Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof (18 page)

Soon Tevye meets Perchik, the young revolutionary, and invites him home for the Sabbath. The scene shifts to Tevye’s home, where the girls are peeling potatoes, sewing, and doing laundry and their mother, Golde, is cracking wise. When Tzeitel wants to know where to put the potatoes, Golde answers, “Put it on my head! By the stove, foolish girl.” When a younger daughter complains that she can’t abide kasha, Golde carps: “Did I ask you what you hate? Eat it.… If you want to hate, hate a crazy dog, hate a drunken peasant who beats up people, why should you hate kasha? Kasha’s not to hate, kasha’s to eat!” The letter arrives from the uncle in America (a good occasion for a song, Stein notes) and the daughters’ romances are introduced in parallel scenes even as Tevye promises the first to the butcher, Lazar Wolf.

Bock and Harnick pulled no punches in expressing their disappointment in the draft. They objected to the opening monologue as “pure, unadulterated exposition” holding up the launch of the story. They didn’t like the way the daughters “have one-liners here and there that don’t begin to reveal them as people.” The scene when Tevye goes to meet Lazar Wolf wasn’t working. Stein had wanted to avoid a hackneyed routine, so he changed the story’s comic mix-up of the two men talking at cross-purposes, Tevye thinking they are discussing the sale of a cow while the butcher thinks they are talking about his interest in marrying Tzeitel. Stein had Tevye come right out with his understanding of why Lazar wanted to see him—“You are interested in my cow”—and that, his collaborators told him, made the scene seem “neither fish nor fowl.”

Most of the comments addressed dramaturgical points—how simultaneously to build and streamline the action, how to fill out the characters—that would be ordinary in a critique of any script’s first pass. But some responses show the writers grappling with enormous questions they may not have uttered aloud but that would determine the show’s prospects as much as any technical shaping and pruning they would do: What was its attitude toward the Jews of Anatevka and the world around them? And, as a corollary, what did it have to say about their own times?

They wondered whether the constable who warns Tevye of the coming pogrom that he will oversee should be “a subtle anti-Semite, a some-of-my-best-friends-are type guy rather than a Nazi?” They favored the former characterization. “This man seems to be both friend and fiend,” they reasoned. “And this leads to a feeling that if we could extend the symbol of Government and Gentile or peasant hostility [toward] the Jews beyond this one man we would have less of a black and white villain and more of a truthful examination of the problem.” At the same time, Bock argued for some ethnographic color: “I think a big Sabbath meal could be fascinating for its ceremony, warmth and uniqueness on stage as well as providing a background that’s part of the fabric of our show.”

Two days after Bock delivered Harnick’s and his comments, Stein’s father died. Whether propelled by a redoubled desire to honor his father’s legacy or stirred to action by his collaborators’ ideas or both, Stein was back at work on the script within a week. He met with Bock and Harnick on November 6 to discuss a new outline. Two months later, he delivered a funnier, more tender new draft that featured preparations for a big Sabbath meal.

In the meantime, Bock and Harnick got cracking on the score. With their first collaboration, on
The Body Beautiful
, they had established a simpatico way of working together: first they’d discuss the show’s subject and source material, then they’d go off and work independently. Bock would sketch some tunes—“musical guesses,” he called them—and give them to Harnick on a tape. Meanwhile Harnick read more deeply, came up with song placements, and began to hatch some notions for lyrics. He’d work with the tapes from Bock. When he had lyrics that didn’t seem to fit any of the recorded tunes, he’d send them along and Bock would compose in response. Back and forth they would go, each stimulated by the other.

“Sheldon, here’s a little gay folk thing that I think has some interest for us,” Bock told his partner on the first recording he sent him in the fall of 1961. Bock plays oompahing chords on a piano in need of tuning as he sings his skipping melody with nonsense syllables: “bup-bup-bup-bup-bup-yaaaa, bup-bup-yá, bup-bup-yá.” Figuring that the dream scene in which Tevye tricks Golde into agreeing to let Tzeitel marry Motel would stay in the book no matter what direction Stein took it, Harnick had been picturing the nightmare’s coming to life: deceased Grandma Tzeitel appears to bless her namesake; then Lazar Wolf’s first wife, Fruma Sarah, comes to threaten revenge if, as the Butwin translation has it, Tevye should “let your daughter take my place, live in my house, carry my keys, wear my clothes.” When the tape arrived in the mail, Harnick quickly affixed the words “A blessing on your head, mazel tov, mazel tov. To see a daughter wed, mazel tov, mazel tov” to the first set of “bup-bup-yá’s,” and the rest of the lyrics to “The Tailor Motel Kamzoil” seemed to flow by themselves, guided by the language in Sholem-Aleichem’s original short story and the contours of Bock’s accelerating tune.

Through the fall and early winter, the pair sent music and lyrics back and forth between Harnick’s Manhattan apartment and Bock’s home in the Westchester suburb of New Rochelle. Now and then, they’d come together in their publisher’s office on West Fifty-seventh Street and sit for hours at an upright piano singing through their creations, smoothing out bumps in the transition from page to sound, and musically doodling. In the neighborhood where popular American song was born, bred, and brazenly peddled, the ghosts of Tin Pan Alley were harmonizing with strains from the Pale: Bock fused his jaunty pop proficiency with a deeply absorbed feel for the thick harmonies and sweet-and-sour falling fourths of Russian folk music, the melancholy modes of Yiddish song, the spiraling frenzy of Jewish wedding dances. Bock didn’t need to do any research to compose this score. He “felt it was inside me” and found that the “opportunity to now express myself with that kind of music just opened up a flood of possibilities.”

He had also soaked up the styles from late 1950s LPs, such as the Moiseyev Dance Ensemble’s compilations of Russian folk tunes and Theodore Bikel’s recordings of Yiddish songs. (Bikel maintains that more than soaking up styles, Bock siphoned some tunes.) When on one of the tapes he sent his partner Bock sings a melody for Harnick with “a certain Yiddish-Russian quality” that he says is “overly sad, which might be a point of humor,” his rich voice breaks, beautifully, with cantorial
krekhts
—half-tone hiccups that distinguish the technique. Maybe that’s why Harnick heard something devotional in it. The lyricist pulled directly from Jewish liturgy—“May God bless you and protect you”—to shape (with some variation and invention) the song Tevye’s family would sing around the table on Friday evening, “Sabbath Prayer,” a yearning song that saw barely any revision over the next two and a half years as the show slowly made its way to Broadway.

But it was another plaintive tune, a waltz, that most stirred Harnick when he played the tape Bock had sent him and heard his partner croon through it with place holding la-da-dee-dee-da-da syllables. Bock thought the melody might express a “flirty idea” for the daughters, but Harnick heard something different. He took to heart Bock’s suggestion that the tune was “unashamedly sentimental.” Words just came—they “crystallized” on the music: “Is this the little girl I carried? Is this the little boy at play? I don’t remember growing older. When did they?… Sunrise, sunset…” He couldn’t wait to share the words with Bock. He took the train up to New Rochelle and sang it at the piano in the composer’s basement studio. When they called Bock’s wife down for a listen, she started to cry and Harnick realized they’d struck deep. Years later, he could count this moment as an early inkling that the show they were making out of sheer love might come to be loved by others.

*   *   *

It was way too soon, however, to let in such grandiose thoughts. The creative team didn’t even have rights to the material yet, and without them the project was going nowhere. Almost as soon as Bock, Harnick, and Stein had started talking seriously about the Tevye stories, their representatives had initiated what they all thought would be a routine licensing process. Negotiations with Crown Publishers began in August 1961 and quickly resulted in a letter of agreement. Bock’s lawyer expected a contract within the first few days of November. By the new year of 1962, Stein had completed a second draft and Bock and Harnick had written at least a dozen songs, but they still lacked a signed deal. The unexpected snag had a name vaguely familiar to the authors: Arnold Perl.

When Perl licensed the stories for his production of
Tevya and His Daughters
in 1956 (after Rodgers and Hammerstein had let their option go), he secured exclusive rights from Crown Publishers and the promise of access to any Sholem-Aleichem material he might want from the writer’s son-in-law B. Z. Goldberg, who took a liking to Perl. Four years later, the former Communist was driving a shrewd capitalist bargain. The new Tevye team was buying access to the stories published by Crown, not to Perl’s play. (Though Perl’s family would maintain that
Fiddler
is based on it, Stein claimed never to have seen
Tevya and His Daughters
and, apart from their significant structural differences, there are no overlapping lines that don’t come either from the Butwin translation or from Maurice Samuel’s
The World of Sholom Aleichem
.) Perl held out for an 8.2 percent royalty (larger than the 4.8 percent Sholem-Aleichem’s family was granted) and, most important, a line of acknowledgment on all title pages and ads forever: “by special arrangement with Arnold Perl.” The deal was done in July 1962.

At last they were ready for a producer. Finding one made the haggling with Perl seem easy.

As the authors started to raise the subject with various contacts, they heard variations on the same dismissal: no producer could make money on a show that would appeal only to a small coterie audience. “What will we do when we’ve run out of Hadassah groups?” asked one of several who turned them down. He was only the most blunt about fears others shared: the show was “too Jewish.”

Were they kidding? Wasn’t worrying about Jews on Broadway just a wee step away from worrying about Jews in synagogue? The director Tyrone Guthrie once quipped that if all the Jews were to leave the American theater, it would “collapse about next Thursday.” What was so threatening about
Tevye
(as the show was now being called)? After all, whether or not one accepts the academic argument that a coded Jewish sensibility underlies almost every show since the invention of the musical, by the time
Tevye
was seeking a producer, the Great White Way was not a restricted neighborhood.

The very same week Stein was finishing his tentative first draft, in October 1961,
Milk and Honey
, the cheery Zionist musical by Don Appell (book) and Jerry Herman (music and lyrics), opened; it enjoyed a sixteen-month run. Soon after, Shelley Berman starred as the comic father in
A Family Affair
, a farce about plans for a big Jewish wedding by James and William Goldman (book and lyrics) and John Kander (music) that, savaged by the critics, lasted only a couple of months; somewhat more successfully,
I Can Get It for You Wholesale
, a bitter tale of greed in the garment industry with a loathsome hero, opened in March 1962, introducing the world to an explosive nineteen-year-old sensation, Barbra Streisand. Streisand went right from that show into her first blockbuster, the bio-musical about the comedian Fanny Brice,
Funny Girl
, which ran for three and a half years.

But potential producers sensed something different about
Tevye
even if they couldn’t quite put their finger on it. These other shows—even
Milk and Honey
—were about Americans. Their Jewishness was not hidden, but it was not thematically important, except insofar as characters moved away from it: the protagonists visiting Israel in the Jerry Herman show fall in love with each other, not with their putative homeland, and return to the United States at the end;
Wholesale
’s Harry Bogen (Elliott Gould) tromps on anyone in his path as he tries to get to the top; and Streisand’s Fanny Brice turns away from her background as she rises to stardom. At least as Harnick understood them, “those shows weren’t Jewish.” And producers who, after all, were investing in Broadway to make money hadn’t seen any Yiddish-related material make a killing in a good long while. If ever.

The
Tevye
team hoped that the young sensation of a producer who had enlisted Bock and Harnick for
Fiorello!
would take a chance on them again: they asked Hal Prince to direct their show. He read the script in the summer of 1962 and simply couldn’t connect. There was “something overall that bothers me,” he fumbled as he broke the bad news to Bock. He found the text “so languid” and full of “let-downs.” Could the material even accommodate a more dramatic shape? “Or is it all charm and warm humor?” he wondered. “It’s just so gentle,” he concluded, before suggesting that Bock spare Stein’s feelings and not share his remarks. Later, he allowed that the problem may have boiled down to a cultural difference. As the descendant of German Jewish forebears, Prince felt no attachment to the Yiddish world of Eastern Europe. He felt “as foreign to the shtetl as I am to Buckingham Palace.”

Prince did offer one piece of advice, though, attached to a promise: he recommended that they ask Jerry Robbins to direct and said he’d consider producing if Robbins came on board. Prince had watched Robbins reinvent the musical with
West Side Story
and had recently called him down to Washington, D.C., for a pre-Broadway repair of
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum
, the frisky Plautine musical comedy by Burt Shevelove (book) and Stephen Sondheim (music and lyrics) best remembered for the outsize buffoonery of its star, Zero Mostel. Robbins had turned that flabby mess of funny material into a trim comic machine. Robbins’s fluency in the language of theatrical metaphor was what
Tevye
would need to move it beyond “being simply an ethnic folk tale” toward its promise of “larger things.” The more Prince thought about it, the more he was sure that Bock, Harnick, and Stein simply shouldn’t proceed without Robbins. And he so advised them.