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

by Alisa Solomon

  Through the three weeks in Washington, Robbins feverishly built and rehearsed the number, bringing nearly the entire company onstage for the sort of high-energy spectacle audiences would have expected from the choreographer of West Side Story. A villager singing about a pot begins to bang on it with a ladle, another thumps a spoon against a pan, a third plinks a cup with a fork. One by one, then in twos and threes, the villagers join in the merry rhythm making with various household utensils. Some hit a table, others stomp the floor in the syncopated beat that builds and builds, until the orchestra comes in with a jaunty melody and the whole town gets caught up in this celebration of simple means. Meanwhile, the individual townspeople—the performers making use of the biographies Robbins had required them to write—present themselves in dance. The fishmonger and hatmaker hawk their wares; the street sweeper twirls in off-center turns with his broom (a bit of choreography made possible by the skills of the man in the role, the dancer Sammy Bayes). The women in the corps, having had their opportunity to dance taken away when the Chava ballet was cut, now weave through the action in a pretty, simple-looking sequence built of complicated steps. Robbins insisted that the troupe retain their bearing as villagers. “Give me klutzy!” he admonished the men. The dancing accelerated into exuberant patterns—and performers, giving him plenty of klutzy, barreled into one another during rehearsals. One of them, John C. Attle, was knocked out in a collision one day. That hardly deterred Robbins. He worked the scene every day for a week.

  Meanwhile, Robbins was having his own head-on crashes with various company members. Rehearsing the new number, he snapped at Duane Bodin for moving too gracefully. Bodin took off his hat, flung it across the stage, and stormed off into the wings, where he filled out the quitting notice Equity rules require. Bock, Harnick, and the stage manager, Ruth Mitchell, found him sitting by the electric boards and calmed him down, reminding him they’d soon be in New York, where the show would be a smash. Bodin couldn’t believe that prediction in the moment, but the authors had a clearer external view. And they had seen the lines at the box office when they arrived in Washington. With government offices still closed for August vacation, the city couldn’t have been deader. The National had not signed on to any Theater Guild subscriptions for the summer. So the queues meant only one thing: word had gotten out from people who had seen the show in Detroit.

  As a stagestruck adolescent growing up in the capital whose summer-camp buddy was Joe Stein’s son Harry, the future theater critic Frank Rich was hanging out in the National with Harry during Fiddler’s tryout and saw the rapture with which the show was received from its first night there. Even for the town’s “unsophisticated audience and such a Gentile audience,” Fiddler was “electrifying.”

  The local critics thought so, too. They were invited for the third performance in Washington, and when reviews appeared on August 28—with the Post declaring, “Joy, there is such joy in Fiddler on the Roof,” and lauding it as neither a conventional musical nor a folk opera but as a new form “put together with freshness to make you feel and to make you laugh”—some of the creators’ anxiety began to lift. The following week a new, bolder thought entered their heads: the show might even succeed without the star.

  No one doubted how much Mostel had added to the development of Tevye’s character or the magnitude of his unique brilliance—Frank Rich, who went on to see hundreds of first-rate productions, calls Mostel’s Tevye “the greatest performance I have ever seen in the musical theater.… It was like Scofield in Lear.” But Mostel raised the unthinkable and unspeakable notion when he fell ill during a performance. After completing “If I Were a Rich Man” during a Wednesday matinee, he apologized to the audience and called out, “Ring down the curtain!” and then crumpled onto the stage. His understudy, Paul Lipson (who played the role of Avram, the bookseller), was hurriedly dressed in Tevye’s faded blue vest. A plaid kerchief was tied around his neck and a brown cap plonked on his head, while Prince walked out in front of the curtain to announce that Lipson would be continuing shortly. Though Lipson had substituted for Mostel in many blocking rehearsals, he had never actually rehearsed or acted the role. He didn’t know the lines and only vaguely recalled the songs, but Prince deemed canceling the performance out of the question. Lipson went out, with a surprising calm, and did what he could. The rest of the cast pulled him through, while the stage manager fed him lines from the wings when his approximations went too far off course.

  Mostel tried to go back into the show that evening, but one of his symptoms was laryngitis, so even if he could have mustered the energy for the three-hour performance—in which Tevye not only remains onstage most of the night but wrings himself out emotionally—he had no voice. He stayed out for several days. To the creators’ amazement, audiences did not complain. Not more than a few returned their tickets on hearing that the star was indisposed, and the rest rewarded Lipson with enormous ovations. The playwright Lonne Elder (observing the show’s development through a program for young theater artists) incredulously overheard people in the lobby saying they couldn’t imagine anyone better. True, Mostel’s ruthless talent likely could not be imagined by anyone who hadn’t seen it. Still, Lipson, with his lighter, sweeter Tevye, didn’t so much carry the show as demonstrate that the show could carry him—that is, the creators could entertain the thought that while Fiddler was transcendent with Mostel, it no longer required him. (Lipson eventually led touring productions of Fiddler and, later, revivals; when he died in 1996, he had played the role more than two thousand times.)

  Lipson’s success was not enough to satisfy Robbins. He was certainly not persuaded by Harry MacArthur’s concluding remark in the Star that “you may just not be able to find anything wrong with Fiddler on the Roof.” Robbins found plenty. He assembled the cast in the first couple of rows of the theater the morning after the reviews came out and sat on the lip of the stage enumerating the many faults of their show—while Mostel stalked upstage, wagging his behind and giving Robbins the finger.

  One day, the thing most wrong in Robbins’s estimation was Austin Pendleton. Robbins thought he had fallen into a rut as Motel and—worse than anyone else in the fatigued cast, which had started to coast once the favorable notices had appeared—was simply not working hard enough anymore. More than anything, Robbins hated complacency, and he was not going to allow anyone to slack off. “Last night during the wedding scene I had to leave the theater,” he told Pendleton right before a matinee performance. “I couldn’t bear the thought of that wonderful young woman being married to you.” And that, according to Pendleton, was “one of the milder things he said.” The actor refused to speak to Robbins for a week, and as the days went by, he felt his performances getting weaker as his confidence evaporated, until he became convinced that he would be fired—even as Bock and Harnick were working on a new song for him.

  Motel (Austin Pendleton) stands up to Tevye (Zero Mostel) and wins the hand of Tzeitel (Joanna Merlin).

  Convy had lobbied for “Now I Have Everything” to be taken away from Pendleton and given to him. The song’s sentiment fit Perchik better, he argued, and he didn’t have to point out who was the superior singer. Bock and Harnick had already begun working in Detroit on a replacement number for Motel. Harnick credits two inspirations: a note Robbins gave him and Bock in a meeting telling them that in response to winning Tzeitel, Motel needed, musically, an outburst of exuberant happiness, and a line Stein had written for Motel in that moment: “It’s a miracle!” Harnick fished in the nightstand of his hotel room for a Gideon Bible so he could brush up on some godly interventions and churned out lyrics for “Miracle of Miracles” fitting a pious young man with their references to David and Goliath, the wall in Jericho, and manna in the wilderness. Bock set Harnick’s words to buoyant music made to order for Pendleton: the melody and chordal harmonies were simpler than those of “Now I Have Everything” and the range was tighter. The songwriters rehearsed with Pendleton on the sly, and during the second week in Wa
shington they presented the number to Robbins. “Okay, show me,” the director said—the first words he’d spoken to Pendleton in days. “Let me see what your instincts are. Do whatever you want to do.” The dance music arranger, Betty Walberg, played the accompaniment on the piano and Pendleton sang and strode around a bit. “Play the music again,” Robbins told Walberg, and he improvised some simple movement: arms tracing a circle on their way to clapping hands, little skipping steps, a joyous sink to the knees. “Okay, now do those,” he told Pendleton, whose excitement swelled even though he was learning the gestures “through a cloud of rage.”

  Acquiring the number didn’t pull Pendleton out of his fury, though, and when Prince caught him backstage one Tuesday night, between his final exit and the curtain call, to invite him for a postshow drink, Pendleton thought he was about to be fired. At a table in the back of the bar at the Willard Hotel, where most of the cast was staying, Prince played what turned out to be one of the most important roles in Fiddler: the offstage good cop to Robbins’s tyrant. Prince put a double Jack Daniel’s in front of Pendleton, sat down, and leaned in. “What’s the problem, Austin? Is it Jerry? He’s being mean to you?” Prince asked, as Pendleton recalls. Then he added, sounding as conspiratorial as he could, “If I was directing and a producer ever did this to me, I would kill him, but I’m doing it. Don’t listen to Jerry. Fuck him. You have two shows tomorrow. Just go out and do them. Over this past week, we gave you ‘Miracle of Miracles,’ and you’re still out there depressed all the time. It’s stupid. It’s nothing. What do you want? You have one of the best songs in the show. Just don’t listen to him.”

  In the two shows the next day, Pendleton felt his vitality begin to come back, and then Robbins called the first rehearsal of “Wonder of Wonders” with the orchestra. With the whole cast sitting out in the house, Pendleton and Merlin took up their positions onstage and cued the lines leading up to the song. “It was a miracle!” Pendleton said, and the strings came in with their introductory arpeggios. Pendleton bounded through the song, with the skips and handclaps and a breathless gush in his singing. When the horns blared in for the big finish, Robbins vaulted onto the stage. “Fabulous!” he cried. “You’re great!” It was as if the weeklong skirmish had never happened. With only a few performances to go before the company moved on to New York, the song went in that night.

  Meanwhile, Mostel’s favorite song had been taken out. It came near the end of the show, after the eviction edict is delivered to Anatevka. “We’ve been waiting for the Messiah all our lives. Wouldn’t this be a good time for him to come?” Mendel asks. Tevye answers, singing about how the Messiah, when he does show up, will apologize for having taken so long. But the Jews weren’t easy to find, “over here a few and over there a few.” Still, he’d make everything work out. The song had to go, the authors understood, because at a moment of pathos the audience could not accept a wry comic number. Mostel hollered about how stupid Robbins had to be to reject it, but Mostel was not in the audience, Harnick noted. “From the stage he couldn’t see that in the context the song didn’t work.” True enough: Broadway musicals of the mid-1960s were not yet hospitable to tonally jarring juxtapositions that would become postmodern commonplaces later (in works by Kander and Ebb, for example).

  But “When Messiah Comes” didn’t fit for deeper reasons that make its ejection more than an amusing footnote to the creation of Fiddler. First, the lyrics refer obliquely to the Holocaust—“Would that be fair / If Messiah came, and there was no one there?”—and Fiddler was recalling the Old Country as the place left behind for the promise of America, not as the graveyard it became. The Messiah’s tuneful apologies clashed with Fiddler’s forward-looking way of looking back. More important, the song hammered home the central doctrinal difference between Christians and Jews—that hardly minor matter of whether or not the Messiah had actually shown up just yet. With its universalizing impulse—and the desire among midcentury Jewish spectators to blend in as a distinct but well-fitting member of the American mosaic—Fiddler couldn’t afford to draw excessive attention to this contrast. This was the one place the show threatened, indeed, to be “too Jewish,” and that, more than the out-of-place comic tone, is likely what caused the audience to feel, in Harnick’s estimation, “a little uncomfortable.” Robbins pulled the song.

  * * *

  Even as he kept working on the second-act Anatevka extravaganza, Robbins was quietly preparing what no one dreamed the show needed: another first-act dance number. The wedding celebration featured some embellished horas and then Perchik’s city dance. And the inn scene’s “L’Chaim,” with its athletic feats and comic contrast of Jewish and Russian styles, more than sufficed as a crowd pleaser. Why couldn’t Robbins leave well enough alone?

  Simple. He could not forget “Mr. Redbeard,” the man performing a flashen-tantz at the weddings he had visited as part of his fieldwork, and the men’s revelry in the homosocial Orthodox world, where, “without any constructing elements except a rudimentary rhythm and an avid impulse to express their communal joy—the men stomped, kicked, hit the floor and … tossed their arms about, flung their bodies around.” Back in March, when Robbins had written to the authors with the long list of changes he expected them to make to the script and score, he offered only one unqualified declaration of enthusiasm: “The wedding scene is going to be wonderful, I think.” Robbins knew an occasion for an elaborate production number when he saw one; less than two weeks from the Broadway debut, he had not yet finished turning the original story’s lean mention of the wedding into a showstopper.

  As a teenager performing in Maurice Schwartz’s production of Di brider ashkenazi, Robbins had seen up close how a staged wedding could combine ceremonial dignity and theatrical fireworks. Eight or nine times a week, for nearly six months, Robbins took part as a supernumerary in the Yiddish play’s marriage scene. Robbins doesn’t mention the solemn, lavishly staged nuptials (or anything else about the production) in his notes and letters on Fiddler, but Schwartz’s savvy showmanship could not have failed to make an impression. Beyond the spectacle, Fiddler’s wedding scene carried forward an impulse that had made Jewish weddings a staple on the Yiddish American stage: they permitted immigrant audiences to maintain, through a secular form, pleasurable ties to ritual practices they may have left behind. At a further remove—over the distance of time and historical catastrophe, as well as geography—the Jews in Fiddler’s audiences could lay claim to such a tie, even as the vigor of the dancing refuted the shame that may have been associated with it: the choreography debunked the common stereotype of weak, effeminate male Jews, so recently accused of having gone like sheep to the slaughter.

  Coming right in the middle of Fiddler, the wedding scene would be central in more ways than one. In thoroughly theatrical terms it makes the show’s essential gesture in a brilliant confluence of form and theme. It provides a fond and historically authentic representation of a traditional wedding ceremony—the chuppah, bride’s veil, ring placed on the index finger, stomped-on glass, and so on—and swathes it, musically, in an American sensibility. Visually, the scene goes (to borrow key words from the Jewish ceremony) according to the laws of Moses; aurally, it goes according to the heartstring tugs of Tin Pan Alley. Fittingly a waltz, the song Tevye and Golde sing over the action—the tune that had made Bock’s wife cry in their Westchester basement when he and Harnick first played it early in their work on the show—lilts with the thoroughly universal wistfulness of parents wondering, “When did she get to be a beauty, when did he grow to be so tall? Wasn’t it yesterday when they were small?” Robbins was tempted to cut the song. He couldn’t see how to stage it. What are Tevye and Golde doing? he needed to know. Bock and Harnick took turns stating the obvious: “Just have them sing it.” For once—and crucially—they prevailed.

  No one in the company knew about the late-night work sessions Robbins had conducted with Tommy Abbott and Betty Walberg during the weeks in Detroit, trying out choreographic ideas that
Abbott kept track of. And though sometimes Sandra Kazan arrived early to rehearsal and caught Robbins onstage, clad in khakis and a white T-shirt, silently sketching out moves with his body, she had no idea what they were for. So the male dancers could not fathom why they were suddenly called for a 10:00 a.m. rehearsal in the theater lobby in Washington a week into their run there. Many who did not have demanding parts in the “L’Chaim” dance had long figured that nothing taxing was being asked of them and had stopped keeping up a daily workout routine.