Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof (19 page)

But the writers didn’t wait. Arnold Saint Subber, who had produced (and, as legend has it, conceived of)
Kiss Me, Kate
fifteen years earlier, was interested. It turned out that he had been raised with Yiddish, having been taken in by a Jewish grandmother after his father was killed in an accident. “He knew Sholem-Aleichem better than we did,” Harnick marveled. Despite Saint Subber’s personal tie to the material, though, the authors perceived that he was having a rough time raising money after a couple of flops and they didn’t think they could count on him. On July 25, they played the score for Fred Coe, the rumpled southerner who produced work on stage, film, and TV. Bock cited the film director and producer Arthur Penn as having expressed interest, too. “Negotiating,” wrote Bock in his diary a short time after meeting with each of them, with no further comment.

On August 20, 1962, more than a year after the men had started to work on the project, an item in the
New York Times
made it official: “Aleichem Stories Inspire Musical,” the page 18 headline announced, noting that the production was being “considered” by Coe and would probably be presented in the fall of 1963.

Then nothing happened. Or not much apart from a presentation for friends two months later in Stein’s New Rochelle home, where Stein narrated events while Bock and Harnick sat at a piano and sang through the score. If any of the guests took out their checkbooks, their pledges didn’t amount to much. Coe, who had indeed signed on, needed to go out and raise money.
Tevye
simply had to wait.

The artists did not. Stein went off and wrote a new play of his own, an adaptation of Carl Reiner’s comic bildungsroman
Enter Laughing
. The “side-splitting,” “uproarious,” “marvelously funny” play—as the
New York Times
declared it—opened in March 1963 and played for a solid year. Meanwhile, Bock and Harnick responded to an invitation to adapt the film
The Shop around the Corner
(based on a play by Miklós László) for Hal Prince, and over the autumn and winter of 1962–63 they wrote and rehearsed their little gem of a musical,
She Loves Me
, which premiered in April 1963. Though appreciated, the small-scale charmer that tells the tale of a surprise romance couldn’t compete with splashier spectacles and it closed after eight months. At the same time, the song duo wrote what the
New York Times
called (in an otherwise negative review) “three snappy numbers” for a tame space adventure for children featuring puppets by Bil and Cora Baird, called
Man in the Moon
.

As for the possibility of Robbins, his schedule was packed all through the season. Coe had duly called him in December 1962, but there’s no indication that Robbins even accepted a copy of the script at that point. He was up to his ears with a trying production of Brecht’s
Mother Courage
(for which he adamantly refused Brecht’s instruction to use a turntable onstage). Soon after it opened in late March 1963—right between
Enter Laughing
and
She Loves Me
—Robbins was preparing a new Broadway opening. If the financial loss, mixed reviews, and miserable experience of
Mother Courage
disturbed him, he didn’t lose stride: he moved right into work on transferring Arthur Kopit’s mordant play
Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feelin’ So Sad
, which he’d staged Off-Broadway the previous season. And a project with Richard Rodgers was in the planning stages. But somehow a sliver of mental space opened long enough for Robbins to think about what would challenge him anew after the Kopit play.

In July, he wrote to his friend and erstwhile collaborator Leonard Bernstein to ask whether the composer had any further ideas about a ballet version of the mystical Yiddish play
The Dybbuk
, which they’d once talked about. Robbins thought they might pull it together in time for the next year’s Spoleto festival in Italy. (They finally got around to it in 1974.) Robbins floated a new idea: “Also, have you read
Another Country
by James Baldwin?” he asked. “There’s a marvelous new and strange kind of musical theater to be evolved from the book [which] touches me enormously.”

Coe reached Robbins at this auspicious moment when thoughts of new forms, Yiddish material, and issues of racial tolerance were mingling in his mind. On August 15, Bock and Harnick came to his Upper East Side home office to play him the score. He didn’t have to be coaxed. On the twentieth, his lawyer called to tell him they’d come to terms with Coe—including the agreement that Robbins would be cut in as an uncredited author—but warned Robbins not to make any decisions about the Richard Rodgers collaboration on his docket until they had the
Tevye
deal in writing. Robbins wasted no time. Within a week, he wrote to Rodgers to withdraw from their plans, explaining that the Tevye material “is something I feel deeply related to. maybe it’s my heritage. I’m aware of the fact that a lot of people have considered this material and gave it up as impossible. but i want to try and have decided to. Both of you are creative enough to understand what is moving me, and believe me the background of my parents and their parents plays a big role.” The next day he heard back from Rodgers. Expressing “deep disappointment” and the “equally deep hope that we’ll work together some time soon,” Rodgers allowed how “this sort of decision has to be made on a personal and emotional basis.”

When Robbins cabled his favorite stage manager, Ruth Mitchell, on August 23, to entice her to join the project, he gushed, “I’m going to do a musical of Sholem Aleichem stories with Harnick and Bock. I’m in love with it. It’s our people.” A few days later, Robbins wrote to his longtime close friend Nancy Keith: “I’m going to do a musical which should really star my father,” he happily announced. “It’s all about the background he comes from.” And then he added, with the sort of winking self-criticism only an intimate could appreciate, “So I have to start getting into my usual black mood for work.”

The
Tevye
team had heard of Robbins’s notorious “black mood” and, as delighted as they were to have won the musical stage’s greatest living director, they stashed away some caution. When they were about to offer the helm to Robbins, Harnick checked in with Robbins’s friend Sondra Lee. She told him they couldn’t do better than Robbins for the project but should give him a wide berth as the opening approached. “He becomes obsessed by his demons,” she told Harnick. “He is so worried about failure.” And since Robbins’s father had imbued him with the fear that if you’re Jewish everything you’ve accomplished will be taken away from you, she thought he might feel especially vulnerable on this show, perfect as she felt they were for each other. If he starts brooding under a cloud, she cautioned, you can expect terrible thunder. If you hear it rumbling and you can’t reach him with humor, she said ominously, “stay out of his way.”

In the summer of 1963, when Robbins stormed into the project, he blew in like a gale force, bringing fresh perspective and exhilaration—and a slew of precise, rigorous demands.

*   *   *

Robbins immediately threw himself into preparing for
Tevye
, despite rehearsals for reopening
Oh Dad
. Robbins always conducted extensive background research where a project warranted it, but never before with as much fervor. He started amassing books, articles, photographs, records, and films about Jewish history, culture, and practice. Early on, he rented Maurice Schwartz’s movie
Tevye der milkhiker
. Perhaps Schwartz’s knack for shifting nimbly between humor and poignancy, his ability to be at once grand and pitiable, helped shape the image of the Tevye that Robbins would want center stage, but his working notes don’t discuss the heartrending movie or Schwartz more generally. It’s a telling omission: Robbins had made his own acting debut under Schwartz’s direction at the Yiddish Art Theater in 1937.

Robbins’s first serious dance teacher, Gluck Sandor, had been hired by Schwartz as a choreographer and he brought Robbins (as well as his sister, Sonia) along with him. The show was I. J. Singer’s
Di brider ashkenazi
(
The Brothers Ashkenazi
), an epic novel adapted for the stage the moment it came off the press. Sprawling and full of twists, rises, and falls, the plot traces the fate of Poland’s Jews—and of the industrializing city of Łodź—from the late nineteenth century to the First World War by telling the story of enterprising brothers who become rivals in business and romance. Robbins danced in two numbers, served as supernumerary in the many lavish crowd scenes, and, just shy of his nineteenth birthday and appearing much younger, played a boy in a two-word walk-on. “Yoh, tata,” he had to say—“Yes, Dad.”

Playing eight or nine times a week for six months (to packed houses) could have provided Robbins with a solid sense of at least one big slice of Eastern European Jewish life (albeit in melodramatic form), despite his not knowing Yiddish. The novel had been published in English, but even if Robbins hadn’t read it he could have followed the stage action, with all its pomp and pious protocol, easily enough. But that was the last thing that interested him at the time—the first instance in which young Rabinowitz was listed in a program under the name Jerome Robbins. He focused, instead, on Schwartz’s technique and showmanship. He found the maestro to be “stern, serious, not smiling except when the play called for it,” and “autocratic” but also a tremendously skillful and compelling actor. Robbins particularly liked to watch the climactic scene in which Schwartz, playing the assimilating brother, cuts off his
payess
—his ritual side curls—“in an act of defiance,… puts on a tie & with a deep determined breath & chin lifted, he strides out to meet the world. (End of act 1.)”

Apart from projecting into his admiration of the scene his own teenage desire to separate from his Jewish heritage, Robbins likely picked up some early lessons in pacing and the power of a portentous first-act curtain. As Robbins would be, Schwartz was a stickler for realism and ensemble playing, and he knew how to build, and milk, big flashy scenes. He gave plenty of stage time and meticulous attention to dramatized religious rituals.
The Brothers Ashkenazi
featured a solemn, extravagant wedding—one Robbins nowhere mentions in his notes even as he is called on to create one himself.

Perhaps Robbins was so resistant to
Yiddishkayt
in his youth that the substance of
The Brothers Ashkenazi
bounced off him and genuinely made no lasting impression; perhaps he needed to engage the artistic project of cultural recovery as a parallel process of personal retrieval, with no interference from another domineering theatrical imagination. Whatever the reason, he approached
Tevye
research as if he’d had no exposure to the century-long history of Polish Jews recounted in the Singer work—or to the culture of the scrappy company at the Yiddish Art Theater. It was
Tevye
that provided him a chance to fill in a wide and aching gap in his understanding, to make up for his father’s teaching him “nought about the religion, Torah, traditions, language or most of all the WHY of it … fasting, davening [praying], payess, tzitzis [fringes] or any pride or history of our tribe.” Among the books Robbins bought:
A Treasury of Jewish Folklore
,
Nine Gates to the Hasidic Mysteries
,
The Jewish Woman and Her Home
,
Great Ages and Ideas of the Jewish People
,
The Lifetime of a Jew: Throughout the Ages of Jewish History
,
The Jewish Festivals
,
Everyman’s Talmud
, Maurice Samuel’s
Little Did I Know
.

But the first item Robbins looked for was a photograph. He wanted a portrait of Sholem-Aleichem. By the time the
New York Times
reported on August 29 “Robbins to Direct ‘Tevye,’ a Musical” (a full year after the paper’s last mention of the project), Robbins had already put in some calls to experts at New York’s Jewish Museum and the Jewish Educational Committee. With a long-standing, serious interest in photography, Robbins may have expected to glean some insights by gazing into the wide, bewhiskered face of his onetime namesake. Or perhaps he simply wanted to see what the debonair voice of the people looked like. Or to keep the author’s smiling eyes nearby as a sort of charm as he worked on the show. In any event, a picture of Sholem-Aleichem would have served as a strong visual rejoinder to a photograph that characterized Robbins’s feelings about Jewishness heretofore.

Hebrew Lesson
, a haunting image by Cornell Capa, had been hanging in Robbins’s home office for at least a few years, depicting a teacher with pointy beard and spiraling side curls leaning like an ominous shadow over boys reading in a
kheyder
. The photo, made in 1955, may have struck sentimental chords for some viewers, but Robbins’s own brief experience with a bar mitzvah tutor had been traumatic and the appeal of this picture, though beautiful, was complicated, to say the least. The hovering figure in the photo evokes the “old wizened, decrepit white bearded, unshaven man [who came] to the house every afternoon to train me to read the Torah, that part of the Torah I had to learn.” But the scarring lesson Robbins took from him was “Jewish submissiveness.” Neighborhood boys taunted Robbins through the window while he had his lesson. The teacher did nothing. “If he’d taught me to fight—if he’d stood up and yelled at them back, but no, he accepted the fact that we were curs and we got off the sidewalk when we were commanded to.” Yet here on his wall Robbins had prominently displayed a reminder of “the horror, the embarrassment and the shame” of Jewish wimpiness.