Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof

by Alisa Solomon

  From his first reading of the script, Robbins warned against the show’s “being in love with the material.” Jumbled as his hasty handwritten notes were, his feelings were clear, visceral: the work was “not a ‘musical’” in any conventional sense and “must not be thought of as ‘Bway.’” It must avoid “making all the Jews & all the people understanding, philosophic & hearts of gold, wry of expression & compassionate to the point of nausea.” The creators would need to let an honest reckoning with the material dictate the appropriate theatrical form, one that would “keep the guts, flavor, humor, color, smell, sound, gesture & cadence of the life,” but in a way that would transcend “the realistic & the expected.” In a likely swipe at the Arnold Perl plays, Robbins wrote an instruction, “Only by striving & tenaciously struggling to find [the right style] will we be able to make this show rise above what has already been seen & played.”

  Right away, a visual image struck Robbins that came closest to what he had in mind: the paintings of Chagall. Robbins had long admired their poetic quality and, as a young dancer on tour with the Ballet Theater in 1942, he had met Chagall in Mexico, where the artist was supervising his set design for a Léonide Massine piece in the repertoire. A decade later, as a star choreographer discussing a possible production of Stravinsky’s Les Noces, Robbins rejected the idea of Chagall as its designer. As “wonderful” as he thought Chagall’s “fantasy and knowledge of Russian village life would be,” Robbins worried that such scenery would upstage his dancers. But now, another decade later, he could see how such imagery would enhance the spirit he wanted Tevye to convey.

  Perhaps the idea occurred to Robbins when he opened one of the volumes of Sholem-Aleichem’s writings he had acquired for his research, The Great Fair, the childhood autobiography published by Noonday Press in 1955 (in a translation by Sholem-Aleichem’s granddaughter, Tamara Kahana). The book featured a Chagall drawing as its frontispiece, a charming sketch of the young artist at an easel, painting the bespectacled, goateed author sitting for the portrait. It was as if Sholem-Aleichem’s playful prose self-portrait of his youth inspired Chagall’s own visual one. Chagall had talked about how he loved Sholem-Aleichem as a boy and climbed a fence to catch a glimpse of him when the author came through Vitebsk on a reading tour. Now he was paying homage. Robbins recognized the same complementarities the publishers at Noonday must have seen between the two artists when they commissioned the book’s frontispiece—what Robbins called the painter’s “fantasy & poetry” and the writer’s “wry irony, earthiness & criticism, detached observation.” He set out to unite them onstage.

  Chagall, too, had been squeezed too tightly in sentimentalizing American embraces but Robbins appreciated a wider, more worldly aspect of the work: “In his fantasy atmosphere, particulars; in his free & nonrealistic choice of colors & form, in his child’s fantasy evocations & artist’s sophistication & elegance, his evocations of the time life & richness of shtetl life becomes so very riveting, exciting, & stimulating. He has translated & elevated the material above the limited appeal of those who recognize its sources, & revealed & endeared it to all peoples everywhere. This is also our job.”

  Just as Hal Prince had anticipated, Robbins was looking for a way to make Tevye both particular and universal and one key was visual: combining earthly detail with spiritual fantasy. On September 4, Robbins cabled Chagall: “We would be very honored if you would consider designing the décor and costumes for a musical play based on the Sholem Aleichem stories that I will choreograph and direct this winter.” Within days, he had the reply: “MERCI VOTRE ATTENTION REGRETTE TROP OCCUPE POUR ACCEPTER FAIRE DECORS.” The painter was not simply making an excuse—he told friends how much he would have liked to work with Robbins had he not been so busy—but even without his direct involvement (and much to his annoyance), Chagall hovered over the production like one of his floating figures. One recurring image in Chagall’s work gave Robbins an early defining idea. The fiddler sawing out a sound track for the shtetl from his precarious rooftop post would guide the show like a magician: coming down to the stage and weaving into the action unseen by the characters, he would foreshadow their fate in movement and melody.

  Chagall or no Chagall, Prince kept his word. By mid-October he had joined Fred Coe as a producer.

  Meanwhile, the scenic designer Boris Aronson was waiting for a call from Robbins. A successful and confident artist, Aronson wasn’t the sort to sit by the phone, but he had contacted Robbins the very day the New York Times announced Robbins as the director of Tevye. Aronson had created the set and costumes for Robbins’s 1952 New York City Ballet piece, Ballade, a melancholy take on commedia dell’arte characters, set to music by Debussy, and had been eager to work with the mature Robbins on a full production. More important, he felt quite simply that Tevye was his show to do. And he was right. No other designer in New York knew as much about Sholem-Aleichem and Chagall as he did. No other designer anywhere. The call came—even before Robbins had received Chagall’s “regrette.”

  Aronson was born in 1900 (or so he said; some accounts correct the date to 1898) in Kiev, where his father was the grand rabbi. From early boyhood through his celebrated fifty-three-year career in New York theater, Aronson chafed against orthodoxy of all kinds: as a child, he boldly told his father he had no interest in religion; he resisted the Kiev art school’s rigid devotion to French realism; he fled the sharp turn toward what he called “rampant cultism” that Soviet art took after a thrilling period of postrevolutionary experimentation; and in New York he upended, sometimes literally, the predictable furniture of prevailing efforts to put a replica of “real life” on the stage. He believed that designers “must be reborn with each show,” creating the style that suits each project.

  If his style was never fixed, Aronson’s principles were set in the heady years right after the Russian Revolution and the First World War, when directors like Vsevolod Meyerhold were inventing radical new approaches to theater production. Aronson had been unconsciously waiting for such dynamism and abstraction since his adolescence. “By the time I was fourteen,” he always maintained, “I was past crying over The Cherry Orchard and no longer cared whether the three sisters arrived safely in Moscow.” In Kiev—which had become a center of the Jewish avant-garde only a dozen years after Sholem-Aleichem had cowered in a hotel there, hiding from pogroms—Aronson emerged as a key figure, helping to organize a show of Jewish artists and exhibiting his own work. He studied for at least two years in the Kiev workshop of Alexandra Exter, an acclaimed modernist painter who served as the chief set designer for the experimental director Alexander Tairov at his Moscow chamber theater, the Kamerny. Aronson assisted her on a 1920 production of Romeo and Juliet, long remembered for its multiple angular playing areas and its use of mirrors. Under her tutelage—and absorbing the new visual and movement vocabularies in Moscow, where he moved in 1921, calling it “the mecca of the theater world”—Aronson learned to think of set designing as a means of giving dynamic space to the actor, highlighting mood, fostering action, and creating a thing of beauty.

  He left Russia for America in 1923, anticipating the taming of the avant-garde into “home-sweet-home calendar art” and the coming political clampdown on creativity. On his way, he spent some eighteen months in Berlin, where he presented work in the first Western exhibit of Soviet art and wrote two books. The first, on “contemporary Jewish graphic art,” essentially argued that there really was no such thing because Jews, living all over the world, created in response to the conventions and tendencies of the cultures in which they resided. The other was a monograph about Chagall.

  Aronson became friendly with Chagall in Moscow and admired his wily Constructivist scenery and costumes for the Sholem-Aleichem plays and his panoramic murals that impishly depicted the people associated with the theater and their surroundings. Aronson especially appreciated the “tonal juiciness” and “coloric strength” that, much more than formal technique, gave Chagall’s work what Aronson called its
“weighty lightness.” (When he became a father in 1950, Aronson named his son Marc, after the artist.)

  When Aronson arrived in New York in November 1923—“with awkward baggage, crowded emotions, little money, and less English”—it wasn’t only the verbal language that led him to seek work in the Yiddish theater. Much to Aronson’s surprise, the Yiddish stage was the realm where Constructivism and other new approaches were most welcome: the mainstream American stage seemed stuck in static realism. Beginning with the avant-garde Unzer (“Our”) Theater in the Bronx, where he designed the fantastical subway car in which advertisements come to life in Osip Dymov’s comic critique of consumerism, Bronx Express, Aronson moved down to Second Avenue and then into the English-language theater. In addition to a long association with Harold Clurman and the Group Theater, there were many Broadway projects, including two that catapulted him into the limelight: The Crucible (1953) and The Diary of Anne Frank (1955).

  Robbins was impressed by the materials on Aronson’s past projects that he’d asked his assistants to gather for him. When he met the big, solemn man with the Russian accent on October 1, he was ready to offer him the post. But Hal Prince was unsure, and the writers, though they had no objection, were rooting for a designer they knew. Aronson had designed some recent flops, and while it was Garson Kanin’s noisy book for Do Re Mi that sank that show about a small-time wheeler-dealer in the music business, Aronson’s set—an enormous jukebox—was considered overwrought by as many critics as found it witty. Prince wanted to know that Aronson would not overdesign their delicate show.

  It so happened that the Storm King Art Center, not far from Robbins’s second home in the woods north of the city, was exhibiting a retrospective of Aronson’s paintings, collages, and scenic designs that fall. Robbins took the team up to see it. There, they were struck by the versatility and imagination in Aronson’s models and color renderings of diverse settings. For J.B. by Archibald MacLeish, who described the locale for his version of the Job legend as “a traveling circus which had been on the road of the world for a long time,” Aronson suspended a huge circus tent. For the Marxist parable at the ARTEF (Arbeter Teatr Farband), Jim Kooperkop, in which a nasty hypercapitalist sends a mechanized golem to quell the masses, Aronson built a clamorous, expressionistic metropolis.

  But it was his design for Maurice Schwartz’s 1929 production of Sholem-Aleichem’s Stempenyu—the play that first flopped with Boris Thomashefsky in 1907—that did most to win over the Tevye team. The main set piece was the exterior of a house that swiveled around to frame an indoor domestic space. Everyone loved the effect and wanted to use it (though Robbins regretted that it depended on a turntable). Maurice Schwartz had helped launch the careers of both Robbins and Aronson. Now, the Yiddish actor who was best remembered for his poignant portrayal in Tevye der milkhiker had indirectly sealed the deal between them for a new Tevye.

  Robbins filled out his design team with two artists with whom he’d done substantial work already. He was one of the lucky few who could count on Jean Rosenthal’s clearing space for him in her crowded calendar. The small, soft-spoken woman with a mop of short brown hair and big, round blue eyes that gave her a perpetual expression of wonder dominated the emerging field of lighting design from the late 1950s through her early death from cancer in 1969. She worked on nearly every concert Martha Graham ever presented as well as on myriad ballet and Broadway productions. For Robbins, she had provided the diffuse whites against a three-walled cyclorama for his Afternoon of a Faun and the sharp urban shafts cutting through the city of West Side Story, among many other projects. She was a perfect match for him. Perhaps it was her temperament, perhaps her education at Manumit, an experimental socialist boarding school upstate whose aim was to help children “to become men and women who can think for themselves, stand on their own two feet and fight injustice and oppression.” Rosenthal quipped that the most important thing she learned there “was how to walk into a chicken house without disturbing the chickens”: excellent preparation for a life in the theater. She was unflappable.

  Studying at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of Theater and then in the design program at the Yale Drama School, Rosenthal entered the profession just as the Depression began. At age twenty-one, she became the technician in charge of the Federal Theater Project’s wagon theaters playing in the city’s parks. As she worked her way through Orson Welles’s Mercury Theater and onto Broadway, she was self-conscious about the closed male world she was entering. She “used courtesy” and “cultivated a careful impersonality,” but mainly “my only real weapon … in the battle for acceptance was knowledge. I did know my stuff, and I knew that the technicians knew theirs.” More than that, she had an artistic vision. “Dancers live in light as fish live in water,” she’d say by way of explaining the role of the designer in creating their “aquarium.” And with dramas, “the play—the playwright’s play—comes first.”

  The industry’s burly stage electricians, who towered over her, famously adored Rosenthal—and without any condescension. They respected her great technical skill. Aronson, who resented her at first, ended up refusing to do a show without her if he could help it. He saw in her a unique and inspiring combination of “technician and dreamer.”

  “Bring six to half, darling,” she’d quietly command, requesting that a particular light dimmer be set at a certain intensity. “Thank you, honey.” When others would start storming and stomping with frustration during the long technical rehearsals that are the lighting designer’s special hell, she’d stay calm and cheerful. And while she loved the give and take with directors or choreographers over the look they wanted to achieve, she held her ground when she was asked to make a change that she considered wrong. She fought to serve the work, not to butt egos, so she had no trouble standing up to Robbins. And he was as besotted with her as the tech guys were. He lined her up on September 12.

  For costumes, he tapped Patricia Zipprodt, who had been designing for Broadway since the late 1950s. Born in Evanston, Illinois, in 1925, Zipprodt came to New York after graduating from Wellesley, filled with Beat Generation dreams of a bohemian career as a painter. Waitressing and ushering to cover the rent on her fifth-floor walkup and the fees for some art classes and wearing “all black and my hair in a bun,” she was “doing the 50s bit” to a T. Even the “floundering around and wondering what to do with myself” seemed to fit the ambition. Then she had a conversion experience. On the spot, at a performance of the New York City Ballet, she determined she’d devote herself to the stage: Karinska’s bejeweled costumes for Balanchine’s La Valse overwhelmed her with their sculptural use of tulle, the light glinting off beads, the shimmer of the overlapping hues. “I saw them as pure painting with fabric,” she said later. “It wasn’t like I was seeing yellow and green and red. It was very layered, color upon color, air and light filtering through it.” The effect “swept me away.” She talked her way into a scholarship at the Fashion Institute of Technology (which wasn’t inclined even to admit a student who already had a BA—Zipprodt’s was in sociology), and there she learned sewing and draping. She took a job making samples in the garment district.

  Then one day she stopped in her tracks on Fifth Avenue to gape at the “architecture” of camel-hair coats by the couturier Charles James on display in the windows of Lord & Taylor. She all but hounded James into letting her work for him, barraging him with letters and phone calls until he let her start at the bottom, picking up pins. Watching James for a year, she learned “how to create the structure for anything.”

  Zipprodt wanted to study design formally but couldn’t afford the programs she looked into at Yale and Carnegie Mellon. Borrowing just enough money to take time off from working to spend a year in the public library, she gave herself an intensive tutorial in the history of costume, from ancient Egyptian tunics to Balenciaga’s tunic dresses, so that she could pass the exam for the United Scenic Union, the requisite ticket into the profession. With a union card in hand, Zipprodt took j
obs as an assistant for various Broadway designers and passed up her first offer of a show of her own to assist the legendary Irene Sharaff (The King and I, West Side Story) on Happy Hunting (1956), a vacuous marriage comedy and comeback vehicle for Ethel Merman.

  Like Jean Rosenthal, Zipprodt had heeded a theatrical calling and methodically set out to learn her craft, without taking any shortcuts or expecting special favors. Such absolute resolve and such a scrupulous work ethic not only enabled both designers to fulfill their talents at a time when women had to prove their excellence simply to be considered acceptable, even in the relatively open realm of the theater, but also made both of them fitting collaborators for the exhaustive taskmaster Jerry Robbins. It didn’t take much to push them to give their all, and then some more—but he couldn’t push them around.

  Zipprodt was beginning to come into her own as a designer when Robbins saw her mix of urban duds, stark white masks, and flashy, power-flaunting court attire in The Blacks, Genet’s “clown show” of racial construction and illusion, which opened Off-Broadway in 1961 (and ran for more than three years). He hired her to design Oh Dad, Poor Dad and her costumes hit just the right skew between reality and absurdity, featuring such elements as arm-length black gloves for a mother in a peculiar state of mourning and a white safari suit for her lover. Just as important, Zipprodt was not cowed by Robbins. Not too much, anyway. For Oh Dad, she had made a big black evening dress for Jo Van Fleet to wear, with red flowers sewed onto its partition—very expensive inset roses for which she and Robbins had “gone over eight thousand reds to figure out one that would be right.” When Van Fleet put it on for dress rehearsal and suggested “it should have a little more blue in it,” Robbins, to Zipprodt’s astonishment, instantly acquiesced. Zipprodt confronted him on the way out of rehearsal and “shook him until his hat fell off. ‘How could you do this! We picked this! We spent hours!’” Robbins sent her a big box of tulips the next day by way of apology. She knew exactly what she was getting into when she agreed to join Tevye that fall.