Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof (28 page)

All three plays dealt with the question of an individual’s responsibility to the claims of history—whether the ghost of his father calling Hamlet to action, racist violence illuminating the moral crisis of white America in
Mister Charlie
, or the pope choosing silence in the face of cataclysm—and did so with a crescendoing demand for civil rights and sexual liberation gathering outside the walls of the theaters. This was the tide Robbins wanted to catch, at least to the extent possible in a musical form. As for
Cafe Crown
, before its official opening on April 17 the producers posted a closing notice; its curtain came down for the last time on the nineteenth. Robbins could not have invented a clearer object lesson.

*   *   *

Robbins was slowly assembling the rest of his cast. To the amazement of his colleagues—and even surprising himself—he offered the role of Golde, Tevye’s down-to-earth wife, to his dance colleague and Ballets: USA member Maria Karnilova. Slender and sturdy, with high cheekbones and smiling eyes, she projected the motherly groundedness the character needed. She had never carried a major Broadway role before, but under Robbins’s direction she had bumped to great acclaim in
Gypsy
as the stripper Tessie Tura, advising, “If you wanna grind it, wait till you’ve refined it,” in the song “You Gotta Get a Gimmick.” She was a friend, a known quantity to Robbins. He knew that physically she could do anything and that she was a reliable, low-maintenance company member. And, no small thing, perhaps an ally in what was sure to be an endless battle with Mostel.

Bea Arthur, a more experienced Broadway actor, had auditioned well for that part—Harnick thought she was “great” and Stein knew her from the days she had understudied the ingenue in
Plain and Fancy
—but she killed her chances to play Golde when she read the nosy, nattering role of Yente the matchmaker. She was the first to make the authors laugh and they lobbied hard for casting her, though Robbins had his doubts: he found her too American, he said, without elaborating. Perhaps he was commenting more on the character herself. Stein had created Yente, transforming the male matchmaker Efrayim, who makes a brief appearance in Sholem-Aleichem’s “Tevye Leaves for the Land of Israel,” into a larger, familiar type: the garrulous busybody, obliviously revealing her peccadilloes through comic business (stuffing extra cakes into her purse when she visits Golde) and ironically contradictory remarks (“Other women enjoy complaining, but not Yente,” she crows, after complaining about her late husband). Such jokey devices are as old as Aristophanes, but when combined with her rapid-fire speech rhythms, her singsong cadences, her tendency to ask and answer her own questions and, more generally, to speak for her supposed interlocutors, Yente’s humor seemed to be thickly cut with borscht. It was an American Jewish sensibility that poured forth from Yente when she was played as written, and it made Robbins nervous. (By calling her Yente, Stein made one of his book’s few concessions to the Yiddish language, which the authors had vowed to avoid; it was too associated with cheap plays for laughs, they believed. A common enough name, Yente had come to mean meddlesome gossipmonger, and that was one old-biddy yuk Stein was willing to exploit.) All the same, no one else who’d auditioned for the role made Yente come alive at all, and, recognizing Bea Arthur’s skill as a character actor and comedian, Robbins gave her the part.

The rest of the supporting characters posed less daunting problems—other than Robbins’s indecisiveness. But eventually he pieced the company together with performers both long known and totally new to him. He tapped his first dancing teacher, Gluck Sandor—the one who had snagged a spot for him in the Maurice Schwartz production of
Di brider ashkenazi
back in 1937—for the part of the rabbi. He took a chance on young Leonard Frey (whom he’d seen in a play in Spoleto), as the rabbi’s son, Mendel. It wasn’t until the end of April, though, that he found a Perchik and a Hodel to replace Anne Fielding: two fine singers, Bert Convy (even though Robbins didn’t want Perchik to be “too handsome”) and Julia Migenes (who came to auditions while still playing Maria in a short-term revival of
West Side Story
).

Ads in trade magazines announced open calls for singers and dancers—the villagers of Anatevka—and they arrived by the score through the last week of May, up to a few days before the first rehearsal. Trying to stand out from the crowd, some came dressed in what they imagined the people of the play would wear. (Roberta Senn, for one, attending her first-ever professional audition, donned a yellow skirt and red leather boots and plaited her dark hair into two thick braids.) Men had a chance to express themselves in improvisations that concluded long days of quickly learning and presenting movement sequences. “The Russians are coming and they’re strong and they’re armed and they’re going to kick you out,” Robbins told one group, setting up a scenario. “You try to placate them, but it doesn’t work. Show me.” Robbins saw some of these chorus candidates, too, as many as ten or twelve times. He was searching for performers who could dance and sing well enough to look like they weren’t doing it too well: these were poor Jewish folk in the Russian Pale, he kept telling them. They shouldn’t sell it onstage. They should come across as regular, untutored dancers when they whirled around at a wedding. Needing townsfolk of all ages, he ended up hiring a number of novices as well as old hands, all with strong training in ballet or modern dance. Hal Prince took a look at the women who made it through the final cuts in their ankle-length skirts and babushkas and was momentarily stunned. “You’ve never seen such a motley crew of chorus girls in your life,” he thought, and then shook off the apprehension, reminding himself that he hadn’t gone into showbiz to be Florenz Ziegfeld. Robbins knew what he was doing and Prince didn’t doubt him for a moment.

But Robbins doubted himself. With the cast finally set and rehearsals slated to begin on June 1, he sent Prince word through his representative that they’d have to delay the production again because he needed more time to prepare. Prince fired off a telegram: “Don’t ever ask me to talk to your lawyer,” it concluded, “unless you never want to work with me again. Love, Hal.” Robbins retorted by cable: “Then don’t give me rehearsal dates via my assistant. Love, Jerry.” Prince coolly replied that Robbins could do as he wished as long as he reimbursed him for the $55,000 he’d already laid out for the production. He warned that he’d sue for it if necessary. When the men finally spoke to each other, Robbins cried. He wasn’t ready, he protested. How could Prince betray him so? Prince didn’t try to relieve Robbins’s panic with strokes of reassurance; he just held to his threat. That was the way to push Robbins over the edge. One good shove was all he needed. Within a few days, things between them were back to normal: Prince was calling Robbins again with the reminders to take care of one thing or another. Most urgent since their contretemps was approving the final plans for Aronson’s turntable. Prince urged Robbins to go see the designer right away so his crew could have the go-ahead to start building it. Otherwise, Prince warned, they’d go into overtime. With the threat of being docked $55,000 less than a week old, Robbins hurried to see the drawings.

One more issue needed resolving before rehearsals started: what was the show going to be called? The authors and Prince had batted around ideas for months and they all agreed only that “Tevye” was too bland and too vague. “A Village Story,” “To Life,” “Listen to the Fiddle,” “Make a Circle,” “Once There Was a Town”: their list kept growing, but nothing zinged. “To Light a Candle,” “My Village,” “Three Brides and a Man,” “A Village Tune,” “Homemade Wine,” “Not So Long Ago,” dozens more. The authors liked “Where Poppa Came From,” but Prince preferred a name that suggested that the show was a musical. In late March, he called the question. “Anything on the list will do,” Stein told him. “I don’t care anymore.” Prince scanned the list and made the choice. “But it doesn’t mean anything,” Stein said. Prince shrugged and replied, “Well, that’s the title.”
Fiddler on the Roof
went into rehearsal on June 1.

CHAPTER
5

R
AISING
THE
R
OOF

O
n the eve of
Fiddler
’s rehearsals, an article came out in
Look
, the biweekly general interest magazine—then enjoying a circulation of 7.5 million—that carried a clue to the show’s coming triumph. Titled “The Vanishing American Jew,” the story described how the Jewish community’s very success in America could be spelling its doom. It quoted alarmed rabbis, communal leaders, and sociologists responding to a rise in mixed-faith marriages among Jews and a parallel decline in birthrates and synagogue attendance. The president of the New York Board of Rabbis warned that “the vitality and the entire future of the Jewish people would be jeopardized” if young people continued to marry out of the faith. Despite the splash made by the book
Beyond the Melting Pot
, published only nine months earlier and arguing for the enduring power of ethnic identity among immigrant groups over generations, the sources in
Look
’s story apocalyptically argued that the increasing acceptance of Jews by others, and the thorough Jewish sense of belonging in America, could eventually lead to the disappearance of the people: annihilation by love, not hate.

Anxiety about the Jewish future had been brewing in communal circles for months before percolating up into a mass publication like
Look
. In October, the 1963 edition of the annual compendium
The American Jewish Year Book
came out, reporting in its lead article that third-generation Jews were twelve times more likely than the first generation to marry non-Jews. The article cited two major studies, including one that found that the “children of at least 70 percent of mixed families are lost to the Jewish group.” Equally perturbing to its authors, the
Year Book
noted that Jews who went to college were more than twice as likely to choose non-Jewish spouses as those who did not. Could the long-revered values of equality and education really be turning out to be bad for Jews?

Well, yes, in a way, some prominent observers were so bold as to argue—at least if those values were pursued without providing Jewish youngsters with the balancing forces of religious knowledge, communal commitment, and reason for sustained affiliation. In many respects this was an old story: the tension between the simultaneous goals of blending into America and maintaining distinctiveness, between seeking full social acceptance and reproducing Jewish families through endogamy, had weighed on the collective Jewish conscience for as long as there had been Jews in the United States; the theme had been valorized in popular culture for decades. But now, a romantic couple like David Quixano and Vera Revenal at the center of Israel Zangwill’s
Melting Pot
in 1908 or Abe Levy and Rosemary Murphy in the long-running 1922 hit
Abie’s Irish Rose
were not an abstract symbol of a contentious ideal. Chava’s betrothal to Fyedka in
Fiddler
, though set in 1905, represented a growing American phenomenon that was rattling the mainstream Jewish community in 1964. It wasn’t just the gradual lowering of social boundaries or Jewish dispersal from urban enclaves into more mixed, decentralized communities; the rising civil rights and sexual liberation movements also pressed the young generation toward one end of the long-standing debate. They faced a “crisis of freedom,” Rabbi Alan Miller, leader of New York’s Society for the Advancement of Judaism, told
Look
. And if they chose universalism over what sounded to them like Jewish chauvinism, the blame, suggested the research director of the American Jewish Committee, Marshall Sklare, belonged to one nefarious force: Jewish liberalism. So Sklare had argued in
Commentary
in April, in an article responding to the
Year Book
statistics: “The liberalism of the Jewish parent—his commitment to the idea of equality and his belief in the transitory character of the differences which distinguish people from one another—subverts his sense of moral rectitude in opposing intermarriage. For if he is at all in the habit of personal candor, he must ask himself if the Gentile is any less worthy of the Jew than the Jew is of the Gentile.” The intermarriage crisis, he predicted, would force the Jewish community to put self-affirmation ahead of such pieties—or else produce “ominous” consequences.

The appeal of
Fiddler
for so many American Jews was not simply that it staged this timely conundrum but that it presented an alternative to Sklare’s stark either/or prognosis. The show offered itself as a means of self-affirmation—one that didn’t require abandoning, and in fact celebrated, those pro-equality “pieties.” Attending the play, purchasing the original cast album, and singing its songs became a form of ethnic assertion.

Fiddler
’s creators sensed what was at stake in the Chava story. Tevye’s reaction to his daughter’s elopement and her eventual effort to reaffirm her solidarity with the family would prove to be the most challenging elements of the production, undergoing more rewrites and more restagings than any other sections as the company rehearsed the show and then took it on the road.

Jerome Robbins clipped the
Look
article when it came out and kept it in his
Fiddler
file, but the intermarriage question did not top his issue agenda as he began working with the actors. He was thinking exactly like the sort of Jewish liberal that Sklare distrusted, as his comment on Tevye’s “prejudice” betrayed. More telling, the contemporary parallels Robbins found in the plight endured by the folks of Anatevka were related not to any threats faced by Jews of his own day but to those being suffered by African Americans. The script drew no explicit analogies, but Robbins himself drew them, blunt as a protest placard, at his first rehearsals.