Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof (26 page)

Hal Prince already had a coterie of investors who had raked in profits on some of his earlier ventures, and plenty were willing take a chance on
Tevye
—as the team was still calling it at the beginning of 1964. In January, the producers drafted an initial prospectus to entice investors. It got some key facts wrong, as such documents, written by office staff who haven’t spent much time talking to the artists, often can. The errors shine some light on the way the business side of a project thinks about its “property”—and often shapes how the public will think about it. Dated January 21, 1964, and aiming to raise $376,000 in shares worth $7,500 per unit, the “preliminary prospectus” describes “an original musical comedy” that is “based upon the TEVYE folk stories by Sholom Aleichem and a play by Arnold Perl, based on said stories.”

Jerry Robbins and the authors would have objected to almost every word in that description: they didn’t think of
Tevye
as a musical comedy—“it is more a combination of an opera, play & ballet,” Robbins had said in his notes—and they insisted that they were not following Perl’s lead. The common but inadequate designation of Sholem-Aleichem’s masterful creations as “folk stories” would not have disturbed them, however, and indeed when the final version of the prospectus was completed a few months later, on April 16, that phrase was one of the few that remained intact. The reference to Perl’s play was whited out and a clarification added: “It is based upon the TEVYE folk stories by Sholom Aleichem” was now followed by a blank space and then an emphatic new line: “It should be noted that the works comprising ‘THE WORLD OF SHOLOM ALEICHEM’ written and adapted by Arnold Perl, are not included as basic material for the proposed Musical.” It’s impossible to know whether the writers of the prospectus were simply making legalistically sure that their document accorded with the agreement Bock, Harnick, and Stein had signed with Perl and Crown Publishers back in 1962, in which they asserted that they were taking over the license to the Tevye stories and not to the material of Perl’s earlier play, or if the prospectus writers were confused about the two different Perl productions and their differing source material. Perhaps they knew the difference and were fudging the distinction on purpose. Clearly enough, though, they wanted to emphasize the originality of their venture.

By that point, the producers had attracted nearly 150 investors, whose involvement ranged from partial shares at the minimum amount of $500 to a few gambles of as much as $22,500. If names are a reliable measure, the list of limited partners was not dominated by Jews. Along with some Adlers, Levys, Feldsteins, Grossmans, and Cohns, the contributors included Dempseys, Buckleys, McVeys, Kelloggs, Farrells, Peccis, Wilsons, Catagnolis, and Vanderbilts, among others: in other words, those with disposable income in their bank accounts and a show tune in their hearts who typically backed Broadway productions in those days. Prince’s track record—and that of Bock, Harnick, Stein, and Robbins—would have counted more than the content of the project. The producers made no special effort to reach out to Jewish investors who might have supported the play as a matter of ethnic pride or interest; if anything, they downplayed the tribal appeal. Neither the word “Jew” nor “Jewish” appears in the prospectus’s description of the play; nor does “Yiddish” or “shtetl.”

The April version—completed after most of the investors had signed on—adds some plot summary, describing the travails of a milkman in Eastern Europe and the fortunes of his three marriageable daughters; the theme, it announces, is “the conflict between the new generation with its modern ideas and the older generation with its traditional ideas.” Then, in a surprisingly insightful bit of dramatic criticism, the prospectus makes a point that the Yiddish literary scholar Seth Wolitz would discern years later in analyzing the show’s tremendous success: “The resolution is the decision of the family to break with the old and move on to the new world—the United States. It is the major step in their acceptance of the changing times and their attempt to change with it.”

Capitalizing at $376,000, the show was not expensive for its time. Nearly a decade before,
My Fair Lady
had cost as much, and only a few years earlier
Camelot
ran up more than $600,000 in start-up expenses. Prince had little trouble raising the funds. And Robbins had none spending it. Early in 1964, with the beginning of rehearsals still six months off, he was already showing signs of dithering his way over the budget.

*   *   *

Design meetings had been continuing regularly since the fall. In those days long before designers could e-mail digital photos and scanned sketches around, Robbins met Aronson and Zipprodt frequently—often several times a week—and separately. Robbins preferred to serve as the controlling relay point between the two designers, the filter for their communications. He would decide which costume sketches Aronson could see when, which set renderings were appropriate for Zipprodt’s discerning eye. The feisty costumer quickly caught on and balked. She called Aronson to say that they couldn’t possibly do their work in isolation from each other and the two started meeting clandestinely at his home, away from Robbins’s dominion. Though twenty-five years apart in age and artistically bred in disparate worlds, the two were, in the words of Aronson’s design partner (and wife), Lisa Jalowetz Aronson, “intuitively related in style.” Both worked from impulses about color, Zipprodt amassing and layering swatches of complementary hues and textures next to one another, Aronson rendering his myriad ideas in watercolors or gouache sketches. They continued their research together—they added a Russian film about Gorky’s childhood and Maurice Schwartz’s Tevye movie to their syllabus—and they compared palettes based in browns and blues with splashes of red and yellow. Zipprodt always thought about color dynamically—its changing over the course of a play parallel to dramatic developments and, especially, through the relationships between characters. “Colors bump into one another,” she once put it. When characters encounter one another, their clothes interact. With Aronson, she expanded her sense of how the costumes combine meaningfully with scenery, too: Golde’s muted claret dress against the red overtones in her home’s wooden furniture, the greens and ochers in Chava’s layers echoing the pastoral backdrops of wheat sheaves and trees. The two formed a strong bond, and though they were wary of Rosenthal at first—Aronson, especially, feared her gelled lights would throw off the delicate color balances that meant so much to the sets and costumes—she won them over when they saw how beautifully she brought out their intentions. Still, Rosenthal worked mostly on her own. And she had little time, and maybe less cause or inclination, to join their kvetch sessions about Robbins. He was driving Aronson mad.

Patricia Zipprodt’s costume sketch for Hodel as she sets out for Siberia.

Every day or three, Robbins called Aronson on the phone or summoned him to a meeting to rave about a new idea he wanted the designer to try. Robbins went constantly to art exhibits and performances—from the flashiest commercial productions to the funkiest avant-garde experiments—and he sopped up what he saw with enthusiasm. If he liked a forest represented with shimmering materials, he excitedly told Aronson to make a shimmering forest. Aronson would hurry back to the studio to sketch some possibilities. When he brought them to Robbins, the director would already have another new notion that thrilled him. Before even looking at how Aronson had responded to the earlier suggestion, Robbins would send him away to try the next one. As the design concepts had to start taking more concrete shape, Lisa Jalowetz Aronson and others in the shop put together models of set pieces and painstakingly began the building drawings that would enable the ideas to be transformed into real, life-sized scenery. Time and again, they would have to start over from scratch as Robbins issued new instructions without considering what Aronson and his assistants had already made. Aronson threw out a lot of work that hadn’t even been given the chance to be rejected. The materials and labor, meanwhile, were mounting up on Prince’s account sheets.

Boris Aronson’s rendering of Tevye’s house: combining elements of fantasy and reality.

When Robbins finally did settle on a specific design element, he changed his mind about its details as finically as he might change his mind about what color shirt to wear. For the wedding scene at the end of act 1, Robbins and Aronson agreed on a painted backdrop of swirling night-sky blues with a whorled bright moon shining against it, stage right. The brushwork gave the drop a Chagall-like sense of motion and dynamic color—the evocation of the master’s painterly style, which was what Aronson preferred to the more literal allusions to Chagall’s imagery that Robbins insisted upon elsewhere in the design. Both men loved that pretty moon, which worked within the realistic frame of the story while also casting a glow of mysticism over it. But Robbins couldn’t decide where, exactly, the wispy white circle should be positioned. One day he wanted it a few inches higher, the next day lower; one day farther to the right, the next more to the left—and day after day, new permutations: higher to the right, lower to the left, higher to the left, and so on. Aronson and his assistants had to repaint the drop repeatedly to accommodate Robbins’s minute adjustments. After countless iterations, Robbins finally nodded his satisfaction. He offered no thanks, no eureka, no acknowledgment of the extraordinary paces he’d put the painters through. But at least it was done. The moon looked gorgeous.

And so Robbins found another detail to fuss over. “The height of the house isn’t right,” he told Aronson. Changing it threw off the relationship of the rooftop to the moon behind it. Aronson’s crew had to paint the drop again.

Still, Robbins had obsessiveness to spare. Casting continued at an accelerated pace in the new year. So did research—more weddings, more reading, more poring over pictures. Robbins purchased another five copies of Roman Vishniac’s book of photographs to share with collaborators; he rented
Laughter through Tears
again. He was on the phone or in a meeting with Joe Stein every couple of days, and almost as often with Bock and Harnick. He was hounding the designers, coaching hopeful actors, and, apparently, dodging phone calls from Hal Prince, who was leaving messages every day or two. When Robbins retreated for a weekend to his secluded house at heavily forested Snedens Landing, about a thirty minutes’ drive north of his city apartment, he brought along background reading and notes to “mess around with” and sometimes he brought Stein himself for an intensive session on the script. When Robbins dashed to London for five days the last week of January, his return flight was due in New York at 1:55 p.m.; he scheduled auditions for 4:00 that afternoon. He would have had to go straight from the airport to the theater.

The show was taking firmer shape in his mind’s eye. Though his activity speeded up, his ideas seemed to coalesce. “The drama of the play,” he scribbled down on the first day of the new year, “is to watch a man carefully treading his way between his accepting of his sustaining
belief
(that way of life that is centuries old, practiced as if it were still in the middle ages, which protects & defends him & makes his life tolerable)—& his wry questioning of it within the confinements of the belief. He always asks
why
. He ducks & weaves with the events around him still managing to straddle both sides—his traditions & the questioning of it.” The tests of Tevye’s ability to stay astride the widening gulf become more difficult and finally, when Chava chooses Fyedka, “he
is forced
either to move forward into being a new Jew or embrace the strict traditions of his life.” Robbins was clearly siding with the “new Jew” option, an interpretation of Tevye befitting midcentury America. From a liberal standpoint that holds tolerance and equality as supreme values, Tevye’s crisis over Chava’s non-Jewish spouse comes across as old-fashioned indeed. Sholem-Aleichem’s Tevye is most undone by Chava’s apostasy, but that simply does not register on Robbins’s radar as such, so the high-minded director has to conclude, “The conditions that [Tevye] has lived under have made him become as prejudice[d] as his attackers.”