Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof (36 page)

As usual in theater culture’s opening-night bonhomie, on September 22, break-a-leg telegrams poured in for the creators from colleagues in the field. Many hinted—even before the curtain went up that evening—how powerfully Jews, especially, would find connection in the show. In advance of the public, Jews in the Broadway community—that is to say, a high percentage of notable artists—cracked Jewish jokes or invoked religious phrases to wish their friends well, taking obvious pleasure in the opportunity to assert an identity that was seldom declared. “Good luck, but we demand equal time,” Robbins’s friend Stephen Sondheim wrote to him, signing, as if in a Groucho Marx role, as “Council of Roman Churches Monsignor Fulton J. Sonzheim Dealer.” Barbra Streisand, still running in
Funny Girl
, cabled, “Come to our show tonight. Relax. Have a piece of fruit.” Madeline Lee and Jack Gilford sent a wire to Bock, Harnick, and Stein promising that “the Talmud says tonight the world is a wedding. Good luck.” (And a postperformance congratulatory letter to Harnick from Harold Arlen came half in Yiddish—albeit transliterated into the Roman alphabet.)

The creators expressed a deepening Jewish identification through the gifts they exchanged. Opening-night presents typically reflect a show’s themes. Robbins gave beautiful art books—Chagall or Ben Shahn—to all the company members. (To Boris Aronson, who, after all, had written a book on Chagall, he gave a plant and a note of apology. And for the technical crew, he bought bottles of Scotch.) But for one another, the creators purchased ritual objects. Joe Stein, for instance, gave Harnick a mezuzah, the first the lyricist had ever owned. Harnick gave Robbins a shofar, the ram’s horn sounded on the High Holy Days. In addition to the sentimental meaning any token of a special event bears, such gifts came imbued with significance that reached far beyond the show’s own history and community. These weren’t just ethnic tchotchkes but items with sacred functions, bearing power to assert belonging as indelibly (if more privately) as tribal markings, should they ever be used as religiously intended. The troupe gave Robbins a white yarmulke emblazoned around its rim with the words “Fiddler on the Roof, September 22, 1964.” Each company member autographed it in ink. Mostel signed his last name only, and in Yiddish—
mem
-
alef
-
samekh
-
tet
-
lamed
—lording his superior knowledge over Robbins to the very end.

Assembled in the wings at 6:55 p.m., the company awaited the show’s first cue. Lights would come up on the fiddler, Gino Conforti. Strains of the violin would play and the orchestra would take up his tune. Tevye would walk out and address the audience. “How do we keep our balance?” he’d ask. “That I can tell you in one word.” Four oompah beats would blare from the string and rhythm sections in the pit, and the chorus would link those pinkies, take a collective breath, and strut out onto the stage as Tevye pronounced the key word: “Tradition!”

As the company waited, jitters kicked in. Just before the curtain went up, Mostel turned to the chorus and, eyes sparkling, opened his mouth in a twisted grin to reveal a red Life Saver stuck to his teeth. The gag broke the tension and, when the time came, the villagers strode out confidently for their song. By the end of the number, the company knew they would have gainful employment for a long time to come. They felt it across their backs, Modelski said, “like somebody tiptoeing with a little ice cube between your shoulder blades.”

Prince sat calmly in the house, watching the audience as much as the show. They laughed, they cried, of course. But beyond that Broadway cliché, Prince discerned an admixture of delight and emotional engagement that he didn’t know what to call. Spectators cooed as they clapped after “Tradition”; they “ahhed” during “Sabbath Prayer” as lights faded up behind the scrim to reveal Jewish families all over Anatevka—all over the world—lighting candles along with Golde and Tevye. He sensed their rapt, if silent, disquiet as Hodel went off to Siberia to join her revolutionary fiancé and as Chava eloped with Fyedka. He recognized the tingle of satisfaction that had become familiar from his successful openings of
Damn Yankees
,
West Side Story
, and
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum
. But something was different this time. Thanks to Robbins, he thought,
Fiddler
was entering some other realm. If the ovation that night lacked the foot stomping and shouting that had erupted in Washington and in the New York previews, Prince didn’t worry. He had never been so certain that a show would succeed.

Tevye (Zero Mostel) evicted, but heading to America.

Expecting much to celebrate, Prince had reserved the swank Rainbow Room some sixty floors above his office at Rockefeller Center for the opening-night party. Actors couldn’t wait to take off their heavy, tattered layers of woolen rags and put on smart suits and velvet dresses for the festivities. For the first time in almost four months, the company would not be assembling as Anatevkans. They would walk down the several rounded steps into the ballroom, to guests’ applause, simply and happily as their shiny selves. Robbins was startled by their transformation. He had forgotten that they had lives and realities beyond their onstage shtetl.

It was almost midnight by the time the party really got rolling because throngs congratulating Mostel at his dressing room delayed the star’s arrival. Tony Cabot’s Music Masters played to an empty dance floor for nearly an hour, but once Mostel made his entrance, the hully-gullying began, topped by what one observer called “a picturesque twist session that was not to be believed.” Kate Mostel high-kicked her way through a jitterbug with John C. Attle. Not to be outdone, her husband whirled around the floor with New York senator Jacob Javits in a raucous hora to a quick medley of the show’s music that Cabot inserted into the playlist of American standards.

Then word of the first review started seeping into the room like a noxious odor. In the
Herald Tribune
, Walter Kerr accused the creators of the one crime they felt exempt from: pandering. “I think it might be an altogether charming musical,” he chided, “if only the people of Anatevka did not pause every now and again to give their regards to Broadway and their remembrances to Herald Square.” Prince took the mic and told the crowd, “This is the biggest hit any of us will ever have gotten near, so party on.” But he was too late. Bock and Harnick had left and much of the cast was filing out, too. Pendleton, for one, “didn’t want to see Jerry after he read the reviews” and figured his colleagues shared the thought. “We felt maybe we’d let him down.” Other reviews turned out far more favorable—in the
New York Times
Howard Taubman declared the show “an integrated achievement of uncommon quality”—but Prince would not have been surprised by the next day’s box office lines around the block even without these notices. Harnick’s hunch had proved right. Decades before the massive marketing campaigns calculated to render new shows “critic-proof,” the reviews hardly mattered. Roberta Senn wrote to her parents in Chicago with a report on the opening (the twenty-two-year-old found the party “too glamorous to be fun”) and urged them to let her know right away when they wanted to come in to see it: “We are sold out until December.”

Harnick marveled: “There was something in this show that people wanted to see.”

*   *   *

By February, Prince was sending distributions to investors. In June, no one was surprised that
Fiddler
swept the Tony Awards, winning as Best Musical as well as for book, score, direction, choreography, costumes, production, and performances by Mostel and Karnilova. (Mostel famously accepted his statue noting that, since no one else from the show who had been on the podium that night had bothered to thank him, he would thank himself; then he carried on a bit in Yiddish. He left the production in August, month after month of eight shows a week too much for his injured leg—and his contract renewal demands too much for Prince.)

But the “something” Harnick recognized was more than an affecting story, spectacular choreography, good songs, thorough and beautiful designs, and one of the most brilliant performances ever. In fact,
Fiddler
did not represent the greatest work of its creative team.
She Loves Me
boasts a superior score,
West Side Story
, more electrifying dances. The greater sum that
Fiddler
’s parts added up to went beyond the soul-stirring, radiant enchantments of even the best Broadway musicals.

Fiddler
gave Gentile post-McCarthy America—and the world—the Jews it could, and wanted to, love. It gave Jews nothing less than a publicly touted touchstone for authenticity. And it did both while capturing the sensibility—the anxiety—of a tumultuous American moment and making reassuring sense of it.

Fiddler
did so formally as well as thematically. In this period of transformation in the American theater—and of America in general—one key to
Fiddler
’s success was its status as a transitional work. The era of Rodgers and Hammerstein had ended with
The Sound of Music
in 1959; Stephen Sondheim’s groundbreaking concept musical,
Company
, would debut in 1970. As deftly as its title character teetering on the roof,
Fiddler
balanced right on the pivot point between them. Without bidding adieu to the spectacular, sentimental, and storybook satisfactions that the old form provided (romances, explosive dance numbers) but gesturing toward the melancholy and irresolution that were to come (the pogrom and expulsion),
Fiddler
was formally familiar enough not to frighten or disorient audiences, and adventurous enough to excite them. It was a work of cultural adaptation and transformation as well as a work about such change.

In prompting audiences to identify with Tevye’s struggle with change—on personal and communal levels—as upheaval bringing loss as well as gain, the show spoke to anyone who had experienced the conflict of leaving behind something profoundly prized, or at least deeply familiar.

Within a decade,
Fiddler
had played in two dozen countries—among them, Australia, France, Germany, Holland, Japan, Mexico, Yugoslavia, and even South Africa. (After a protracted battle against a company that would have performed for segregated audiences without the authors’ permission, the authors agreed to an alternative production whose proceeds—as its program prominently declared—would benefit an organization of black artists.) Joe Stein loved to tell that at rehearsals in Tokyo that he attended, a local producer asked him how the show could have been a hit in America when it was “so Japanese.” By 1971—just before the film version was released, spreading
Fiddler
’s reach far wider—there had been fifteen productions in Finland alone.

At home, Gentiles were gushing over its ethnic familiarity. In just one of many such congratulatory notes to the creators from friends and colleagues, the music arranger Bobby Dolan praised Robbins for expressing universality through particularity, for “as you must know, these Jewish people are equally Irish.”

The response that came from the Jewish community was breathtaking. Today, after
Seinfeld
and Sarah Silverman—and, more apt, decades after the launch of the annual Chabad telethon, with its Hasidim frolicking and fund-raising on commercial TV—it’s hard to imagine just how thrilled audiences could have been to see men wearing
tzitzis
and women lighting Sabbath candles on a Broadway stage, and not as a joke. Even the Yiddish press rejoiced. The conservative
Der Tog Morgen Zhurnal
couldn’t help finding virtues in the “Broadwayized” Tevye;
The Forverts
declared
Fiddler
“Jewish America’s most beautiful monument to Sholem-Aleichem.” For those who harbored shame in the Old World ways of their parents or grandparents, as well as the guilt that comes barking after such patricidal feelings, the affectionate portrait of Anatevka seemed to wash humiliation away. Robbins had staged his own passage from Jewish repudiation to conciliatory embrace and perhaps spoke most directly to those who had heeded the same self-abnegating call. From that heritage that had been “laid open” for him, that he had “stored away—deep and away,”

from all of that I closed my self off—dismissed, rejected & tore out of me. Blacked it out—forgot it & threw out (i was sure). Wash yourself clean of it—bathe & scrub; change your clothes, cut your hair, alter your walk, your talk, your handwriting, recast your future, remold your life, your friends, your taste; convert convert! No, don’t adopt the Christian religion—do not go that far; but leave behind forever the Jew part. I became Jerry Robbins.

Making
Fiddler
, Robbins reclaimed that discarded part of himself and, in so doing, returned it, in a glittering package, to those audience members who also had left it behind. “
Fiddler
was a glory for my father,” he wrote in the same set of notes toward an autobiography, “a celebration of & for him.” At the end of the opening-night performance, Harry came backstage and found the director in the dimly lit wings. “How did you know all that?” he asked. He threw his arms around his son and wept.