Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof (16 page)

Harnick, too, showed early signs of what would make him such a successful and sensitive lyricist. Growing up in Chicago, where he was born in 1924, Harnick shared the family penchant for writing verses to commemorate special occasions. (His first published effort, a Thanksgiving poem, appeared in his grammar school newspaper when he was in the fifth grade: “The turkey has my sympathy. / Why must we be so mean? / What has the turkey done /That he deserves the guillotine?”) More substantively, he was studying violin seriously and by the time he was a teenager he would sometimes play in the orchestras for Gilbert and Sullivan shows put on by amateur groups. He was “bowled over” by the technical feats of Gilbert’s lyrics and began to play with puns and with internal and multisyllabic rhymes in the songs and sketch comedy he was writing with a high school buddy. In the army—Harnick was drafted into the Signal Corps in 1943 and worked as a mobile blind-landing-systems installer—he gravitated to a volunteer unit that threw together a weekly show for fellow servicemen at the Robins Field airbase in Georgia. Harnick joined other cast members in improvisations based on comic scenarios that their director, Sol Lerner, a former theatrical agent from New York, remembered from shows he’d seen back home; Harnick also played the violin and wrote and performed satirical songs about life in his unit. Before Harnick received his honorable discharge in early 1946, Lerner tendered a version of “If you ever come and try your luck in New York, look me up, kid.” First, though, Harnick went back to Chicago and enrolled at Northwestern on the GI Bill. There, he studied violin and wrote for the storied student revue, the
Waa-Mu Show
. His classmate Charlotte Rae, costumed in overalls as a wartime munitions worker, sang his freshman contribution, “I’ve got those gotta-go-home-alone tonight blues.” She also gave him a copy of the original cast album of
Finian’s Rainbow
, and Yip Harburg’s lyrics lit a spark. “I thought it was extraordinary that a man could have such fun with words and yet be saying something important,” Harnick explained, and he wanted to do the same. He continued to pursue a violin career after graduating, even landing a seat in a prominent dance orchestra with a standing five-night-a-week gig at the Edgewater Hotel. But when tension in his arms (caused by his clenching with nervousness when microphones descended nightly to broadcast the music on radio) along with layoffs in the orchestra left him jobless, he moved to New York. If he was going to be penniless, he figured he might as well do it where he could try to break into showbiz.

Harnick did call upon Lerner soon after he arrived in the summer of 1950 and Lerner helped by hooking him up with some television variety shows that needed songs. Bock had arrived some eighteen months earlier, a semester short of finishing at Wisconsin. He, too, had been writing for shows in college—a full-length musical for which he served as composer won first prize in a student contest sponsored by BMI—and with Larry Holofcener, a talented college pal, as lyricist, the two quickly snagged a job with television’s
Admiral Broadway Revue
, which starred Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca and eventually morphed into
Your Show of Shows
.

Musical variety shows still had a few years of life on Broadway in the early 1950s—and for a bit longer Off-Broadway, on TV, and at summer resorts in the Catskills, Adirondacks, and Poconos—and they provided invaluable on-the-job training for theatrical songsmiths. Often turning out a new show every week, the writers honed their skills for all kinds of swiftness. They had to write fast and what they wrote had to establish a lot of information quickly: in a variety format, each number presented a new character (or at least a character type), a new story (or at least a joke), and its own tone. The satirical recounting of a dud of a date, from attraction to disappointment in a seething but censorious town, for example, comes off in six short stanzas—less than two hundred words—in Harnick’s first hit, “Boston Beguine” (from
New Faces of 1952
). “How could we hope to enjoy all the pleasures ahead,” the frustrated singer concludes, “when the books we should have read were all suppressed in Boston?” These shows were also crash courses in what worked in front of an audience and what died. Many a writer of book musicals shaped up for the complex dramatic demands of that genre—and for coming up with good new songs in a day or two during on-the-road tryouts—by cranking out tunes for the second-class form.

Encouraged by a meeting with Yip Harburg, Harnick considered working with a partner while he concentrated on lyrics, but he never stopped writing music and his sense of composition can be felt in the supple phrasing of his words. As for Bock, he put aside his lingering literary ambitions and focused on music, becoming even more adept at producing tunes for any dramatic situation, from clomping cowboy syncopations to calypso beats to sliding Gypsy flourishes, as fanciful revue settings—or costumes—demanded. By the time they met in 1956 (introduced by their mutual friend, the performer Jack Cassidy), both had written for book shows—Harnick for a comedy called
Horatio
that was a huge hit in Dallas but flopped at an Adirondack resort and never came to New York and Bock for
Mr. Wonderful
, a Sammy Davis Jr. vehicle that ran nearly a year on Broadway (and brought Bock recognition as well as royalties for its frequently covered songs “Mr. Wonderful” and “Too Close for Comfort”). Harnick and Bock had begun to make lives—and even a living—in the theater.

As partners, they gave each other new occasions to rise to in song after song: Bock’s contrapuntal flourishes invited Harnick to build character conflict into his lyrics; Harnick’s haiku-like turns offered Bock chances to mark subtle emotional shifts in the music. Without having to discuss it, they concurred on a core principle: that songs served the show and shouldn’t be written as stand-alone commodities. That’s why, though they typically wrote three songs for every one used, they seldom had any recyclable trunk songs.

Fiorello!
showed off their adroit and witty use of songs to convey heaps of dramatic information, draw audiences into the characters, and comment on a situation—often all at once. “The Name’s La Guardia,” for instance, shows the hero’s idealism tempered by political savvy while also poking fun at the exploitable ethnic voting blocs of the urban electorate: as multilingual La Guardia campaigns for Congress in the first act, he sings in English, then Italian, then Yiddish as he meets different groups of constituents, and Bock keeps up, shifting from Sousa-like march to tarantella to the festive dance tunes known as
freylekhs
.

Bock and Harnick had been hired separately for
Fiorello!
and the astounding success of the show—it even won that year’s Pulitzer Prize for drama—cemented their partnership. The show’s coproducer, Hal Prince, signed them up as a team (along with Abbott and Weidman) for a new project while
Fiorello!
was still in rehearsals. (The new show was
Tenderloin
, a tale of whores, church reformers, and corrupt cops in 1890s New York. With an appealing score but lumpy libretto, it opened to mixed reviews in October 1960 and closed six months later, while
Fiorello!
was still running strong.) But Bock and Harnick were beginning to talk about developing a project through their own initiative. And they were talking about it with the librettist Joseph Stein, who had coauthored the book for their first musical together,
The Body Beautiful
, a clunky effort about an aspiring boxer. It opened in late January 1958 and lasted about seven weeks. Nonetheless, the three men liked working together and in 1960 an idea for a musical began to hatch.

Stein, born in 1912, was also smitten by theater in high school and he loved to write. At City College he continued to work on plays and to contribute to the school newspaper and magazine, but without dreaming of pursuing writing as a profession. After completing a master’s degree in social work at Columbia University, he found a job as a psychiatric case worker—but he kept writing in his time off. In 1942, over lunch with a mutual friend, he met a comic who needed some new material for radio monologues. Stein made some off-the-cuff suggestions and the performer said, “Why don’t you write that up?” The fifteen dollars he paid Stein for the material marked the beginning of Stein’s professional career as a writer—and it was not the last time Stein would write for Zero Mostel.

Stein’s comic sensibility was warm, even kindly—like the man himself. His radio sketches found humor more in the absurdity of situations and in the sure-fire Jewish outsider stance that dominated much comedy of the period than in ridicule or caustic jokes. They were funny enough to open doors to Broadway revues and TV; through the early 1950s, Stein, too, wrote for
Your Show of Shows
. And he crossed paths with Jerry Bock again when he and a writing partner, Will Glickman, were hired to write the book for
Mr. Wonderful
. But two other musicals he wrote before 1960 set him more directly down the path to the new project with Bock and Harnick.

The first was
Plain and Fancy
(1955), a commission bankrolled by a Philadelphia department store owner who wanted a show about the Amish to do for Pennsylvania what Rodgers and Hammerstein had done for Oklahoma—or so Stein remembered it. (Accounts from the period explain that a woman from Pennsylvania had tried to sell the producer on her script about the Amish a couple of years earlier.) Stein and Glickman (again, writing partners) researched Amish customs, dress, and speech; the producer brought a Mr. Zeek from Pennsylvania to school the company in the ways of his tribe, and he also planted a tape recorder mic among the celery in a Lancaster County market stall to try to capture the local lilt for the cast. Preshow press coverage emphasized the exoticism of the simple-living Mennonites, but the script took pains to portray the community in a positive, even wistful light. It relied on a well-worn plot device: two city-mouse New Yorkers, Dan and Ruth, alight in Bird-in-Hand, Pennsylvania, where Dan is selling a farm he inherited to a local man. In the process of helping to right a romance, the outsiders come to appreciate the meaningful way of life they witness, and the community reaffirms and tightens its ties to tradition (displayed most wondrously in a second-act opening number, in which a barn is raised onstage). Utterly conventional in form and quaint in spirit, the show offered a frisson of the foreign in a pleasant, familiar package. It ran for more than a year despite lukewarm reviews.

Stein turned to themes of family conflict within a tight, rigid community once more when, in 1959, he adapted Sean O’Casey’s
Juno and the Paycock
. Working on his own as librettist this time, Stein stayed faithful to O’Casey’s close study of the crumbling Boyle family in the period of Ireland’s War of Independence—stalwart mother, drunkard dad, stool pigeon son, besotted then spurned (and pregnant) daughter—while also coloring in the social background. The show featured several big ensemble scenes that brought 1920s Dublin to life, with women commiserating comically on front stoops, men cavorting in a pub, neighbors viciously turning on the Boyles when the family’s ballyhooed inheritance fails to materialize. The show offers a surprising critique of masculinity in times of war—the son’s death at the hands of IRA avengers comes across as part of a violent culture that’s out of control, the dad’s drinking renders him entirely ineffectual, and the women leave to make a better life, daughter following mother “to my sister’s place, to the farm, where you can take a full breath without the smell of sadness in it.” Despite a rich score by Marc Blitzstein and stirring, Irish-inflected choreography by Agnes de Mille,
Juno
closed after sixteen performances, criticized for failing to find a convincing middle ground between bubbly musical numbers and O’Casey’s bitter tone.

Stein didn’t have either musical consciously in mind when he suggested that he, Bock, and Harnick take a look at Sholem-Aleichem’s short stories as possible source material for their new venture. He was simply reminded of the stories after Harnick proposed they adapt Sholem-Aleichem’s
Wandering Stars
. A friend had given Harnick a copy of the novel and he saw great potential in the rollicking, epic, and tumultuous love story that traces the parallel paths of a cantor’s daughter, Reizel, and a wealthy man’s son, Leibel Rafalovich, who are separated as youngsters as they try to run off from their shtetl together to join the theater. Each traipses across Europe and, eventually, comes to America as a star—Rosa an admired singer in the Gentile opera houses, and Leo Rafalesco a celebrated leading man of the Yiddish stage. Literary critics have long pointed to the book’s choppy plotting, melodramatic emotion, and expositional cop-outs (epistolary chapters that fill in skipped-over events, for example) as key evidence of Sholem-Aleichem’s failure as a novelist. But theater people have frequently found it irresistible, both for its vivid portrayals of the mendacious managers, conniving costars, and imperious divas who nonetheless consistently manage to put magic on the stage and for its direct (critics would say overly blatant) theme of the theater’s irresolvable inner conflict as a commercial art—one that must please a paying audience even as its creators aspire, like Rafalesco, to greatness. Harnick loved it. So did Bock. The Broadway musical seems like the story’s natural habitat—the form, after all, was invented and sustained by scrappy Jewish artists who learned to balance seriousness and shmaltz, assimilation and ethnic assertion.
Wandering Stars
looked perfect as Harnick, Bock, and Stein’s next project.

Except that it was too sprawling for even a three-hour stage adaptation. Or so Stein contended. Traversing a dozen locales and as many years, populated by hordes of colorful characters and twining around two central plot lines, the novel couldn’t be contained in the taut structure of a book musical. (If the
New York Times
reviewer is to be believed, Maurice Schwartz’s 1930 dramatization with songs by Avrum Goldfadn bore out Stein’s judgment: it played as “a succession of insufficiently fused fragments.” How the Moscow Yiddish Art Theater’s version fared is hard to say; the June 1941 debut was overwhelmed by other events.)