Where the Music Never Ends
“Tradition!” by Barbara Isenberg, available from St. Martin’s Press
The Norris Theatre presents “Fiddler on the Roof” for three weekends
Tomorrow evening, the musical “Fiddler on the Roof” opens at the Norris Theatre for 11 performances, a decent run by local standards. However, when the show opened on Broadway in 1964 it was an unstoppable phenomenon that didn’t step off the stage until nearly eight years later, the curtain having gone up and down 3,300 times. No other Broadway musical had lasted that long, and “Fiddler” would continue to hold its longevity record for over seven years.
Longevity, and ticket sales, are of course dubious indicators of quality, but “Fiddler on the Roof” not only had the right ingredients, it had the right personnel to put it together and bring it to life: librettist Joseph Stein, lyricist Sheldon Harnick, and composer Jerry Bock, plus choreographer and director Jerome Robbins who hammered it into shape.
“Fiddler on the Roof,” with its Marc Chagall-inspired title, is based on the short stories of Sholem Aleichem, who was famous in his time (just like most of us today) but then largely forgotten after his death in 1916. The work is set in Anatevka, a poor Russian village, or shtetl, and the year is 1905. Bad things are in store for the Jews in Russia and elsewhere, but they don’t know it yet. Stein, Harnick, Bock and Robbins were Jewish descendents of immigrants, and what they created was an homage to their Eastern European ancestors.
Global resonance
“Fiddler on the Roof” has been pried apart and dissected more times than all the frogs in your biology class, but there’s now a very readable book called “Tradition!” about the history of the show and its many incarnations, including the 1971 film directed by Norman Jewison. The author is Barbara Isenberg, and she’s a former staff reporter for the Los Angeles Times and the Wall Street Journal, with three other books to her credit, including “Conversations with Frank Gehry.”
She seemed like the right person to talk to about “Fiddler on the Roof.”
“The things that drew me to writing about it,” Isenberg says, “is that you have this very well crafted book of a musical, and you have these fabulous songs (which include “Sunrise, Sunset” and “Matchmaker, Matchmaker”), and then you have that plot that has something for everybody. There’s family and friction between generations, emigration, assimilation, all that kind of thing (including repression, prejudice, displacement, and… tradition). It’s a powerful story. So, if you’re going to spend that much time of your life on something, because it’s such a big commitment to write a book, you really want it to matter, and this really mattered.”
In her book, Isenberg quotes Richard Ticktin who estimated that “Fiddler on the Roof” had been performed in 130 countries, including Senegal. During our conversation, Isenberg also mentions that there have been 15 productions in Finland over the years. Clearly, the show has themes that resonate virtually everywhere.
John Massey as Tevye in the Norris Theatre production of “Fiddler on the Roof.” Photo courtesy the Norris Theatre
“Fiddler,” Isenberg says, is or at least was the most popular American musical in Japan.
“Joseph Stein, the librettist, always talked about his experience when he went to Japan for the first Asian production of the show. He said that the Japanese producer asked him, Do they understand the show in America? And then, when Stein said,‘Well, why’re you asking? the producer said Because it’s so Japanese. One of the people I interviewed told me that the biggest connective tissue between the Americans and the Japanese in terms of the story was the importance of the father, and the importance of doing what father says. This is something I didn’t know.”
Of course, if you’re a father with three daughters, you can count on having grey hair by the time you’re 30. That’s why Tevye, the village milkman, sings “Tradition!” at the start of the show — because tradition’s soon to go out the window. But on the other hand “tradition” is really what the show’s about, and its place in a rapidly changing world.
“The first song in the show was originally ‘We’ve Never Missed a Sabbath Yet,’” Isenberg says, “and that was one of the things that Robbins” asked the others to change because, he felt, it gave the impression that the audience was in for a small-scale show. Replacing it with “Tradition!” the work became a different creation altogether, and more global in its reach.
Honed to perfection
“We’ve Never Missed a Sabbath Yet” wasn’t the only number to fall by the wayside.
The songwriters cranked out about 50 songs, but only 16 of them made the final cut. There was one called “Dear Sweet Sewing Machine,” beloved by Harold Prince, the legendary producer. “Sheldon Harnick said that they always wondered why he didn’t use it,” Isenberg says. “It turned out it was because it had to do with the story of the eldest daughter, Tzeitel, who has just been married, and they were moving on to the second daughter (Hodel), and his feeling was you don’t put that song in because it takes you backwards instead of forward.”
That’s also an indication of how much and how hard Stein, Harnick, and Bock were prodded by Prince and by Robbins, especially Robbins (best known for choreographing “West Side Story”). The latter was a real taskmaster and people didn’t particularly like him, although they appreciated his genius. Isenberg, however, liked him for another reason:
“Jerome Robbins probably never saw a piece of paper that he didn’t like or keep,” she says, “so you could just sit there (among his archives, in New York) and see his notes to himself. He had to keep asking questions, and it was all on yellow-lined paper, and he’d write ‘Why? Why? Why?’ just like Tevye did. I found that rather exciting; it made it very much come alive for me, just to read his notes.”
Joseph Stein and Jerry Bock passed away in 2010, the year Isenberg began writing “Tradition!” Of the four principals, that left only Sheldon Harnick (who turns 92 in a few days; Robbins died in 1998). However, she’d interviewed Stein and Bock ten years earlier while on assignment for the Times. “It was wonderful then to write about ‘Fiddler,’” she notes in the book, “a groundbreaking musical with historic roots, contemporary resonance, and amusing, articulate people to relate its creative odyssey. Several years later, I remembered how much I’d enjoyed their many stories and, I thought, ‘That’s my next book.’”
“Tradition!” author Barbara Isenberg. Photo by Patricia Williams
The music never stops
Barbara Isenberg herself has never been in “Fiddler on the Roof,” nor did she see her first production of it until the L.A. Times assignment, but by now she must feel she’s lived with it her entire life, having seen it dozens of times, including a couple of months ago when she was in New York for the show’s 50th anniversary and fifth Broadway revival. So what’s her favorite moment?
“I’ll tell you what’s been standing out for me recently,” she says, “which is actually from the film: I’ve had to see the film a few times to talk about it. There’s a scene toward the end when all the people in the village have to leave their home, and they’re going across a bridge to get boats to get out of their village. All those pictures could have been on the front page of the paper yesterday because they look so exactly like the migrants now.
“When Norman Jewison made the film he had tears running down his face — and Norman Jewison is not Jewish despite his name.”
In the book, this makes for an amusing anecdote. Invited to meet several film executives who wanted him to direct the movie version of “Fiddler,” Jewison realized that everyone in the room except him was Jewish. Panic set in: “My God. They think I’m Jewish. What am I going to tell them?” Jewison, however, had already directed “In the Heat of the Night” and “The Thomas Crowne Affair,” among others. His ethnicity or religion wasn’t a concern for them.
The film was released in 1971, picked up three Academy Awards, and was nominated for five others.
On stage, the musical was still playing, not closing until July 2, 1972. In its first year it was nominated for ten Tony Awards, and among the nine that won were Best Musical and Best Actor in a Musical, the latter being Zero Mostel for his role as Tevye.
There are “enough former Tevyes of all ages and nationalities to populate a dozen shtetls,” Isenberg writes, and others of note have included Chaim Topol and Theodore Bikel. The current Broadway Tevye is Danny Burstein, and soon to join that august brotherhood is John Massey, when the curtain rises at the Norris Theatre.
Isenberg is returning to New York in a few days to help promote the audio version of “Tradition!” It’s narrated by Adam Grupper who plays the Rabbi, and is also Tevye’s understudy, on the Broadway stage. And so, first this way and then that, the music and the dancing, but also the heartbreak and sorrow, goes on and on, and not just with professional companies. Music Theatre International reckoned that between 2001 and 2011 they’d licensed some 2,500 community theater and 4,300 high school productions of the musical. People will be singing “To Life” and “If I Were A Rich Man” for years if not generations to come.
Fiddler on the Roof opens tomorrow, April 22, at the Norris Theatre, 27570 Norris Center Dr., Rolling Hills Estates, with performances Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 2 p.m., plus Saturday matinees at 2 p.m. on April 30 and May 7. Closes May 8. The show is directed by Randy Brenner, choreographed by Roger Castellano, and conducted by Sean Alexander Bart. Tickets, $48 to $58, less $10 for children 12 and under. (310) 544-0403 or go to palosverdesperformingarts.com.