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

by Alisa Solomon

  Accelerating the forward motion—in act 2, finding it—consumed Robbins as the work continued in what Kazan described as “agonizingly long” rehearsals that were “hell to go to.” A sagging second act is a common enough problem in musical theater making to be a cliché—the exposition is over, the denouement is obvious, and getting to it just takes too long. Fiddler heaped on a few more troubles: there was still a lot of plot to go, and most of it was depressing.

  And how could it be that, though they’d been talking about it since New York, Tevye had no second-act song and Golde had none at all? Although Harnick had imagined Tevye responding to his daughters’ romances by suddenly wondering whether his own arranged wife loved him, he couldn’t figure out how to make it work. He took long walks around Detroit trying to raise some ideas. Finally, he sent some words to Bock, apologizing that they sounded more like dialogue than lyrics. Bock came back with a setting that didn’t change a word. It took Robbins no more than fifteen minutes to stage “Do You Love Me?” Its sweetness charmed audiences, as did its assurance that the hidebound elders learned from their modern children.

  If scrapping the sewing machine song and giving the parents an unlikely love duet allowed focus to sharpen on the two other couples, that focus only made their shortcomings more obvious. Between Chava and Fyedka, Robbins didn’t feel the spark—and how could their romance set off Tevye’s sense that his world is collapsing around him if it wasn’t convincing? Simply telling the actors to find some chemistry did no good. Reblocking them with approach-and-retreat patterns, to emphasize the physical attraction that they had to resist, didn’t help, either. Robbins concluded that the problem was visual. Robert Berdeen was not much taller than Tanya Everett and looked young and innocent, even pretty. To convey that theirs was not mere puppy love, Robbins decided that Fyedka had to look more mature, like someone who could take care of her. He would have to replace the actor. Prince remembered a tall actor with a likable stage presence from some earlier shows he’d produced and found him on summer vacation in a cabin in New Jersey. Joe Ponazecki caught the first flight to Detroit that he could make; he needed a job and this one was offering $175 a week. (Berdeen—a fine dancer—was shifted to the chorus.)

  Perchik and Hodel, in contrast, would take more work. Robbins had been complaining for a while that Bert Convy and Julia Migenes had to be pulled away from “that ‘golly–oh gee shucks’ business they’ve been indulging in.” They were playing shiny, smiley Broadway lovers instead of fervent idealists of 1905, Robbins chided, saying they reminded him of the cloying Nelson Eddy–Jeanette MacDonald movies that aired on late-night television. He worked with them day after day on the scene when Perchik proposes marriage and, in the same breath, announces that he is going away. Frustrated and searching for a way to make Convy understand Perchik’s revolutionary zeal, he told him—only a month after the murders of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner—to imagine that he was a student on his way to Mississippi to assist with voter registration. “You are not going to Coney Island for a ride on the Ferris wheel,” Robbins prodded. “You are going on a dangerous mission. That’s the urgency I want to feel in this scene.”

  Bock and Harnick struggled with Perchik, too. Trying to write a number for him that would express his fire as well as his charm and also push the action became what they called their “bête noire number 1.” They wrote about a dozen different songs—some of them duets with Hodel—but couldn’t hit the mark. Perchik ended up sounding too propagandistic (“You’ll hear a rumble and the earth will shake / And Romanovs will crumble and the chains will break”) or too cornball (“A dairy farmer’s daughter / And a cigarette maker’s son / Met in a tiny village / And there became as one”). Or too propagandistic and too cornball (“When we’re free to be free / What a world that will be”). Finally, they came up with a satisfying argument song in which Perchik schools Hodel in how he’d behave “if I were a woman” (“I’d want to know why / I had to take orders / from men not a quarter as smart as I”).

  Detroit audiences always rewarded the tune with some laughs and a nice hand. So Bock and Harnick were stunned when, at a postshow meeting one night, Robbins said he was cutting it. “Are you out of your mind?” Harnick said. “It works!” Robbins answered with the impassivity of a mechanic explaining some minor engine trouble: “I know it works. But it’s a four-and-a-half-minute number and the show is very long. I think I can accomplish the same thing in thirty seconds of dance and it may even be stronger. Let me try it.” Bock and Harnick had heard that polite plea many times and understood what it really meant: “I will try it or you guys are fired.” But Robbins also promised that if his plan didn’t improve the show they would go back to the song. Sure enough, when Perchick pulled Hodel into a social dance he says he learned in Kiev, the action showed, in Harnick’s words, “a transformation of tradition being broken, of men and women dancing. You saw the two of them falling in love, you saw her embarrassment. You saw him changing—a warmth you hadn’t seen before. It was wonderful.”

  Still, Bock and Harnick were not going to waste the two best voices in the company. They had also produced a humorous love song for the top of the second act called “As Much as That,” to come after the couple tell Tevye they plan to wed: “As much as I love the people, the workers, the peasants / As much as I love the work we plan to do / As much as that / And maybe more. Yes! More! / Do I love you.” It, too, fell to Robbins’s time-slashing crusade at the Fisher. The marchlike tune didn’t tell the audience anything they didn’t already know, he reasoned. Besides, Prince never liked it. The producer thought it crowed about “what a lot of fun it is to be a member of the Communist party.”

  In its place, the team gave Perchik a short reprise of Motel’s act 1 song, “Now I Have Everything,” with new lyrics Harnick dashed off in his hotel room. Convy brought out the lushness of the song, which, like all the other lovers’ numbers in the show, musically marked the gap between the children’s and the parents’ generation, between the individual and the community—and, by extension, the New World and the Old. But Convy couldn’t raise more than a tepid response from the house, despite his beautiful high baritone. Reprises didn’t belong to the style Fiddler was forming for itself and the audience seemed confused by recognizing a tune they’d already heard.

  But Robbins let it be for a bit while he focused on the more crucial, emotional pivot point of the second act: Tevye’s anguish in response to Chava’s elopement. Robbins had created the “nightmare ballet” he had planned—a complex, wrenching sequence that ran some ten minutes long, as Tevye reeled from place to place, searching out his beloved daughter. Robbins scored the movement precisely following an outline Stein drew with only a little variation from Sholem-Aleichem: Tevye goes to the priest’s house—which Robbins instructed Aronson to place on one side of the stage—thinking he has been summoned over an issue with a cheese order, only to find that Chava has run off to marry Fyedka. At that moment, Robbins noted, “his world begins to tilt, careen, and come apart. Realistic time and place changes: events are condensed … his world becomes flooded with associative fantasies.” He totters home (on the other side of the stage), where he slaps a child, screams at Golde, and knocks over a stack of his milk cans, kicking and beating them, and collapses. The family disappears and he gets up and rushes back out, searching for Chava. Robbins planned that, next, “through the village he charges in pain and the shtetl comes apart, fragmentizes and flies around him.… What pieces of scenery appear is treated normally at first, but as the sequence progresses, the bits and pieces of props etc. representing village etc. become transparent, unrealistic—swimming—detached and loose—a Chagall swirling past in pieces. The performers move these pieces themselves and in this way we arrive at the end in the shifting woods.”

  To realize this vision, Robbins placed villagers onstage going about their business in an abstracted sort of pantomime and then had them freeze as Tevye staggers among them. Others execute more complex
steps while holding the whirling scenic pieces. (At last there was some choreography for the women in the corps.) Chava appears—then a second Chava. Tevye freezes, then lurches impulsively toward them, then abruptly stops himself and changes direction, running from Chava’s entreaties. As he rushes through the woods, the trees—the chorus in a forest ballet—tilt and tumble as the stage is bathed in gradually intensifying washes of red light. The result was a wrenching expressionistic spectacle, an external rendering of Tevye’s inner torment.

  By all accounts, Mostel melted down before the audience’s eyes in a disintegration as complete and convincing as his famous transformation into a rhinoceros. He didn’t tear his hair or beat his chest in ever-larger histrionic gestures; instead, it looked like the air was slowly leaking out of him. He became weaker with confusion and despair, wordlessly questioning why God created both Gentile and Jew.

  Harnick loved the sequence—“it was sensational”—but reluctantly had to agree with Stein that after it “the show died.” The audience barely applauded at the end, and if Robbins wanted to think that they were too emotionally devastated to clap, he couldn’t help noticing that they never fully reengaged the show from then on.

  At rehearsal each day he reduced the sequence further, trying to distill the action and emotion to their most concentrated essence. The smaller it became, the larger the audience response. “If he takes it out altogether,” Bock joked, “it will be a showstopper.” Bock was basically right. Over a couple of weeks of condensing, Robbins converted the elaborate episode into an elegant, heartbreaking event, just a minute or two long: the daughters, upstage—as if seen in Tevye’s mind—are courted in dance, accept their suitors, and go off, as Tevye mourns the flight of his “little bird.” He can’t make sense of what’s happening: “Everything is all a blur. / All I can see is a happy child. / The sweet little bird you were / Chaveleh, Chaveleh.” In one of the show’s most effective shifts from the particular to the universal, Tevye’s despair over Chava’s apostasy boils down to a father’s grief over the loss of a daughter.

  If Robbins felt any chagrin over tossing out weeks of work, he didn’t show it. He held nothing—and no one—too precious if it didn’t serve the show. Having cut the character of the priest, he dismissed the actor Charles Durning. Robbins realized, he told the authors, that the expressionist mode was totally out of character with the rest of the show and yanked the audience away from the fictive reality the artists had worked so hard to establish. In contrast, the Fruma Sarah dream sequence in the first act unfolded within the reality of the story: Tevye was, in fact, recounting a dream (albeit one he had invented to persuade Golde to let Tzeitel marry Motel instead of Lazar Wolf). And that comic aspect helped them get away with a big expressionistic production number. But the Chava nightmare didn’t belong. “It was a mistake,” Robbins said, placidly dismissing the result of the company’s long, exhausting labor. “I should have known that.”

  For all the diminishment of the Chava episode, Mostel did not let up on playing Tevye’s rage and bewilderment over Chava’s challenge to his core beliefs. And in this instance, he agreed with Robbins: the simpler framework made Tevye’s distress more legible and specific. In the early part of the scene—which preceded the deleted choreography—Tevye refuses Chava’s plea for acceptance. When he commands, “You are never to speak to him again, never to mention his name again, never!” Mostel yelled the word “never” as though he wanted to be heard in Chicago. Night after night, Everett felt like she’d been socked with a sandbag, even though she knew the shout was coming. The force of his voice was tremendous and terrifying every time. And he looked at her “like he wanted to kill me.” Even the audience started, as if physically stunned by his volume and emotion. Mostel was channeling the severity of what his mother had done to him, his son Tobias Mostel reckoned: “That’s why it cut the audience in half every night.” This scene was the play’s emotional climax as far as Mostel was concerned. Future actors would save the highest feeling for the eviction at the end, but for Mostel, Tevye’s tragedy was his separation from Chava.

  Mostel was playing lighter scenes with just as much comic intensity and, as early as Detroit, was beginning to test the limits of the script with his infamous embellishments. In “Rich Man,” Robbins gave him a bit of business at a moment where the song calls for him to sigh: he should raise his hands to God with the sigh, then drop them—only to catch one in a milk barrel. His sleeve would come out wet and Mostel was to shoot a look heavenward as if to say, “Even this?” and then wring out the sleeve and go on with the song. Within two days, endlessly inventive Mostel was performing five minutes’ worth of lazzo. He dabbed milk behind his ears like perfume, used it to grease the wheels of his cart. On the third night, he sighed, lowered his arm, and took it out—dry. Robbins had instructed the crew to leave the barrel empty. He won that round. But the battle had barely begun.

  Once the schedule of performances started, Mostel was excused from most rehearsals to rest up his leg. His understudy, Paul Lipson, stood in, and Robbins’s assistant relayed any changes to Mostel a couple of hours before curtain. That’s all Mostel needed. To the other actors’ amazement, he could learn new lines in a glance and absorb physical and interpretive adjustments without rehearsal. If his absence from the daytime labors left the cast without their comic relief, it also spared them the endless hostility between him and Robbins. The director was giving off enough rancorous vapors without Mostel in the room, and who knew how much more toxic the air would have become if Mostel had been goading Robbins as he smoldered. As each day wore on, the company felt more certain that the show was a disaster. After all, Robbins was not satisfied with anything—he found fault even with the scenes that seemed to be playing well. At one point he suddenly decided that Fruma Sarah should make her entrance in a coffin, and Aronson and his crew had to snap to and produce one, despite Prince’s hollering about the budget. The coffin went in—and came right out the next day, when Robbins decided he didn’t like or need it.

  Zipprodt, too, could hardly keep up. She remade Everett’s skirt fifteen times because Robbins wanted it to flow a particular way when she moved. Meanwhile, he was demanding rewrites from Stein every day and, at least once, threw new pages at him, denouncing the writing as amateurish and embarrassing. Stein just kept bringing the pages. Robbins’s sniping at Bea Arthur escalated as the size of her role dwindled and her own temper flared. Karnilova, ever Robbins’s champion, tried to boost the others’ spirits. “The man is a genius,” she reassured them. “He’ll pull it together.” But she didn’t persuade the troupe. If nothing else, the cast was simply too fatigued from what seemed like arbitrary changes and colossal disregard for their toil to recognize how much better the show was actually becoming.

  The proof was in the local word of mouth. Even after the subscription audience ran out, houses kept filling up. By the third week, Fiddler pulled its first hint of profit—$1,600—on a deal with the Fisher that gave the show 70 percent of the box office up to the first $20,000 in sales and 75 percent of any amount over that sum. The show cost about $50,000 a week in operating expenses so when, in the fourth week, the profit reached $8,300, Prince silently congratulated himself. The Detroit run closed on August 22 with total losses to date of $5,335.65—a better outcome than most.

  Pendleton likened Robbins’s refinements large and small to the work of an art restorer removing smudges from a canvas: “Suddenly all the composition and color scheme of the painting are revealed. It was just like that.” With several outstanding additions still to come that would send the show over the top, Fiddler left the Midwest in good shape.

  * * *

  The cast, on the other hand, was in a shambles—actors sick, dancers injured, everyone in a state of advanced exhaustion. But from their point of view, Robbins was faring even worse: he was “having a hard time,” in Kazan’s generous phrase; Pendleton deemed him “in a torment”; Bodin thought he was “unraveling.” Harnick cracked a joke in a discus
sion about a song revision, and when Robbins glared at him and snapped, “I want that lyric as soon as you can get it,” Harnick remembered Sondra Lee’s advice: “With the tone of his voice and the look in his eye, I thought: ‘Okay. This is the time. Stay out of his way.’”

  That wasn’t really an option, though. Rehearsals resumed in a hotel ballroom within hours of the troupe’s arrival in Washington, while the scenery was being put in at the National Theater, and production meetings continued every night. In the absence of the Chava sequence, Robbins was still struggling to find a big production number for the second act—he thought the audience wanted one. When he renewed the notion of a company song about Anatevka, Bock and Harnick came face-to-face with their “bête noire number 2.” In the first, light and humorous version, spurred by the arrival of a letter from New York, the villagers asked, “Is it really such a paradise, America? / Nothing but unhappy people go there / People who hunger for letters from where? / Anatevka, Anatevka.” For bringing the action to a halt, this song was abandoned after a few performances at the Fisher.

  But Robbins clung to his desire for an act 2 wallop. Though Fiddler was successfully defying many of the conventions of a midcentury book musical—no overture, no flirty chorus girls, no reprises, no simple plot line, no happy denouement—Robbins wasn’t letting go of a presumed need for a big number to start off the second half with a surge of energy and to win the sort of ovation that “Tradition,” “Tevye’s Dream,” and “L’Chaim” were drawing in act 1. At the nightly meetings, he pushed for an occasion to put in something splashy. He liked Stein’s suggestion that a refugee from another town passes through Anatevka and, on his way out, disparages the town as a “mudhole,” prompting the locals to defend their home in a tuneful boast charming for its modesty. Bock and Harnick responded with a zesty song called “A Little Bit of This,” which began with Golde intoning, “What does he mean, a mudhole?” and soon had Tevye chiming in: “Let him go to Minsk or Moscow or Pinsk / Let him go to America. / What does he think he’ll find? / Everything is here! /Maybe not a lot / But every little thing a man could need or want we’ve got.” They wrote two more introductory options, all three of them leading to a chorus in which the people catalog their worldly possessions: “A little bit of meat / A little bit of fish / A pot and a pan and a glass and a dish / A little bit of wood / A little bit of twine / A slice of bread and a drop of wine / All very small, small indeed / But in Anatevka, all we need.” The song expressed a romantic ideal of the shtetl that Maurice Samuel and Abraham Joshua Heschel had made popular more than a decade before: that what the people lacked in material wealth they made up for in spiritual riches and communal cohesion. Though the number went through several transmutations before being fixed as the mournful hymn preceding the expelled Jews’ exit, this sentiment remained at its core: both a compliment to contemporary audiences for how far they had climbed from their humble origins and a reminder of all they may have sacrificed for their achievement.