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

by Alisa Solomon

  Projects like these served to lift the curse of kitsch off Fiddler. They could do so for two reasons. First, the musicians’ own work over the years: artists like Svigals joined the nascent klezmer revival movement in the 1980s shortly after it was earnestly under way, and they began learning from old LPs and from aging Yiddish musicians who still played for weddings and bar and bat mitzvahs. What they picked up about tough, complex rhythms they did not discern in the Broadway show; in place of sophisticated approaches to the phrasing they were studying, they heard in Fiddler glissandos and vibrato—“all that slipping, sliding stuff,” Svigals calls it—that does not properly belong to the genre. But as the wave of klezmer and of other new Jewish sounds rose, the Bock and Harnick score was swept from its unsought place as prime exemplar of Jewish music. Svigals and her colleagues began to see that dismissing those songs from the klezmer canon was like complaining that Mozart’s “Rondo alla Turca” is lousy Turkish music. Fiddler never intended to be there in the first place. Svigals could finally recognize the score for what it is—great show tunes—and even publicly admit to having played the original cast album to death in her adolescence. More than that, the score introduced the wider culture to some Jewish sounds—passages in the freylekhs mode, melodic reliance on the all-important interval of the fourth—effectively keeping a foot in the door that the new generation could come along and kick open. And as the foil to the seekers of counternostalgic “authentic” Yiddish music, it could even be said that it made the klezmer explosion possible.

  Second, by the twenty-first century, when the generation after Svigals was expanding the repertoire of new Jewish music, culture was coming to the fore as a primary means of Jewish expression and identity making. In contrast to the Broadway songsmiths who happily “just happened to be Jewish,” the younger artists needed to make their Jewishness happen publicly. They were inventing new ways of proclaiming their belonging and determining its meaning. More dissociated from Jewish institutions than any generation yet, they have been coming of age in the “postidentity” era, when affiliation and self-naming still matter but have become more playful and open, less bound to politics, and less deferential to policing authorities. A “Heebster” or “New Jew” or “post-Halakhic Jew”—as younger Jews have been called—might in a single gesture reject and assert Jewish connection: violating Jewish law against bodily desecration by tattooing a Jewish star on her or his body.

  In a pop culture landscape in which Jon Stewart’s bemusement and Sarah Silverman’s sassiness have supplanted Woody Allen’s angst and Gilda Radner’s send-up of stereotypes, Jewish outsiderness is no longer an issue—and thus, Jewish striving to fit into the mainstream no longer defines the community. Hardly exiled to the margins of power, American Jews boast high rates of academic achievement (55 percent of Jews graduate from college, compared with 28 percent of the general population), economic success (the median income of a Jewish household is $54,000—compared with $42,000 in general), and political muscle (12 percent of the current U.S. Senate is Jewish, compared with some 2 percent of the population). They take aim at Jewish insiderness by restoring a countercultural flicker of Jewish difference to their self-making. And they share it with the tools of that project—including Fiddler.

  Projects like the Oy!hoo concert or the album of Fiddler songs by the Australian punk band Yidcore, Fiddlin’ on Ya Roof, with its snarled delivery, racing tempos, and assaulting guitar chords, neither reject Fiddler nor make fun of it; they incorporate it into their own, larger cultural enterprise. Remaking the work in their own idiom, they put a generational stamp on it that oddly Judaizes it. Theirs is the opposite of the universalizing gesture of albums like Joe Quijano’s “Fiddler on the Roof” Goes Latin or Cannonball Adderley’s jazz covers of the score of the 1960s. Suspicious of claims of universalism, the current generation of artists gleefully adds to, and takes from, a multiculti smorgasbord of raw materials but keeps the identifying tags on the items that they own and those that they borrow. In this view, Fiddler’s Jewishness does not dissolve by virtue of its being absorbed into someone else’s work. In place of the satisfied marvel that attended the Japanese embrace of Fiddler in the late 1960s, reactions today to non-Western productions, especially, express amusement. A link to a YouTube video of a Japanese troupe rehearsing the “Tradition” number—“Shikitari” in Japanese—made e-mail rounds in 2006, introduced by remarks about how “hilarious” and “unbelievable” it was. A 2008 production of Fiddler in Hindi translation in Delhi merited a report in the Forward as a man-bites-dog sort of story. These productions differed little from foreign versions in the 1970s, but the Jewish American discourse around them had changed.

  The reclaiming or highlighting of Fiddler’s Jewishness has also helped make the show available to parallel projects with their own ethnic claims. Lin-Manuel Miranda has frequently said that In the Heights, his 2008 Tony-winning hip-hop musical about a changing Dominican neighborhood, blatantly borrowed structure and thematic development from Fiddler. The Bollywood director Rajiv Menon has been dreaming for several years about translating Fiddler into the local cinematic idiom. He wants to set the story in Kashmir in the 1980s, portraying Tevye as a Hindu Pandit farmer who is ethnically cleansed from the valley and lives in a refugee camp in Jammu; he’d add an act that follows Tevye back to his native village.

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  All these revampings extend Fiddler’s scope and significance, but they don’t replace the show itself, which unswervingly maintains an insistent power and popularity. Even Ruth Wisse has to admit that, much as she despises it, Fiddler is “in many respects, an adaptation of genius.” The licensing agency Music Theatre International counted several hundred amateur and professional productions in 2012, from Panama City to Klaipeda. In the form in which it has long been known and loved, Fiddler still packs the house. Topol toured the show through Australia and New Zealand in 2005 and 2007 to wide acclaim and then, beginning in January 2009, at age seventy-three, headlined a “farewell tour” across North America (which he left after ten months because of a shoulder injury; he was replaced by Harvey Fierstein). Huge houses sold out from Jersey City to San Francisco.

  Topol did not, however, star in the production mounted in 2008 at Tel Aviv’s leading repertory theater, the Cameri, as part of his native Israel’s sixtieth-anniversary celebration; the role went to a younger, rough-hewn charmer with sly humor and a strong singing voice, Nathan Datner. The unexpected casting served the anniversary goal of honoring one strong strain of national roots with a fresh take on the past. The director, Moshe Kepten, thirty-seven, knew he’d have a hard time retrieving the play from the common view that the old classic had been gathering barnacles in its several revivals since the Godik production at the Alhambra. Two generations after Fiddler helped sabras approach a once-reviled past, it seemed to have nothing more to say. Young actors hesitated to accept roles Kepten offered until he described, at length, the robust new approach he and his set designer, Roni Toren, had in mind. If he and Toren could not—or did not want to—entirely undo the mechanism whereby an origin myth supplies a justification for the present, they could add a strain of critique. They could strip away any shtetl romance.

  That meant finding a visual idiom whose fabulist quality did not rely on the cliché of Chagall and whose sense of real stakes did not depend on spelling out every domestic detail. Toren fashioned a more abstract and open playing space. The show began with a roof freely suspended, like an island floating over the stage, and the fiddler—lithe and clad all in white—initially standing astride it. As Tevye introduced the community and summoned them with those foot stomps and the call of “Tradition,” the roof tilted into a vertical position to become a mizrach—a beautifully painted eastern wall of a traditional synagogue—and to reveal the Anatevkans singing before it. Immediately the production established its new terms: magical, historical, self-consciously theatrical. In short, operatic.

  Most significant, the proscenium arch was lined with sepia
portraits of folks from the Old Country. Kepten and Toren wanted the audience to feel they were entering the story as if paging through a family photo album—no matter if their families had come from Poland or Yemen or Spain or Iraq. Some of the photos came from Toren’s own family (his father, from Bessarabia, wrote fiction set in the shtetl); some were pictures of the cast members made to look as if they’d been taken a century earlier. The images were meant to work in several ways: first, to give spectators a sense of a personal link as part of a nation of immigrants (among Jews) and, second, literally to put a frame around the action that might produce some critical distance and reveal historical parallels—specifically, Kepten hoped, with the ongoing dispossession of Palestinians. Though Kepten said that in postperformance discussions some playgoers freely brought up the analogy, it was not noted by the major critics and certainly not mentioned in the Cameri’s promotional materials. The third reason for the photos made more sense within the institutional choice of Fiddler for the state’s anniversary celebration: to commemorate the end of the civilization the show depicts. To say, “This is the past,” as Toren put it. “This world is finished and we are looking backwards into the story.” At the play’s close—when the departing, singing Anatevkans pause in their choreographic arm movements to hold up their hands in a gesture of surrender that perfectly mimics the young boy in a cloth cap in the famous Warsaw Ghetto photograph—flames light up beneath each of those proscenium portraits: memorial candles.

  At three hours, the show clocked in at nearly twice the length of most Cameri productions, and at 8 million shekels (about $2 million) nearly twice the usual budget. The theater had to extend the run repeatedly, more than doubling the initially planned sixty performances. Typically stingy with standing ovations, Israeli audiences rose to their feet night after night. Kepten, Toren, and their colleagues had given them not only a new look at Fiddler but also one made specifically for them. Earlier productions, overseen by American directors, had replicated the original Robbins staging (as the licensing typically requires), but in 2008 the Cameri addressed its own Jewish public directly through the bedecked proscenium. “The dramaturgical main premise,” said Toren, “is that we look backwards to our history via the gate of personal family.” The production hailed its Jewish audiences and—more self-consciously than the Israeli flag and national anthem, which refer to Jewish symbols without concern for non-Jewish citizens—reaffirmed their national myth.

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  A visual revamping of the show in New York in 2004 had an opposite effect on some Jewish spectators.

  Invoking the commonplace, seemingly unobjectionable notion that theater is not a museum but a living dynamic form, Bock, Harnick, and Stein began to yearn for a “new look” to Fiddler. (Robbins died in 1998.) Talk of a fortieth-anniversary Broadway revival was brewing—there had already been three (in 1976, starring Mostel, in 1981 with Herschel Bernardi, and in 1990 with Topol)—and recent, revelatory new takes on Carousel and Cabaret suggested, as Bock put it, that Fiddler could benefit from “a fresh, exciting approach.” Should the show ever return to New York, the authors wanted it to be “a production that will not only stir memory, but create the kind of excitement as if the audience were seeing it for the first time.”

  Up to a point. They rejected a director who wanted to break for intermission after the scene where Tevye concocts the Grandma Tzeitel dream, present the wedding after the intermission, and cut the rest of the act down considerably. Robbins’s choreography was also nonnegotiable: preserving it was written into the licensing agreement for any future productions. That, they all agreed, was as it should be. Who could possibly improve on those dances? Still, there was plenty of room to create what Bock called a “renewal, not revival.”

  The person who did get the job, the British director David Leveaux, thought one way would be to include a new song. Yente could use one, he suggested—even though Bock and Harnick hadn’t collaborated since 1970, when they differed over the firing of the director of their show The Rothschilds. In the original Fiddler, before the utterly downward arc of Hodel’s departure, Chava’s elopement, and the community’s eviction, Yente started a light number called “The Rumor”: passing one another as they rush along in front of the curtain, the Anatevkans share news of Perchik’s arrest, each twisting the information, like in a game of telephone, into a string of increasingly absurd catastrophes. In addition to adding a little levity, the song’s primary function was to cover a scene change. Norman Jewison did not use it in the film—he had the jump cut at his disposal—and many productions since had found ways to do without it. Leveaux figured there was still room in that moment for Yente to inject some humor into act 2, but in a way that made a stronger thematic link. The matchmaker’s role was dwindling—a complaint the original Efrayim makes in Sholem-Aleichem’s “Tevye Leaves for the Land of Israel”—and Yente could comment on how tradition was breaking down for her, too.

  The production was already in its second week of rehearsal, so the songwriters had to work fast. Bock relished the chance to put some klezmer into the score—by 2004, the more traditional Jewish sound had shed the mawkishness associated with it in the 1960s, thanks to the inventive music of bands like the Klezmatics, who blasted onto the scene like a Yiddish Led Zeppelin in the late 1980s. Harnick focused on keeping energy and vitality in the number, despite his worries that there might not be anything Yente could say that the audience didn’t already grasp. The two came up with “Topsy-Turvy,” in which Yente expresses her bewilderment over young people seeking wedded bliss—a spry but, still, incidental song that in Harnick’s view didn’t work as well as “The Rumor” in front of an audience.

  The change to Yente that satisfied him more was a tweak he and Stein gave to her lines that went unremarked in the press but suggests more about Fiddler’s relationship to a changing context. In the departure scene, she originally tells Golde that she is heading to “the Holy Land” (an unlikely locution warranted by the impossibility of her saying on a New York stage in 1964 what a character in 1905 actually would have said: “Palestine”). Yente says she will continue her work as a matchmaker and “help our people be fruitful and multiply.” By 2004, the authors didn’t like the ring of those lines in relation to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: they may have sounded like an endorsement of the idea of a “demographic war.” Stein replaced them. “I just want to go where our foremothers lived and where they’re all buried,” she now says. “That’s where I want to be buried—if there’s room.”

  Leveaux’s eagerness to “take that musical and strip it of the schtick that has become attached to it” mostly took a visual form. Theatrical language had changed in four decades and that meant the set could be “more evocative rather than representational.” He and the scenic designer, Tom Pye, started from scratch—no Aronson turntables, painted drops, folding house. They covered the orchestra pit to move the action closer to the audience in the cold and distant Minskoff Theater—and placed the orchestra on the stage. They played the scenes on a raked wooden platform that helped to delimit the space. And they surrounded it all with pretty silver birch trees and scattered leaves. Above them twinkled dozens of lanterns that resembled the oil lamps of synagogues. Leveaux restaged the dream scene with clear homage to Chagall—Tzeitel and Motel flew over the scene as floating bride and groom—and tilted the platform until it was nearly vertical, so that the audience seemed to be watching the expressionistic dream from a bird’s-eye perspective.

  No question, it all looked gorgeous. But whether gorgeous is how Fiddler ought to look became part of a savage critical debate, one in which it was sometimes hard to distinguish between legitimate disagreements and a bizarre form of critical jingoism. On the side of legitimate critique, some objected to what they deemed Alfred Molina's low-key performance as Tevye. He seemed to blend too much into the ensemble, surrendering Tevye's centrality; that just doesn't work for the character through whom the audience sees everything. (This balance shifted for the bett
er when Harvey Fierstein took over the role after about a year and led the production for the next thirteen months; his Tevye generated great warmth. He did not change his approach to the part when, several years later, he replaced Topol in the more "traditional" production of the national tour.) On the other hand, some critics experienced a form of collective hysteria, ascribing the production’s faults to a shortage of Jews. The accusations began while the show was still in previews, ignited by an instantly infamous essay in the Los Angeles Times by Thane Rosenbaum and immediately enflamed by the New York Post’s mischievous theater columnist Michael Riedel. On top of Rosenbaum’s complaints that the production “tastes great and looks Jewish but isn’t entirely kosher,” Riedel declared it “de-Jewed” (flimsily attributing the phrase to anonymous “Broadway insiders”). A rumor spread charging that Leveaux had conducted callback auditions on Yom Kippur. (A “ludicrous joke,” Leveaux said.)

  In reviews, claims to ethnic authenticity, which had not been the currency of theater discourse forty years earlier when Fiddler originally opened, dominated the discussion. Much of the tribal rancor was reserved for Molina—the actor “has many inventive skills,” Peter Marks declared in his Washington Post review, “but infusing Tevye with an ebullient Jewishness is not one of them”—although the cavil extended to the rest of the cast. Riedel had suggested that something was amiss when actors playing the three daughters were named Kelly, Murphy, and Paoluccio, and in a review for the New York Sun, Jeremy McCarter picked up on the very point: one shouldn’t expect such performers, he said, “to abound in Russian-Jewish authenticity.” Months later, when Harvey Fierstein took over for Molina, the critic for the website Theatermania.com kept the meme going, praising Fierstein’s “personal and touching” performance and, bizarrely surprised, declaring Broadway’s gay godfather convincing as a paternal figure “even if his daughters seem a couple of gene pools removed from his own.” In 1964, no one had any problem accepting Tanya Everett and Julia Migenes—and Joanna Merlin, who, though Jewish, was a Midwesterner not well-steeped in Yiddishkayt—as Tevye’s children. They were acting, after all.