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

by Alisa Solomon

  The creators expressed a deepening Jewish identification through the gifts they exchanged. Opening-night presents typically reflect a show’s themes. Robbins gave beautiful art books—Chagall or Ben Shahn—to all the company members. (To Boris Aronson, who, after all, had written a book on Chagall, he gave a plant and a note of apology. And for the technical crew, he bought bottles of Scotch.) But for one another, the creators purchased ritual objects. Joe Stein, for instance, gave Harnick a mezuzah, the first the lyricist had ever owned. Harnick gave Robbins a shofar, the ram’s horn sounded on the High Holy Days. In addition to the sentimental meaning any token of a special event bears, such gifts came imbued with significance that reached far beyond the show’s own history and community. These weren’t just ethnic tchotchkes but items with sacred functions, bearing power to assert belonging as indelibly (if more privately) as tribal markings, should they ever be used as religiously intended. The troupe gave Robbins a white yarmulke emblazoned around its rim with the words “Fiddler on the Roof, September 22, 1964.” Each company member autographed it in ink. Mostel signed his last name only, and in Yiddish—mem-alef-samekh-tet-lamed—lording his superior knowledge over Robbins to the very end.

  Assembled in the wings at 6:55 p.m., the company awaited the show’s first cue. Lights would come up on the fiddler, Gino Conforti. Strains of the violin would play and the orchestra would take up his tune. Tevye would walk out and address the audience. “How do we keep our balance?” he’d ask. “That I can tell you in one word.” Four oompah beats would blare from the string and rhythm sections in the pit, and the chorus would link those pinkies, take a collective breath, and strut out onto the stage as Tevye pronounced the key word: “Tradition!”

  As the company waited, jitters kicked in. Just before the curtain went up, Mostel turned to the chorus and, eyes sparkling, opened his mouth in a twisted grin to reveal a red Life Saver stuck to his teeth. The gag broke the tension and, when the time came, the villagers strode out confidently for their song. By the end of the number, the company knew they would have gainful employment for a long time to come. They felt it across their backs, Modelski said, “like somebody tiptoeing with a little ice cube between your shoulder blades.”

  Prince sat calmly in the house, watching the audience as much as the show. They laughed, they cried, of course. But beyond that Broadway cliché, Prince discerned an admixture of delight and emotional engagement that he didn’t know what to call. Spectators cooed as they clapped after “Tradition”; they “ahhed” during “Sabbath Prayer” as lights faded up behind the scrim to reveal Jewish families all over Anatevka—all over the world—lighting candles along with Golde and Tevye. He sensed their rapt, if silent, disquiet as Hodel went off to Siberia to join her revolutionary fiancé and as Chava eloped with Fyedka. He recognized the tingle of satisfaction that had become familiar from his successful openings of Damn Yankees, West Side Story, and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. But something was different this time. Thanks to Robbins, he thought, Fiddler was entering some other realm. If the ovation that night lacked the foot stomping and shouting that had erupted in Washington and in the New York previews, Prince didn’t worry. He had never been so certain that a show would succeed.

  Tevye (Zero Mostel) evicted, but heading to America.

  Expecting much to celebrate, Prince had reserved the swank Rainbow Room some sixty floors above his office at Rockefeller Center for the opening-night party. Actors couldn’t wait to take off their heavy, tattered layers of woolen rags and put on smart suits and velvet dresses for the festivities. For the first time in almost four months, the company would not be assembling as Anatevkans. They would walk down the several rounded steps into the ballroom, to guests’ applause, simply and happily as their shiny selves. Robbins was startled by their transformation. He had forgotten that they had lives and realities beyond their onstage shtetl.

  It was almost midnight by the time the party really got rolling because throngs congratulating Mostel at his dressing room delayed the star’s arrival. Tony Cabot’s Music Masters played to an empty dance floor for nearly an hour, but once Mostel made his entrance, the hully-gullying began, topped by what one observer called “a picturesque twist session that was not to be believed.” Kate Mostel high-kicked her way through a jitterbug with John C. Attle. Not to be outdone, her husband whirled around the floor with New York senator Jacob Javits in a raucous hora to a quick medley of the show’s music that Cabot inserted into the playlist of American standards.

  Then word of the first review started seeping into the room like a noxious odor. In the Herald Tribune, Walter Kerr accused the creators of the one crime they felt exempt from: pandering. “I think it might be an altogether charming musical,” he chided, “if only the people of Anatevka did not pause every now and again to give their regards to Broadway and their remembrances to Herald Square.” Prince took the mic and told the crowd, “This is the biggest hit any of us will ever have gotten near, so party on.” But he was too late. Bock and Harnick had left and much of the cast was filing out, too. Pendleton, for one, “didn’t want to see Jerry after he read the reviews” and figured his colleagues shared the thought. “We felt maybe we’d let him down.” Other reviews turned out far more favorable—in the New York Times Howard Taubman declared the show “an integrated achievement of uncommon quality”—but Prince would not have been surprised by the next day’s box office lines around the block even without these notices. Harnick’s hunch had proved right. Decades before the massive marketing campaigns calculated to render new shows “critic-proof,” the reviews hardly mattered. Roberta Senn wrote to her parents in Chicago with a report on the opening (the twenty-two-year-old found the party “too glamorous to be fun”) and urged them to let her know right away when they wanted to come in to see it: “We are sold out until December.”

  Harnick marveled: “There was something in this show that people wanted to see.”

  * * *

  By February, Prince was sending distributions to investors. In June, no one was surprised that Fiddler swept the Tony Awards, winning as Best Musical as well as for book, score, direction, choreography, costumes, production, and performances by Mostel and Karnilova. (Mostel famously accepted his statue noting that, since no one else from the show who had been on the podium that night had bothered to thank him, he would thank himself; then he carried on a bit in Yiddish. He left the production in August, month after month of eight shows a week too much for his injured leg—and his contract renewal demands too much for Prince.)

  But the “something” Harnick recognized was more than an affecting story, spectacular choreography, good songs, thorough and beautiful designs, and one of the most brilliant performances ever. In fact, Fiddler did not represent the greatest work of its creative team. She Loves Me boasts a superior score, West Side Story, more electrifying dances. The greater sum that Fiddler’s parts added up to went beyond the soul-stirring, radiant enchantments of even the best Broadway musicals.

  Fiddler gave Gentile post-McCarthy America—and the world—the Jews it could, and wanted to, love. It gave Jews nothing less than a publicly touted touchstone for authenticity. And it did both while capturing the sensibility—the anxiety—of a tumultuous American moment and making reassuring sense of it.

  Fiddler did so formally as well as thematically. In this period of transformation in the American theater—and of America in general—one key to Fiddler’s success was its status as a transitional work. The era of Rodgers and Hammerstein had ended with The Sound of Music in 1959; Stephen Sondheim’s groundbreaking concept musical, Company, would debut in 1970. As deftly as its title character teetering on the roof, Fiddler balanced right on the pivot point between them. Without bidding adieu to the spectacular, sentimental, and storybook satisfactions that the old form provided (romances, explosive dance numbers) but gesturing toward the melancholy and irresolution that were to come (the pogrom and expulsion), Fiddler was formally familiar enough not to frighten o
r disorient audiences, and adventurous enough to excite them. It was a work of cultural adaptation and transformation as well as a work about such change.

  In prompting audiences to identify with Tevye’s struggle with change—on personal and communal levels—as upheaval bringing loss as well as gain, the show spoke to anyone who had experienced the conflict of leaving behind something profoundly prized, or at least deeply familiar.

  Within a decade, Fiddler had played in two dozen countries—among them, Australia, France, Germany, Holland, Japan, Mexico, Yugoslavia, and even South Africa. (After a protracted battle against a company that would have performed for segregated audiences without the authors’ permission, the authors agreed to an alternative production whose proceeds—as its program prominently declared—would benefit an organization of black artists.) Joe Stein loved to tell that at rehearsals in Tokyo that he attended, a local producer asked him how the show could have been a hit in America when it was “so Japanese.” By 1971—just before the film version was released, spreading Fiddler’s reach far wider—there had been fifteen productions in Finland alone.

  At home, Gentiles were gushing over its ethnic familiarity. In just one of many such congratulatory notes to the creators from friends and colleagues, the music arranger Bobby Dolan praised Robbins for expressing universality through particularity, for “as you must know, these Jewish people are equally Irish.”

  The response that came from the Jewish community was breathtaking. Today, after Seinfeld and Sarah Silverman—and, more apt, decades after the launch of the annual Chabad telethon, with its Hasidim frolicking and fund-raising on commercial TV—it’s hard to imagine just how thrilled audiences could have been to see men wearing tzitzis and women lighting Sabbath candles on a Broadway stage, and not as a joke. Even the Yiddish press rejoiced. The conservative Der Tog Morgen Zhurnal couldn’t help finding virtues in the “Broadwayized” Tevye; The Forverts declared Fiddler “Jewish America’s most beautiful monument to Sholem-Aleichem.” For those who harbored shame in the Old World ways of their parents or grandparents, as well as the guilt that comes barking after such patricidal feelings, the affectionate portrait of Anatevka seemed to wash humiliation away. Robbins had staged his own passage from Jewish repudiation to conciliatory embrace and perhaps spoke most directly to those who had heeded the same self-abnegating call. From that heritage that had been “laid open” for him, that he had “stored away—deep and away,”

  from all of that I closed my self off—dismissed, rejected & tore out of me. Blacked it out—forgot it & threw out (i was sure). Wash yourself clean of it—bathe & scrub; change your clothes, cut your hair, alter your walk, your talk, your handwriting, recast your future, remold your life, your friends, your taste; convert convert! No, don’t adopt the Christian religion—do not go that far; but leave behind forever the Jew part. I became Jerry Robbins.

  Making Fiddler, Robbins reclaimed that discarded part of himself and, in so doing, returned it, in a glittering package, to those audience members who also had left it behind. “Fiddler was a glory for my father,” he wrote in the same set of notes toward an autobiography, “a celebration of & for him.” At the end of the opening-night performance, Harry came backstage and found the director in the dimly lit wings. “How did you know all that?” he asked. He threw his arms around his son and wept.

  * * *

  Not that Jewish spectators had to be as hugely conflicted as Jerry Robbins to share in the outsize emotional response to the play. In letters of gratitude they extolled Hal Prince and the authors for showing the world the beauty of their Jewish heritage in a place they never expected to find it. Rabbis sent copies of the sermons they were giving based on the play. (That they were giving sermons at all was a matter of the cultural adaptation that Fiddler both embodies and celebrates: Jewish worship had been “Protestantized” in the postwar period and preaching became increasingly important to a congregational rabbi’s role.)

  One Jack Spiro attended the show on the first night of Passover and wrote to tell Hal Prince, “This is the first seder I’ve missed in many a year, but I felt more uplifted being in the audience of Fiddler than I would have had I passed that time in Temple.” With a surprising twist, he added, “I want to thank you for restoring my faith in musical theater”—as pure a testament as there could be to the idea that popular culture answered the spiritual displacement of many midcentury American Jews.

  Untold others tapped into this exhilarating public esteem, even if they didn’t send notes to say so. One of thousands of such families was the Fiersteins from Bensonhurst, Brooklyn—Irving and Jacqueline and their two boys. From Irving’s earnings at a handkerchief factory, they budgeted funds for regular family trips into the city for art exhibits, concerts, and plays. Jacqueline sent in for theater tickets as soon as new shows were announced and, as usual, garnered front-row balcony seats for Fiddler early in the run. The younger brother, age eleven at the time, was dumbstruck by the spectacle of men with beards and women with babushkas. In all their theatergoing, the family had never seen a stageful of Jews. The boy found it shocking. Most of all because those Jews were proud. Adults in his neighborhood gossiped about how Streisand ought to fix her nose and Jews needed to change their names to make it in showbiz, but here they were, a few blocks from an unaltered star faring so well in Funny Girl and, more astonishing, watching life unfold in a shtetl. Young Harvey Fierstein couldn’t get over it: Jews had come out of the closet, exuding self-respect and treasuring their ways. Songs from the show would be played at his bar mitzvah two years later and the sensibility would stay with him a few more years after that, as he became a pioneering gay playwright and actor (and, decades later, played Tevye in a twenty-first-century Broadway revival).

  Some audience members wrote in to affirm the show’s veracity or, gently, to offer a suggestion or correction. “The play was the life of my grandparents, may their souls rest in peace,” began one of many such responses, this one from a woman not yet sixty years old who had been born in Zembrow, Poland, which “was very much like Anatevka.” Her grandfather wore a cap and a beard just like Tevye’s, she wanted the creators to know, and the show reminded her of a family story about a teenaged cousin shocking the town by dancing with a boy at a local wedding: “My grandparents hid for shame.”

  A Mrs. Schwartz from East Orange, New Jersey, remembered having left “just such a little town in Russia” at age four and only wished that Tevye’s family, like her own, had packed a brass samovar along with the candlesticks. “I’m sure you can pick up a samovar on 3rd Ave,” she encouraged. “And believe me it will complete a beautiful scene.”

  The producer received kind instructions on how the “Anatevka” sign in the train station where Hodel departs from her father should be written in the Cyrillic alphabet, how an actor should properly pronounce “Kiev,” how the ring in the wedding scene should be presented to the bride after the drinking of the first cup of wine, how Tevye should recite the Kaddish when he disowns Chava, and many more. Such letters suggest how powerfully Fiddler hailed members of the public who saw themselves reflected in it.

  As Fiddler’s run extended over a year, then two, three, and more, the tone of the mail began to change. Fiddler was becoming an icon, which burdened it with extratheatrical responsibilities. The show reached its 900th New York performance in November 1966, without having had one empty seat or even an empty standing-room spot. In that short time, Prince had returned a profit of 352 percent to investors (not including the contemplated film sale, well in the works). And national companies were lighting down in cities large and small all over the country.

  But one didn’t need to be near a theater hosting a production to know and partake of the Fiddler phenomenon. In his Tevye costume, arms posed as if playing an invisible violin, Mostel graced the October 19 cover of Newsweek in 1964 (paid circulation 1.6 million). The original cast album, released that same month, topped $1 million in sales within a year. Right away, wedding bands all over the co
untry were expected to be able to strike up its tunes on demand. Long before the movie played in cinemas in every small town, Cannonball Adderley recorded a jazz version of the score, Joe Quijano a Latin one. Eydie Gormé sang “Matchmaker” on the Ed Sullivan Show only a few months after Fiddler opened; the Supremes and the Temptations teamed up for a medley as part of a special broadcast on NBC. (Later, even the Osmond Brothers harmonized and boogalooed through the Fiddler songs in pastel three-piece suits.) Fiddler belonged to everyone.

  The more Fiddler’s image of the mythic Jewish past proliferated, the more anxiety some Jews expressed over its duty to hold up a dignified, religiously correct ethnic self-portrait. For such spectators, Fiddler wasn’t only speaking about Jews; it was speaking for them. And thus they had a personal stake in making sure the show got them right.

  Complaints started to trickle in about Gluck Sandor’s portrayal of the rabbi. Robbins initially enjoyed the “funny kind of tenderness” his old teacher brought to the role, playing him as a little frail and absentminded but approachable and admired by the community. As time went on, Sandor doddered across the line of dignity and spectators didn’t hesitate to make their disappointment known. Beginning with high praise for the show in general, their letters objected to a “stupid ridiculous,” “idiotic,” “half-witted,” “buffoonish” characterization that did “a disservice to the play and the Jewish people.” No less than Maurice Samuel issued a public protest in a lecture in St. Louis, deriding the show’s authors for presenting the rabbi as “a confused nebbish, a jester,” and sniping that “only a Broadway musical comedy could cast the rabbi as a comic.” Prince gamely answered the mail, explaining, “The real intention was that we not treat the rabbi pompously, over-reverentially. He’s a villager and warm and fallible.” Anatevka wasn’t Vilna, after all; its rabbi was a provincial, not a world-class scholar. Still, Prince sometimes admitted, “the gentleman who plays the rabbi often gets carried away,” and he knew that the authors agreed. Joe Stein held little faith that Sandor could go back to playing the “simple, gentle man” Stein had written, and pleaded with Robbins, “for the sake of the show and for my own peace of mind, I’d like to urge that we make a change.” Robbins duly wrote Sandor “another letter about you know what—that rabbi problem again” and tenderly threatened his job. But Robbins couldn’t bring himself to fire his early mentor; Sandor stayed in the show until 1970—with no impact on the box office.