Surprise--It’s Tradition

On Sept. 22, 1964, at New York’s swank Rainbow Room, producer Harold Prince read aloud to his opening-night guests from one of “Fiddler on the Roof’s” less than inspiring reviews. “I can’t resist reading this to you,” he told them, “because it’s so irrelevant.”

Nearly eight years and 3,300 performances later, “Fiddler” broke the record for longest-running musical, and Prince again pulled out those reviews.

He reprinted, then bound them in a gold-lined, commemorative program that he gave to everyone in the audience. Noting today that $1 invested in “Fiddler” in the ‘60s returned $35.62 by October 2001, Prince quips that “sometimes you do get the last laugh.”

Apparently so. Winner of nine 1965 Tony awards, including best musical, “Fiddler” has introduced audiences around the world to Yiddish author Sholom Aleichem’s milkman Tevye, his family, poverty and persecution in turn-of-the-century Russia. Now in the midst of a 44-city tour landing at Beverly Hills’ Wilshire Theatre on Tuesday, “Fiddler” stars Theodore Bikel, who has played family patriarch Tevye 1,800 times in the last 34 years.

Wedding and bar mitzvah planners would be bereft without “Sunrise, Sunset” and “Tradition.” New York’s Music Theatre International, which licenses musicals in schools and community and professional theater, reports more than 650 productions in the U.S. and Canada alone in an average year.

On Broadway, where it’s already had three revivals, “Fiddler” is still among the top 10 longest-running musicals. “You don’t have to be a Jewish immigrant from Eastern Europe, a milkman and father with five daughters to relate to this story,” says Jed Bernstein, president of the League of American Theatres and Producers, who played Tevye in his high school production. “A family struggling, a marriage that’s successful for 35 years--these are things anybody can plug into and obviously have over and over again.”

Joseph Stein, the show’s librettist, recalls his concern and skepticism when he went to Japan for the show’s first foreign production. “The Japanese producer asked me, ‘Do they understand this show in America?’” Stein says, “And I replied, ‘Why do you ask?’ He said, ‘Because it’s so Japanese.’”

It’s been 40 years since a friend sent composer Jerry Bock and lyricist Sheldon Harnick a copy of Aleichem’s book, “Wandering Star,” with the notion that it might make a good musical. Bock and Harnick, who had already written the score for the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Fiorello!” and would eventually write seven scores together before going their separate ways in 1970, read the book and were intrigued. They took it to Stein, with whom they’d first worked on the 1958 musical “The Body Beautiful.”

“Wandering Star” revolved around a group of actors who toured Russia, says Stein, who didn’t think it would make a good musical. But it reminded him of Aleichem’s stories about Tevye, which he’d heard as a child and which he suggested Bock and Harnick also read. Written as monologues by Tevye about his daughters, the stories had already been proved stageworthy in plays adapted by Arnold Perl in the ‘50s.

Bock, Harnick and Stein all say that the more they talked about the material, the more excited they became. Equally important, they all drew on family experiences and memories. Harnick, whose parents were born in Eastern Europe, talks of a synagogue he attended as a boy in Chicago and “the gaunt elderly men in prayer shawls who were praying fervently, then rejoicing afterward with schnapps and cake.”

Bock began to hear the music, he says, “as I read the stories and remembered the lullabies and little melodies my grandmother would sing to me.

“The environment, flavor, feeling, background and our own sensitivity to the people in the stories made it more and more accessible as a project. We started to write it as we would any other show, but adding those embers that kept burning underneath.”

Although Prince did go on to direct Bock and Harnick’s next show, “She Loves Me,” he declined to direct “Fiddler.” “It was foreign to me,” he says now. “I didn’t feel the connection I felt years later with [the musical] ‘Parade’ and German Jews in the South.”

Prince suggested that they try Jerome Robbins. Not only did Robbins come from a Russian Jewish background, Prince says, but there was a second reason: “I said, ‘For it to be universal, you need a choreographer-director’ because I thought dance was an easier language to understand than words.”

The original Broadway cast included such now-well-known actors as Austin Pendleton (as Motel, the tailor), Bea Arthur (as Yente, the matchmaker) and Zero Mostel as Tevye. Mostel had to finish a film, and rehearsals were postponed, a circumstance that gave director Robbins additional time to work on the show with the authors.

They had written almost a complete show by that point, Harnick recalls, but Robbins wasn’t satisfied. “He thought it was warm and amusing, but felt we hadn’t found whatever element it was that gave the stories their power. His question was always, ‘What is the show about?’ and we kept saying, ‘This dairy man and his daughters.’

“Then one of us said, ‘The change of a whole lifestyle,’ and Robbins’ eyes lit up. He said this is about the way traditions were changing all over Europe, and if that was the case, we have to have an opening number that shows the audience some of those traditions. If possible after that, every scene should show or relate to the changing of tradition.”

Their opening number, “We Haven’t Missed a Sabbath Yet,” was scrapped for “Tradition,” a songwriting task that Bock recalls “came about through pain and tumult. Robbins envisioned that the piece start in a circle and end with a circle being broken and splintered, with everyone going off in different directions.”

As they rewrote, he says, Robbins would continually “ask us, ‘How is this song contributing to the overall theme? How is this scene helping us establish it?’ I’m certain that affected our writing constantly.”

Because all of the principals were fairly well known in the theater, Stein says, they had no problem approaching producers. “But we were turned down by everybody because they thought it wouldn’t have popular appeal.

“One producer said, ‘I really like it, but what am I going to do for an audience once I run out of Hadassah benefits?’ But we believed in it, and eventually got it to [television, theater and film producer and director] Fred Coe. It was the first time he ever heard of the shtetls, but he was enormously intrigued. I thought we had something really special if somebody like Fred showed interest.”

Eventually the authors went back to Prince, whom Robbins wanted as a producer and who could help Coe raise the money. Prince, who had already made investors happy with such earlier shows as “West Side Story,” “Fiorello!” and “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum,” assembled a budget of $375,000 for a show he estimates would cost about $10 million today.

“Fiddler” opened first in Detroit, then Washington, before heading into New York, and the best piece of luck they had in Detroit, Prince says, is that the newspapers were on strike. But a few of the reviewers’ negative comments made their way to radio, and an out-of-town review in Variety wasn’t too good either.

The night the Variety review came out, recalls actor Pendleton, he ran into Robbins at the bar across the street from the theater. “I asked him, ‘What are you going to do?’ And he said, ’10 things a day.’ And that’s what he did in Detroit and in Washington--he kept cutting and heightening and shaping.”

In New York, reviews were more positive but still mixed. The influential critic Walter Kerr, then writing for the New York Herald Tribune, called “Fiddler” “a near miss,” and as reviews were brought over to Robbins at the opening-night party, the mood chilled.

“The room emptied out fast,” Pendleton remembers. “Everybody was piling into the elevators.”

But the next day, something surprising happened, Pendleton says. “I came in to play the matinee, and you would have thought [we’d gotten] the reviews of ‘My Fair Lady.’ There was a line around the block. This is so easy to say now, but I always knew it was going to be a hit and a great musical. Even at that first preview in Detroit, you could just tell the way it gripped the audience.”

The show’s Broadway success soon led to national tours, still unusual in the ‘60s, and in 1967 even a stint at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. Cut to 100 minutes with no intermission, “Fiddler” played there for six months starring Bikel and launching the 34-year relationship the actor would have with the show.

Although Bikel says he’s essentially playing his grandfather onstage, he and everyone else involved with the show speaks of its universality. “The better the play, the better it connects with audiences. Audiences are bright and don’t go just for what they are intimately acquainted with. Non-blacks connect to plays by August Wilson. I don’t have to be Danish to like ‘Hamlet.’

“When I played Tevye in Hawaii, I’d come out the stage door and there would be Asian faces--Japanese, Chinese, Hawaiian. I’d ask, ‘What does it mean to you? 1905? Jews? Russia?’ And they’d say, ‘Tradition.’”

“Fiddler” also arrives in Los Angeles with the added baggage of Sept. 11, 2001. “When people are asked what shows audiences want to see, ‘Fiddler’ is always the No. 1 show,” says Sammy Dallas Bayes, an ensemble member who went on to become the original Broadway show’s dance captain, and who is choreographing and directing the show at the Wilshire. “I thought it was good that ‘Fiddler’ was going out now because it gives a sense of something familiar that Americans could relate to.”

Prince agrees. “What the show ultimately celebrated was this melting pot called America,” Prince says. “At the end of the show, that’s where they’re going, and it’s to America that so many of these people came.

“That’s the strength of this country--its identification with so many cultures. It’s an amazing experiment that worked, and the show celebrates that.”

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“Fiddler on the Roof,” Wilshire Theatre, 8440 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills. Tuesday-Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 2 and 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2 and 7:30 p.m. On Jan. 27, 2 p.m. only. Ends Jan. 27. $47-$67. (213) 365-3500 or (714) 740-7878.

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Barbara Isenberg is a regular contributor to Calendar and the author of “Making It Big: The Diary of a Broadway Musical.”