Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof (29 page)

For the first two weeks of June, Robbins called only the three daughters and their suitors to the rehearsal hall, a cramped fifth-floor studio at City Center on West Fifty-fifth Street. He started the work by asking them to improvise: “What would it be like if you were in the South and you were a black person and you were buying a book in a bookstore where blacks were not allowed?” he asked Robert Berdeen and Tanya Everett, who were playing the illicit lovers, Fyedka and Chava. Hal Prince had dropped in to see how things were going and was appalled when he heard the actors ad-libbing: “But what do you mean you won’t sell to me? Just because my skin color is different?” Prince couldn’t decide which was worse, the banality or the irrelevance of the drill. Robbins also had the actors enact an impromptu concentration camp scenario. He seated Berdeen at a writing table and told him he was a German soldier serving as a bureaucrat who had to process Everett, a Jewish woman. The actors gamely played a scene full of clichés, wondering all the while, “What the hell does all this have to do with czarist Russia?” But they didn’t dare complain. “Nobody ever complained to Jerry,” Prince affirmed. They were terrified of him.

Within a couple of days, Robbins abandoned the improvs, but not the effort to instill the actors with a sense of the oppression of the Pale. He wanted them to grasp, emotionally, what it meant to be the victim of discrimination, how it felt suddenly to lose everything on some authority’s whim and to have no recourse. Most of all, he said, he needed to “make a shtetl out of them.” Attempting to give them a visceral glimpse of traditional religious mores, Robbins adapted a famous scheme from his
West Side Story
rehearsals: as he had separated the actors playing Jets from those playing Sharks, even during lunch hours and rehearsal breaks, he now tried to impose gender segregation on those playing the Jews of Anatevka. The actors put up with the contrivance for less than a day. Even Robbins soon saw it was silly.

But even after abandoning the hokey improvs, Robbins did not immediately turn to Stein’s script. He didn’t want the actors on their feet until they had fully absorbed the pictures, paintings, and prose depictions of shtetl life that he piled onto a table in the rehearsal room: Chagall reproductions, the stills from
Through Tears
, mimeographed excerpts from
Life Is with People
—and for Pendleton, at least, the whole book. Robbins’s seriousness about the material—and his eyes always burning “like one of those figures you see on the cover of paperback editions of Dostoyevsky,” in Pendleton’s view—charged the rehearsal room with an electrifying sense of mission. This was different from the typical energy that juices the early, anything-is-possible stages of any Broadway show as actors begin to learn their parts, banter into relationships, and dream of long-running glory. Robbins didn’t seem to be chasing after a hit—not a hit for its own sake, in any case. He was on a quest and he was calling the cast aboard. If his demands were unusual, they were not unwelcome. “You didn’t do that kind of research for
Guys and Dolls
,” Merlin recognized. “This was exciting.”

Of the six actors playing the lovers, Merlin was the only one who was Jewish, and though she was familiar with Sholem-Aleichem, she knew next to nothing about Orthodox practice. She watched with eyes as wide as her colleagues’ when Robbins dispatched her and the others to wedding parties through Dvora Lapson. Everett and Migenes tried to blend in among the women at a grand affair at the Ansonia Hotel one hot night, conversing with vague “mm hmms” and silent nods for fear of being revealed as interlopers. Merlin and Pendleton played participant-observers at weddings in Williamsburg in their respective gendered tribes, allowing themselves to get lost in the crowds of hundreds. As a self-described “goy from Ohio,” Pendleton was amazed by everything: the groom stomping on a glass, the couple raised up in chairs, the hours of raucous dancing—and astonished more by the transference of the joyous ritual into a staged scene that he would eventually play night after night with genuine, brimming emotion.

Educating the cast mattered enormously to Robbins, but the improvisations and table talk served another function, too: as delaying tactics. Robbins was both the most prepared director anyone had ever worked with and also the most insecure, especially when it came to scene work. He simply didn’t know how to talk to actors. He’d blurt out Actors Studio words like “motivation” and “justification” and urge his cast to find their “inner reality,” but he couldn’t articulate any thoughts about the specific emotional lives of the characters. So he concentrated on the behavior. Obsessively.

But Robbins knew, as a week of rehearsal was flying by, that no matter how much he dreaded the process, he had to get the actors up. He started by staging the early scene where the daughters set the table for the Sabbath and Tzeitel and Motel end up having a private conversation in which she urges him to speak to her father about their desire to marry each other, while he helps her lay down a tablecloth and then add dishes and candlesticks. The action is in the dialogue, the pretext in the business. But Robbins could deal only with the business—and he spent several precious hours on it one afternoon. By Pendleton’s count, Robbins restaged the table setting twenty-five different ways: Put a plate down on this line. No, try it after that line. Maybe it would be better on the next line. Never mind, put the candlestick down instead. Not there, over two inches to the left. No. To the right. Switch places and try it again. Go faster. Try it slower. Let’s go back to the first way. And so on, well into the night. Merlin and Pendleton grasped that Robbins wanted them to arrive at behavior that seemed effortless, just part of the reality of their characters’ lives, but the wavering unnerved them. They had only just gotten started. Were they in for seven more weeks like this?

For the chorus, who joined the rehearsals in the third week, work ran more smoothly (at least at first). Robbins was at ease placing dancers on the stage and showing them their moves. And dancers, in turn, did not expect or need the coaxing and questioning that drew the best work from actors. They did as they were told, even when what Robbins told them deviated from any task they’d been given before. They weren’t there to sing and dance, he explained; they were there as vital members of a community. He required all the ensemble members to conjure up characters and write their biographies. Food vendors, hatmakers, cobblers, street cleaners, embroiderers, water carriers: the research materials described many communal roles they could choose from. He mandated that they describe their ages, professions, temperaments, and relationships to everyone else in the town. One night Robbins assembled the entire company to show them
Ghetto Pillow
and
Through Tears
. And a large group of the chorus, too, made a field trip to a Brooklyn wedding.

When Zero Mostel blasted into rehearsals after the second week he started ridiculing Robbins right away. “A couple of weddings in Williamsburg and that putz thinks he understands Orthodox Jews!” he’d snort with a roll of the eyes that seemed to trace the full circumference of the globe. Mostel vied for power with everything he had—comic charm, deep personal knowledge of
Yiddishkayt
, colossal talent, sheer volume and size—but always indirectly. Like an overgrown class clown, he shared his jibes in naughty asides to other actors. He never confronted Robbins directly, but he baited him. One day, every time Robbins turned his back, Mostel shook his ample behind at him. The next day he carried out the same routine, only this time he gave Robbins the finger. On another occasion, when Robbins insisted Mostel stop chomping on chewing gum during rehearsals, the actor stuck the gum behind his ear and popped it back into his mouth and began gnawing lustily when Robbins looked away. Once he tromped across the back of the stage with a bucket on his foot while Robbins was talking to other actors. Day after day he found a way to entertain his fellow cast members at the director’s expense. And most of the company—especially the younger actors—cheered him on with their laughter. The more one feared Robbins, it seemed, the more one appreciated Mostel’s pokes at his authority—and the prospect that Robbins feared Mostel.

Robbins silently endured Mostel’s shenanigans. How hard he had to work to keep from blowing his stack, no one knew, but he never exploded—not at Mostel, anyway. He could be curt with Stein, barely looking up when the writer passed him the new pages he demanded. He could be cutting with actors—he called Everett “fatso,” carped incessantly at a couple of chorus members (his “scapegoats,” as they were known), and drove Bea Arthur off the stage in tears with an insult. But with Mostel, Robbins stayed businesslike. And if his own acting was involved, Mostel responded in kind. When both were concentrating on a scene, their working relationship simmered, in Stein’s description, at “two degrees below hostile.” Robbins put as genial a spin on their antagonism as he could when questioned by a journalist shortly after the show opened. “Mostel likes to test you when you work together,” he said, removing some of the sting by generalizing with the second person. “There was a certain amount of squaring off at each other, but I think we both felt some good healthy respect beneath it all.”

Robbins said little to Mostel by way of direction and that was plenty since Mostel, endlessly inventive, needed little prodding. When they argued at all, it was over substance, and often over Jewish substance. “What are you doing?” Robbins demanded at one rehearsal as Mostel touched the doorpost of Tevye’s house and then brushed his fingers over his lips. Mostel offered the obvious answer: “I’m kissing the mezuzah.” Robbins responded bluntly, “Don’t do it again.” But Mostel insisted that Tevye, like the Orthodox Jews with whom the actor had grown up, would never neglect to make the customary gesture of devotion that acknowledges the case of sacred parchment affixed to doorways of Jewish homes. Robbins bristled. Mostel held firm and kissed the mezuzah again. Without raising his voice—in fact, the more emphatic he became, the more firmly and calmly he spoke—Robbins demanded that Mostel stop. The actor relented. And then, when he walked through Tevye’s doorway once more, he crossed himself. He’d made—and won—his point. The mezuzah kissing stayed in.

Less contentiously, Mostel deepened the Jewish texture of other elements of the show. When Bock and Harnick wrote “If I Were a Rich Man,” they had been inspired by a mother-daughter duo they’d heard singing a Hasidic song at a benefit for the Hebrew Actors’ Union. Bock went home with the song’s harmonies of thirds and sixths in his ears and wrote the music for “Rich Man” that very night. For lyrics, Harnick began with the hero’s fantasy in the first Tevye story in the Butwin volume, “The Bubble Bursts” (not otherwise dramatized in
Fiddler
), in which Tevye invests his entire savings with his speculating relative, who ends up squandering every cent. After handing over his “little hoard” in the story, Tevye has visions of “a large house with a tin roof right in the middle of the town,” with a yard “full of chickens and ducks and geese.” He sees his wife, Golde, as “a rich man’s wife, with a double chin,” who “strutted around like a peacock, giving herself airs and yelling at the servant girls.” Earlier in the story, he imagines being wealthy enough to purchase a seat by the synagogue’s eastern wall, build the synagogue a new roof, and take up other magnanimous works. Harnick shaped these fantasies to Bock’s melody (including a verse, eventually cut, about dispensing charity) and elaborated them into a more complex version of a Broadway musical standard, the so-called I Want song. Typically, such a number comes early in the show and lets the protagonist tell the audience what she or he desires—for instance, Eliza’s “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly?” in
My Fair Lady
or Rose’s assertive “Some People” in
Gypsy
. “Rich Man” does the same, but only up to a point.

Where characters usually reveal the goal that motivates them—the driving force of the action to follow—Tevye expresses a flight of fancy, poignant for two differing reasons. First, both he and the audience know that he won’t become wealthy and, anyway, that material riches don’t truly motivate his actions. And second, audience members (of any ethnicity “beyond the melting pot”) can tacitly recognize that they, the descendants of struggling ancestors, have fulfilled Tevye’s idle dream. “Rich Man” instantly took the place of an earlier song the team had written for Tevye, a charming but less telling number about his recalcitrant horse. (“Matchmaker” is also a complicating variation on an I Want song: through singing it, the girls come to understand what they don’t want. It replaced “To Marry for Love”—which pointed out how “love doesn’t put a turnip on the table”—as Bock and Harnick reshaped the score around the capacities of the cast. The melodically simpler waltz, “Matchmaker,” was easier for Everett and Merlin.)

Mostel could convey the ironic texture of “Rich Man” by heaving a heavy yet wistful sigh during the pauses built into the tune. No other actor could find as many layers and shades in an audible exhalation. Harnick gave him a chance to indulge in his hallmark faces and animal noises, too, by adding in lines about crossed eyes and the squawks made by those chicks and turkeys and geese.

But it was Mostel’s religious background that enabled him to give the number its fullest dimension. Bock and Harnick had been especially impressed by the sound of particular passages in the Hebrew Actors’ Union performance and wanted to capture it in their song: the duo had burbled beautiful nonsense syllables. Harnick found it impossible to render such phonemes in prose, so he wrote down, “digguh-digguh-deedle-daidle-dum.” When Bock and Harnick played the song for Mostel, he understood instantly what Harnick had been after and offered to “try something.” “If I were a rich man,” he began, and then, in place of the “digguh-digguh” phrase, he quietly emitted a soulful half-hummed, half-articulated incantation derived from the murmur of daily davening—a “dream-tasting spiral of Yiddish scat-syllables,” as the critic Richard Gilman later described this tender, primal sound of yearning itself.