Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof (30 page)

Meanwhile, Harnick worried that the song took too serious a turn. He proposed cutting the verse in which Tevye dreams of the synagogue seat by the eastern wall and imagines how he’d “discuss the holy books with the learned men seven hours every day. / That would be the sweetest thing of all.” Mostel protested. “If you change that,” he boomed, “you don’t understand this man.” Harnick yielded, and said later, “He saved me from myself.”

For all his goofing around at rehearsals, Mostel could switch instantly into a state of intense focus on the work. Other actors watched him in awe, spellbound by his freedom and self-confidence as a performer. He would try anything and never doubted himself. “He can do the same thing four ways,” Stein remarked, “and they all seem right.”

He became so totally absorbed in his character that, like a guru walking on hot coals, he shut down the distress signals being sent to his brain. In 1960, Mostel had exited a Manhattan bus on a January night and slipped on the icy pavement. The bus ran him over, crushing and mangling his left leg. After five months in the hospital and four complicated operations, he was spared the amputation that had originally been recommended, but he lived in a state of severe, perpetual pain and walked with a cane—except onstage. The moment he came off, the agony rushed in. Tanya Everett or his dresser, Howard Rodney, would bring him swaths of cloth that had been drenched in water and put in a freezer, to apply to his leg after a performance.

Mostel’s injury made his unlikely gracefulness all the more astounding. At a bulky 230 pounds when he played Tevye, he treaded lightly and could even appear dainty. Robbins compared him to “a bagful of water [that] has gotten up and started to float around.” For a man without formal movement training, he had exceptional control. Robbins exploited it in the first big number he staged, “L’Chaim,” the celebration at the inn after Tevye assents to Lazar Wolf’s proposal to marry Tzeitel. Working on this scene had to be one of the occasions when the friction between Mostel and Robbins was superseded by their brilliance, each man recognizing—and feeding—the creativity of the other.

To Bock and Harnick, “L’Chaim” was simply a song. But Robbins saw much more in it: an opportunity for bringing together Russians and Jews, exploring their long-standing animosity and opening up, then closing, the possibility of rapport—all through dance. He divided the male corps into the two groups, putting, as one of them remembered, “the butchest dancers in the Jewish roles.” Despite looking tougher, however, those playing Jews were told to keep their movement small and contained at first, to express a physical submissiveness when Russians are around. “Keep it all inside,” Robbins instructed, as he showed them their celebratory steps: they hold up their arms, elbows bent at right angles, and clasp hands with the men on either side, and, thus lined up, snake through the inn. When Russians unexpectedly leap into the revelry, they slap their feet in a set of rhythmic steps, perform jumping splits, vault over the furniture, kick their legs, and generally dash about. They are the masters of the universe, Robbins explained, and their boisterousness, though friendly in this instance, threatens the Jews.

The climax of the scene comes when, in the frenzy, a Russian bumps into Tevye. Everything pauses as the two glare at each other and, without moving, approach the precipice of a physical fight. Then the Russian—played by Lorenzo Bianco—thrusts out a hand, inviting Tevye to dance with him. Here, Mostel’s dexterity allowed him to be funny and piteous in a single moment and small gesture: slowly, he moves his pinky into Bianco’s hand, expressing with just a finger Tevye’s eagerness to trust his neighbor as well as his apprehension. In the instant their hands connect, Bianco flies into a toe-and-heel-tapping caper, and Mostel seems as if he will take flight. At half Mostel’s girth, Bianco pulls him through the dance like a weightless kite and the men from both factions join in, their clashing styles meshing in the celebration not only of the engagement but now also of the rare and temporary suspension of hostilities. In a line, the Jews take small sideways steps and the Russians come bursting through between them, scooting along the floor on their knees and swooping in all directions. The number was a triumph for Robbins and for Mostel. The first time Prince saw it in rehearsal, he figured it wouldn’t take long before he’d be sending checks to investors.

But as the work continued, Robbins didn’t stage any more dancing. Six weeks of rehearsal had gone by and the male dancers hadn’t learned anything else; the women hadn’t done anything at all. Robbins had wangled the unusually long eight-week rehearsal period by insisting he needed four as director of the actors and four as choreographer. So where were the rest of the dances? “Oh, I’ll do them,” Robbins said, with a nonchalant wave. Prince fumed quietly.

The members of the cast, too—especially the women—were beginning to wonder. They had learned and practiced the prologue’s song, “Tradition,” but as they entered their seventh week of rehearsals and the departure date for Detroit neared, Robbins still hadn’t staged it. Given how tediously they’d labored over the simplest scenes, actors were getting nervous. At the rate Robbins was going, they figured he’d need at least a few days to put the opening number on its feet. And it wasn’t going to be fun.

One day toward the end of the last week in New York, after the lunch break, Robbins clapped his hands and called the full chorus onto the stage (meanwhile, the principals were sent off to the lounge to work on their scenes with assistant director Richard Altman). He put the group in a line—young Roberta Senn at the lead—and told them to hold their arms up at a 90-degree angle and to link pinkies with the person on either side of them. His dance assistant, Tommy Abbott, helped show them what to do: maintaining their line, walk in from the stage-left wing, stepping on the downbeat of a four count, knees pulsing lightly, and circle the stage. Nothing could have been simpler. The variations flowed out of Robbins with an effortlessness that seemed casual: some performers were to shift their head position from left to right every four beats, some to turn around entirely. When the circle was complete, with all twenty-four performers onstage, the two positioned downstage center were to let go of each other’s hands and lead their lines in opposite directions, heading upstage, walking underneath hand bridges formed by pairs of actors and coming to rest in two semicircles.

“You’re proud,” Robbins told them. “Tradition!”

Robbins gave each group with a verse in the song—the papas, mamas, sons, and daughters—a series of defining movements to perform as they came downstage, in turn, to sing about their lives and obligations. Papas slap their chests with their right hands, point an index finger skyward, turn around with arms raised at 90 degrees, palms toward their faces, snapping their fingers. Mamas fold their hands on their stomachs, wipe their brows with the back of the right hand and thrust the hand toward the floor, walk toward the audience rolling their hands in a paddle-wheel motion. Robbins presented the sons with a little skipping crossover step and incorporated into their sequence a pensive hand to the cheek, a shrug, and the rhythmic swaying—the
shukhel
—of men’s prayer. For the daughters, he assembled a couple of curtsies, some swaying motions of the arms, a series of side steps with a foot flexed and heel scuffing the floor: the moves combined an image of deference with a hint of mischief.

In less than two hours, the villagers learned their steps. “You’re proud,” Robbins told them as they got set to run the whole sequence from the top, this time with music. “You’re very proud of your tradition.” They straightened their spines. “All right,” said Robbins. “Here ya go.” Mostel picked up his opening speech toward the end: “And how do we keep our balance? That I can tell you in one word.” The rehearsal pianist hit the opening chords, Mostel stomped his foot in time, threw his arms upward, and cried, “Tradition!” Out came the line of villagers, chins up, chests forward, spiraling onto the stage as they sang. From the house, Austin Pendleton (who wasn’t in the number) was watching and what he saw forced him to change his own posture: he sat up and leaned forward with attention. Right away he grasped how tremendous the staging was. The steps were not complicated but the patterns were rich and meaningful: the cohesiveness of the circle, the abstracted gestures that distinguished each family member not only functionally but temperamentally, the vertical motions that connected the people to their God and to history. Most of all, Pendleton recognized that the number set forth the show’s high stakes. “When the tradition gets repeatedly challenged in the course of the play,” he marveled, “you’d know it’s something huge. Jerry wanted the audience to feel that instantly. Now they would.”

The performers felt it, too. A couple of hours earlier, they had been a cluster of theater gypsies, frayed and fearful, awaiting instruction from a man who could turn tyrant at the drop of a cue. Now, onstage at least, they were a community, elevated by the pride in their way of life. The scene wasn’t completely finished that day. The song “accumulated” over time, as Jerry Bock later remarked. “It just kept rolling to a bigger moment.” And Joe Stein would continue to weave more strands into the prologue “like a tapestry.” He kept writing new lines—“a piece of dialogue here to introduce the rabbi, another to introduce Yente, others to introduce various other characters.” Bock was adding layers to the music: toward the end of the song, all four separate groups sing their parts simultaneously in a folkish fugue that produces some surprising dissonant clashes that hint at the familial discord to come.

Even the unfussy staging would see some adjustments. Senn would have to relinquish her lead place in line to the dancer Mitch Thomas, and Peff Modelski would have to walk backward in her spot. Everyone’s positioning and timing would have to be recalibrated once the floor contained an orbiting turntable. But the very first time through, on that July afternoon, they knew that Robbins had nailed the curtain raiser. The company now had an inkling that whatever trials were to come over the next eight weeks in Detroit and Washington, they could very well be worth it. The troupe would have to dig deep sometimes to remember that.

*   *   *

For now, everyone’s attention was fixed on preparations for the road. On July 18, actors dressed for the standard costume parade, a one-by-one walk across a stage that would allow Robbins to see what Zipprodt had made of the sketches and the collection of swatches that he’d been responding to for months. Again and again, Robbins had reminded her that the people of Anatevka “are not ‘characters’ but laborers, workmen, artisans, and the effect of their work on their clothes and bodies must be apparent.” That meant more than putting the butcher Lazar Wolf in a bloodstained apron or draping a tape measure over the shoulders of Motel the tailor, Zipprodt knew better than anyone. She labored to make the clothes look aged and worn without seeming fake and, just as important, without losing texture under theatrical lighting. Through trial and error, she invented a technique of dyeing, painting, and rubbing fabrics with tools like vegetable graters, wood rasps, and steel wool to create the look she wanted. Perchik’s burnt-orange pants began as a pleasant rust color. Zipprodt dyed them brown, then scraped away at the material, as if laundering the pants against a washboard, abrading the added color so that the rust peeped through irregularly. Many pieces underwent what she called a “bleach and overdye” process: first their original color was faded down in a chlorine bath and then they were dipped in a dye of a compatible hue. Even the
tzitzis
—the fringes religious Jewish men wear under their clothing—were tinted and treated for the sake of authenticity.

From underwear to overcoats, Zipprodt used natural fibers that would have been available in 1905 for the 165 costumes she made: silks and cottons for the shells and pink knee-length bloomers, belted calf-length shifts, and striped camisoles with skirts that the three sisters wear as they change into their Sabbath clothes and sing “Matchmaker”; various grades of wools for the buttoned cloaks, patterned shawls, and heavy jackets the Anatevkans bundle into after the order of expulsion. It may have been July in New York, but when the play ends it’s winter in Anatevka. There was no scrimping on the heavy layers.

As the actors walked around in the clothes and saw their Anatevkan neighbors in full attire for the first time, their world started to come to life in a newly thick, visual way. The cast had yet to work with Aronson’s set pieces, which were already packed into shipping crates and on their way to Detroit. The costumes would join them that night in the ten trailers heading west at the outrageous cost of $9,000. When Prince signed up the trucking company, he figured they’d need six trailers. “It never occurred to me that we would have one of the biggest monsters ever sent out!”

Robbins knew how much work he’d have to do in Detroit. Days before departure, Robbins told his assistant to ask his doctor for eight weeks’ worth of “those very mild pickups with SKF printed on back” (no doubt, Smith Kline French’s readily dispensed Dexedrine). It would be the work of clarifying, fine-tuning, trimming, and shaping—the kind that could be harder than a major overhaul.