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.
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 slippe
d 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.
Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof Page 22