lining: “They were inching out backwards. That was the one encouraging thing.” Stein, too, held his confidence in check, noting that much of the crowd that night was part of a Jewish group benefit. At the intermission he heard some of them talking in the lobby: “Well, we like it, but will they like it?” The performers weren’t even noticing the audience that night. They were just glad to have completed the whole show without a major disaster. The dancer Duane Bodin was not the only one thinking, “Well, we got through that one.”

  To get through the one the next night better, Robbins began tinkering at rehearsal first thing in the morning. One audience reaction that perplexed him came after a charming song near the top of the second act, Motel’s paean to his “Dear, Sweet Sewing Machine” in which he promises, as if taking a matrimonial vow, to love and honor it, to keep it clean and oiled if, in turn, the machine will help him make a living, transforming “satin and silk” into “butter and milk.” True, Pendleton’s singing scraped by on spirit (and Merlin’s didn’t compensate when she chimed in with some counterpoint), but he was a terrific actor and his weedy voice fit Motel’s nebbishy character. The song had always been a favorite at backers’ auditions.

  Robbins had staged it so that at the end the townspeople came running in to see the tailor’s amazing new contraption. During the first preview, they took up their places in the wings as the song began, and as Pendleton finished they did what every pro knew to do: they held for applause. They would rush on as directed once the clapping had peaked. But there was barely any clapping that night. Almost none. Mostly an awkward silence until the Anatevkans realized they should go ahead and make their entrance. Robbins discussed the problem with Harnick and Bock afterward—there were production meetings late each night after every performance—and at the rehearsal, they told Milton Greene what to do: the orchestra should play slower and more softly. “I’m afraid they’re not getting the lyrics,” Harnick explained to Greene. Pendleton and the musicians practiced it at the new pace and the new version seemed delightful.

  But not to the second-night audience. Once again, they greeted the song with indifference. Otherwise, the second preview ran more smoothly—except for when Tevye’s house, moving into place on the turntable, collided with a backdrop and the show had to be stopped. Prince came out to apologize while the technicians rescued the scenery. The audience didn’t mind. Even Pendleton “could feel their warmth” throughout the show despite their coolness toward his love song to his mechanical apparatus. Stein also felt the receptiveness from the house, and this time they were there: a non-Jewish benefit audience from an insurance company. The playwright started to allow himself “a feeling that we might have something very special.”

  The official opening the next night put a damper on that feeling. Not so much because the audience wasn’t appreciative—though they still did not take to “Dear, Sweet Sewing Machine,” despite the orchestra’s now playing new underscoring at the end instead of stopping and leaving a hole that should have been filled with applause. The problem was the critics. There weren’t any—or hardly any. The Detroit newspapers were on strike, and word was out that the fate of the show could rest in the hands of a single reviewer, the local stringer for Variety. Writing under the byline Tew, he was rumored among the cast to be moonlighting for the showbiz daily from his day job as a Chrysler vice president. In fact, he had studied theater at Northwestern—Harnick remembered him as a classmate. But the car-company quip seemed to fit, as if Chrysler in the 1960s conditioned him to appreciate designs with imposing front ends and squared-off rears; he had few favorable words for Fiddler, with its tidy first act and its still baggy second. His dismissive assessment plunged the actors into the doldrums, even though they had to know that Tew was wrong from his first line: “Everything is ordinary about Fiddler on the Roof except Zero Mostel.” True, Mostel was sui generis, but a show about Jews living in the Pale of Settlement that begins without an overture, brings down the first-act curtain with a pogrom, and ends with a mass eviction—that was not ordinary, either. Tew declared the songs unmemorable, the sets, costumes, and lighting merely “serviceable,” the direction “workmanlike,” and the choreography “pedestrian.”

  But despite Tew’s legendary pan, long remembered as the only Detroit review, other critics did, in fact, attend that night and they recognized—as the striking Detroit News writer Jay Carr said on local radio and TV (instead of in print)—that Fiddler was shaping up to be “an uncommonly fine musical.” In an upbeat letter to investors on July 28, Prince quoted liberally from Carr and from enthusiastic reviews from Toledo and across the river in Windsor, Ontario. (There would soon be one in Chicago, as well.) The newspaper strike forced Prince to buy more expensive and less effective advertising on TV and radio, but the show was getting favorable coverage by critics. The producer was not worried about the “bum review” in Variety.

  But back in New York, Variety’s was the only notice easily available, and apart from the investors on Prince’s mailing list, few interested parties had seen any balancing accounts—until the Times reported a week later that Fiddler was “receiving good response in its run” in Detroit. In the meantime, doomsday rumors flew. Pendleton’s agent called him from Manhattan the day Tew’s review appeared saying she’d heard Robbins was going to be fired and replaced by George Abbott. Though Abbott had directed Bock and Harnick’s Fiorello! and Tenderloin—only two of the dozens of shows “Mr. Broadway” had written, directed, or produced by then—Robbins had recently rescued A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum for his early theatrical mentor. What’s more, Abbott—a buttoned-up WASP who had spent much of his boyhood on a Wyoming ranch—had not a stitch of affinity for Fiddler’s material. Besides, rail as Prince did about rising costs, he never lost confidence in Robbins as the only director who could make Fiddler robust. That the actors lent any credence at all to the false gossip was a measure of how done in they felt—and of their half wish that Robbins would just go away and leave them alone. He didn’t.

  The night after opening, with the Variety review and the New York sniping clouding their moods, the members of the company repaired to the bar across from the theater after the show and congregated around several tables. Pendleton noticed Robbins sitting off by himself at the bar and, after knocking back a Jack Daniel’s, summoned the temerity to approach him. “So, Jerry. What are you going to do?” Pendleton asked. Robbins answered calmly: “Ten things a day.”

&nb
sp; One of the first was dropping “Dear, Sweet Sewing Machine.” Not because Tew, in his only accurate judgment, had recommended excising the “forgettable” number but because Robbins, already realizing why it was failing, was planning to take it out as soon as Stein and the rest of the team could sew up the incision. “It’s forward motion,” he explained to Harnick. Tzeitel and Motel’s romance has already been resolved by the time that song comes along and the audience is interested in what will happen with the other daughters and their suitors. “You can keep the first couple alive, but you can’t give them a major number,” Robbins said. “The audience doesn’t want to hear it. They want to go on.” He broke the news to Pendleton, offering the same explanation along with his commiseration. Pendleton let him pretend to be sorry, though at heart the actor was relieved: “It’s no fun being in a number that doesn’t work.” And anyway, he still had a song in the first act, “Now I Have Everything,” his exuberant response to Tevye’s accepting him as Tzeitel’s intended: “Did you see what I did / When he laughed in my face? / I stood there and stiffened my spine. / The nerve of a tailor to ask for a queen / Without having goods or a sewing machine. / A nothing turned into a Samson, no less, / And lo and behold! You are mine!”