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

by Alisa Solomon

  Robbins didn’t say much by way of explanation when the dozen men assembled in the carpeted lobby: “This is the dance at the wedding to entertain the bride and groom. Here we go.” He showed the troupe some steps—walking in a circle with some bounce in the knees, to begin—and then passed out glass bottles and told the dancers to put on yarmulkes and do the steps again with the bottles on their heads. One by one, the bottles thudded onto the carpet. Robbins instructed the men to try again. And again. Sammy Bayes finally made his way through the sequence, but the movement looked so tentative and stiff as he used all his energy to concentrate on not dropping the bottle that Robbins finally allowed the men to put on hats. But he permitted no tricks—no holes cut into the crowns, no Velcro. He wanted the audience to feel the tension—for the sheer theatrical thrill as well as for the emotional echo of the precarious eponymous fiddler trying to scratch out a tune without breaking his neck. The dancers definitely felt it. Bodin wasn’t the only one “scared shitless”: all the men knew they would be dancing on a wooden stage and that the choreography called for some of them to slide across the floor on their knees. Glass splinters were not an option.

  But the more they practiced, the more undemanding the bottle balancing seemed—standard for those who had stayed in shape and were used to “pulling up” into the dancer’s efficient posture of tucked-in pelvis and lifted rib cage. Robbins selected for the role four men who found the trick easy enough to be able to make it appear arduous. Then he showed the group the next section, which most of the rest of the corps would join, featuring far more difficult moves—“whips and hooks,” Robbins called them, body flings that required quick twists and jumps and changes of direction. “You’re working yourself into a state of joy,” he told the men. Within a couple of hours—like magic, to Prince, who watched part of the rehearsal—the men absorbed the choreography. That afternoon, Robbins called a “put-in” rehearsal. The entire cast played through the wedding scene and they burst into applause—and some into tears—when they saw the new number for the first time. That night it went into the show.

  It’s impossible to know exactly what moves Robbins took from Mr. Redbeard’s frolics or from the communal cavorting among the men at Orthodox weddings, but certainly Robbins embellished on what he observed. Years earlier, when choreographing “The Small House of Uncle Thomas”—the second-act ballet in The King and I—Robbins hit a dead end trying to create authentic Siamese dance, despite his extensive research into the genre. Only when Richard Rodgers urged him to take some license with the movement vocabulary was he able to break through his inhibition and devise an exciting fourteen-minute dance drama that conveyed Thai-ness with its cocked legs, flexed feet and wrists, and wide-stance demi-pliés but that actually borrowed from the Balinese legong dance, Peking opera, Japanese Bunraku and Kabuki, and Cambodian dance—as well as from Martha Graham and, most important, from Robbins’s own imagination. In the “Bottle Dance,” Robbins similarly captured the spirit of the original by maintaining some essential elements—balanced bottle, arms pumping heavenward, the group in a frenzy—and then built on them with sheer choreographic ingenuity and showbiz panache.

  Having seen one man pretending to totter drunkenly, flexing his knees and flicking his wrists, Robbins begins by doubling the spectacle: two men gently pulse their legs, twirl their hands, turn a full circle, and, maintaining their ramrod posture, sink to the floor, then spring back to full height. Facing each other and clasping right hands, they repeat the moves, punctuating them with some formalized handclaps and slow leg swings. Next, Robbins doubles the stakes again, arraying four men balancing bottles in a lateral line, holding hands at head height. To the stately beat of the score’s most klezmer-inflected music, featuring a trilling clarinet and a jingling tsimbl (or cimbalom, the hammered dulcimer of Eastern Europe), the men slide stage left, then stage right in a series of syncopated grapevine steps: on tiptoe, tracing a semicircle along the floor with a foot, tapping the ground with the heel, or completing a phrase with an emphatic full-foot stomp. The music crescendoes and climbs up the scale like a fanfare signaling that something magnificent is about to happen—and it does. The men back up, still maintaining their line, and lower themselves to their knees. The orchestra’s horns kick in, cymbals crash, and the men thrust out the right leg at a 45-degree angle, and then pull themselves forward along that vector, gliding upon the left knee and bringing it in line with the right for a slight showy pause in a kneeling position. Then the same routine to the left, then again to the right and to the left. Finally they rise up and let their bottles drop into their hands. As the music quickens, more dancers join in, and they all break into a wild ecstasy of motion: leaning back and, as if sending a signal to the heavens, clapping hands with a circular sweep of the arms that propels them into a spin. Some swing a partner round, hands on each other’s biceps, and they seem to take wing by virtue of centrifugal force. No circle dance ever looked as vehement as the brief, brawny turn they make together before lining up side by side and linking hands with crossed arms. Thus joined, they advance downstage as a mass of throbbing rhythm for the finale: they jump and whirl and land on bended knee, arms outstretched—both a gesture of devout supplication and the quintessential footlight finish, made iconic as far back as 1927 by Al Jolson in The Jazz Singer (playing another Rabinowitz/Robbins pulled away from Judaism by show business).

  That first night the dance was performed—and forever after—the audience exploded at the end. Here was Robbins’s choreographic genius radiantly on display: two and a half riveting minutes of innovative movement that revealed situation and character, fed the action, and, in its very form, encapsulated the show’s ideals of Jewish revivification and cultural adaptation. Legendarily, Boris Aronson watched from the back of the house that night and at the close of the dance turned to Richard Altman and said, “Any man who can do that, I forgive everything.”

  Mostel was back onstage by that point and the show, having been played before audiences some forty times, had found its groove—that place where the performers have absorbed into a kind of muscle memory all their cues and technical tasks and can devote their energies to being wholly present in their fictive reality.

  But Robbins was still fretting over the big chorus number at the beginning of the second act he had yet to put into the show. After a week or so of rehearsing it, he had begun to wonder whether he could really justify the scene with the refugee coming through town, given that it so baldly functioned as a setup for the song and dance. And even the song felt like a drag on the action at a point when so much more of the story had yet to unfold. Even so, the pot-and-pan-clanging dance could be the act 2 element that would bring down the house as surely as the “Bottle Dance” was doing in act 1. Robbins hesitated to let that opportunity go.

  But he did adjust the play’s ending. The moment Mostel returned, Robbins quickly reworked the exodus of the villagers, thanks to some quick revisions from Bock and Harnick. They took out a bitter song called “Get Thee Out” and fused the “little bit of this, a little bit of that” music and lyrics to an earlier, slowed-down version of the Anatevka song to create a rueful farewell that expressed the ambivalence of exile. On the one hand, the townsfolk try to convince themselves that they would be better off somewhere else. “Well, Anatevka hasn’t exactly been the Garden of Eden,” says one villager over a vamping accordion, as a lead-in to the community’s inventory of “a pot, a pan, a broom, a hat…” “Someone should have set a match to this place long ago,” Tevye concurs. On the other hand, they sing of abiding attachment to home: “Where else could Sabbath be so sweet … where I know everyone I meet.” They quote the original subtitle of Life Is with People in the closing lines of this leave-taking from the “dear little village, little town of mine.”

  Repositioning the song so that it follows the eviction order gave it a dramatic function—a reason for being that it lacked when placed earlier in the act. Robbins thickened its meaning with the change, too. At the end of
the play, the song operates through classic dramatic irony: the audience knows something the characters don’t know—that the Anatevkans, or at least their children, will be better off elsewhere. And not just any elsewhere. Tevye, Golde, and the two youngest daughters are heading to New York (and Tzeitel and Motel are expected to follow before long). American spectators can supply the happy ending that the play itself does not explicitly propose. Such warm satisfaction tempers a conflicting emotion that comes from a different kind of privileged knowledge: the future fate of Anatevka, functioning at its most synecdochic in this number that begins to bring events to a close.

  The scenes leading up to and out of the song point forward in both affective directions, too: toward the Holocaust and toward American redemption. First comes the edict, delivered by the constable, who professes in act 1 to like Tevye “even though you are a Jew.” He brings the decree to Tevye as villagers are gathered outside his home, in front of one of Aronson’s most expressive backdrops: the same two trees that were in green bloom earlier now stand bare on an ocher background of a bleak winter. (Zipprodt has dressed the company in heavy coats, mufflers, and hats: the seasons have cycled through over the course of the play.) When Tevye, stunned, asks how the constable, who has known them his entire life, could do such a thing, the officer all but says he is “just following orders.” Though the exchange runs only three lines, it marks a rare moment in which Fiddler not only evokes the Holocaust but also places the expulsion from Anatevka within a historical continuum in which, as the Passover Haggadah maintains, “from generation to generation our enemies rise up to destroy us.” The constable is thus rendered as one more enemy in an eternal stream of Jew haters and the play enters a cosmic Jewish time zone. Now Tevye becomes anachronistic, too. “Get off my land,” he commands in response to the constable’s excuse. “This is my house.” Tevye practically chases him offstage and, for good measure, Mostel spits noisily into the wings after him. Never mind that from Alexander III’s notorious May laws of 1882 onward, almost all Jews of the Pale were forbidden to lease or purchase land. Tevye’s claim to property grants him some authority and a means of fighting back, if only temporarily. It’s one of the feel-good moments the ending depends on.

  The other is Tevye’s muttered “God be with you,” spoken indirectly to Chava and Fyedka, who have come to say good-bye and explain that they “cannot live among people who would do this.” This, finally, was Stein’s century-bridging solution to a matter Sholem-Aleichem leaves unresolved. The original story cycle ends without its hero having made up his mind whether to embrace his returning daughter or to reject her. Stein sustains a bit of the tension by having Tevye speak under his breath with a nod toward Tzeitel, who repeats his blessing to her sister and brother-in-law. The bigger change is Fyedka’s presence—Chava has left him in the original story—and his indignant and self-congratulatory comparison of himself to exiled Jews: “Some are driven away by edicts, others by silence.” Tevye’s recognition of their marriage, reluctant as it is, catapults him across time, the patriarch of the Pale putting at least one foot into the contemporary parental category excoriated by Marshall Sklare in Commentary.

  In the penultimate line of the play, Golde tells the two youngest girls to “behave yourselves. We’re not in America yet.” But figuratively, they have already made the journey, bearing the values of American tolerance and adaptability that need only find the proper setting in which to flourish. In short, as Seth Wolitz aptly dubs them, they are a new generation of Pilgrims running from religious persecution for the freedoms of the New World, and thus (to borrow from an earlier musical) they belong to the land—this land.

  Audiences embraced them as quintessential Americans, rising to applaud their departure for these shores night after night in Washington. Robbins had staged the exodus to such winning double effect, drawing acclaim in one gushing ovation both for the fact of Jewish immigration and acculturation (and for American tolerance and democracy that enabled them) and for the virtuosity of the show. With his last line—“Come, children. Let’s go”—Tevye picks up the handles of his cart and begins to drag it along a counterclockwise arc, with the two girls following behind and Golde alongside; the turntable rotates underneath them, the house rolls off into the wings, and the rest of the company joins in circling the bare stage. As a snare drum rolls, everyone raises an arm toward the sky, recalling the gesture from the opening “Tradition” number, thereby saluting the past they are leaving behind—and then they drop their hands and walk off. The circle of the community established in that first song dissipates before the audience’s eyes, “swirling away like in a Chagall,” as it felt to Tanya Everett. Left alone with his family, again, Tevye tugs his cart forward and reveals the fiddler, bent over his violin behind it. He plays the four-bar theme, Tevye turns a full 360 degrees to take in his little world for the last time, and then, with a thrust of the chin, beckons the fiddler to join the family. The orchestra takes up the theme, crescendoing into a momentous final chord as Tevye, Golde, the two girls, and the fiddler curve along to exit and the curtain falls.

  Robbins maintained the image in the curtain call, keeping the turntable revolving as the company assembled, seeming to be continuing their journey. As they took their bows, the actors began to let “some real excitement” seep in with the ovations. Among themselves—never in Robbins’s earshot—they buzzed about the likelihood that they were in for a healthy run. “We all had the feeling that it was going to be enormous,” Everett said, though “we were kind of amazed at how enormous.”

  The more smoothly the show was running, the more Robbins began skipping out to the lobby during act 1. Typically, he lost interest when he ran out of problems to solve, or perhaps he couldn’t stand seeing the tiny imperfections that he would never be able to fix. A couple of days before the end of the Washington run, he left town altogether.

  The company caught up with him in New York on September 14—after a luxurious rare day off—for a rehearsal at the vacant Barrymore Theater while the Imperial was being readied. First on the agenda, they ran through the act 2 extravaganza, showing it to Prince and the rest of the creative team. The troupe had worked on the number for nearly three weeks and, exhausted as they were, they were flying on the excitement of the upcoming opening and the knowledge that they had made a good show. They presented the number with precision and full hearts. The pots banged, the pans clanged. The women dancers twirled and leapt. When they finished, Robbins offered a simple “thank you” and quietly conferred with Prince while the company just stood around, sweaty and anxious. After a few minutes, Robbins turned to the troupe and, feeling his gaze, they straightened their spines, like recruits coming to attention when the sergeant walks in. “You know what?” he said. “We’re not going to put it in.” No one groaned. No one sighed audibly. But disappointment swept through the company. “You know why?” Robbins added, almost consolingly. “Because in Washington, the second act we already have came together and this number would violate everything we accomplished in creating a new kind of second act.” Besides, in the creators’ confab, Prince, who in any event could not bear the possibility that the show might add even two more seconds to its length, condemned the number. “It’s not our show,” he said. “It’s villagers gamboling on the green. Let’s be brave.” Robbins assured the company that they were standing by a beautiful, quiet second act that was an innovation for a musical and the proper culmination of their story. And with that decision, the making of Fiddler was complete.

  * * *

  But of course Robbins called rehearsals. There was always fine-tuning to do and the actors needed to get comfortable on the stage of the Imperial, a Schubert theater built in the 1920s especially for musicals, with a wide, as opposed to deep, house that allowed the 1,400 spectators to feel close to the action. The backstage area was shallow, too, and performers had to make offstage crossovers beneath the stage, past the male chorus members’ basement dressing rooms. Mostel had finally recovered thoroughl
y from his illness and was tapping replenished reservoirs of energy. He was jovial as a schoolboy on the verge of summer vacation, and even as he continued his jibes against Robbins, they were rounded by the pervasive mood of happy anticipation. Mostel, too, sensed the coming triumph—and he took the credit for it.

  The company breezed through three preview performances for a rapturous audience and approached their official opening with a sense of confidence they could not have imagined only a month before. Harnick noticed the long lines at the box office and thought, “For the only time in my life, I don’t have to worry about the critics.”

  The last rehearsal, on the day of the opening, was almost pointless in terms of making adjustments to the production. Robbins gave some notes simply for the sake of giving some notes. But the real point was for the company to feel, collectively, what Lonne Elder observed as a “serene quietness and resolve” about all they had endured and all they had achieved. “We came to love our village,” chorus member Peff Modelski said. “We needed the performance to be wonderful.”

  As usual in theater culture’s opening-night bonhomie, on September 22, break-a-leg telegrams poured in for the creators from colleagues in the field. Many hinted—even before the curtain went up that evening—how powerfully Jews, especially, would find connection in the show. In advance of the public, Jews in the Broadway community—that is to say, a high percentage of notable artists—cracked Jewish jokes or invoked religious phrases to wish their friends well, taking obvious pleasure in the opportunity to assert an identity that was seldom declared. “Good luck, but we demand equal time,” Robbins’s friend Stephen Sondheim wrote to him, signing, as if in a Groucho Marx role, as “Council of Roman Churches Monsignor Fulton J. Sonzheim Dealer.” Barbra Streisand, still running in Funny Girl, cabled, “Come to our show tonight. Relax. Have a piece of fruit.” Madeline Lee and Jack Gilford sent a wire to Bock, Harnick, and Stein promising that “the Talmud says tonight the world is a wedding. Good luck.” (And a postperformance congratulatory letter to Harnick from Harold Arlen came half in Yiddish—albeit transliterated into the Roman alphabet.)