Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof (33 page)

Mostel was playing lighter scenes with just as much comic intensity and, as early as Detroit, was beginning to test the limits of the script with his infamous embellishments. In “Rich Man,” Robbins gave him a bit of business at a moment where the song calls for him to sigh: he should raise his hands to God with the sigh, then drop them—only to catch one in a milk barrel. His sleeve would come out wet and Mostel was to shoot a look heavenward as if to say, “Even this?” and then wring out the sleeve and go on with the song. Within two days, endlessly inventive Mostel was performing five minutes’ worth of lazzo. He dabbed milk behind his ears like perfume, used it to grease the wheels of his cart. On the third night, he sighed, lowered his arm, and took it out—dry. Robbins had instructed the crew to leave the barrel empty. He won that round. But the battle had barely begun.

Once the schedule of performances started, Mostel was excused from most rehearsals to rest up his leg. His understudy, Paul Lipson, stood in, and Robbins’s assistant relayed any changes to Mostel a couple of hours before curtain. That’s all Mostel needed. To the other actors’ amazement, he could learn new lines in a glance and absorb physical and interpretive adjustments without rehearsal. If his absence from the daytime labors left the cast without their comic relief, it also spared them the endless hostility between him and Robbins. The director was giving off enough rancorous vapors without Mostel in the room, and who knew how much more toxic the air would have become if Mostel had been goading Robbins as he smoldered. As each day wore on, the company felt more certain that the show was a disaster. After all, Robbins was not satisfied with anything—he found fault even with the scenes that seemed to be playing well. At one point he suddenly decided that Fruma Sarah should make her entrance in a coffin, and Aronson and his crew had to snap to and produce one, despite Prince’s hollering about the budget. The coffin went in—and came right out the next day, when Robbins decided he didn’t like or need it.

Zipprodt, too, could hardly keep up. She remade Everett’s skirt fifteen times because Robbins wanted it to flow a particular way when she moved. Meanwhile, he was demanding rewrites from Stein every day and, at least once, threw new pages at him, denouncing the writing as amateurish and embarrassing. Stein just kept bringing the pages. Robbins’s sniping at Bea Arthur escalated as the size of her role dwindled and her own temper flared. Karnilova, ever Robbins’s champion, tried to boost the others’ spirits. “The man is a genius,” she reassured them. “He’ll pull it together.” But she didn’t persuade the troupe. If nothing else, the cast was simply too fatigued from what seemed like arbitrary changes and colossal disregard for their toil to recognize how much better the show was actually becoming.

The proof was in the local word of mouth. Even after the subscription audience ran out, houses kept filling up. By the third week,
Fiddler
pulled its first hint of profit—$1,600—on a deal with the Fisher that gave the show 70 percent of the box office up to the first $20,000 in sales and 75 percent of any amount over that sum. The show cost about $50,000 a week in operating expenses so when, in the fourth week, the profit reached $8,300, Prince silently congratulated himself. The Detroit run closed on August 22 with total losses to date of $5,335.65—a better outcome than most.

Pendleton likened Robbins’s refinements large and small to the work of an art restorer removing smudges from a canvas: “Suddenly all the composition and color scheme of the painting are revealed. It was just like that.” With several outstanding additions still to come that would send the show over the top,
Fiddler
left the Midwest in good shape.

*   *   *

The cast, on the other hand, was in a shambles—actors sick, dancers injured, everyone in a state of advanced exhaustion. But from their point of view, Robbins was faring even worse: he was “having a hard time,” in Kazan’s generous phrase; Pendleton deemed him “in a torment”; Bodin thought he was “unraveling.” Harnick cracked a joke in a discussion about a song revision, and when Robbins glared at him and snapped, “I want that lyric as soon as you can get it,” Harnick remembered Sondra Lee’s advice: “With the tone of his voice and the look in his eye, I thought: ‘Okay. This is the time. Stay out of his way.’”

That wasn’t really an option, though. Rehearsals resumed in a hotel ballroom within hours of the troupe’s arrival in Washington, while the scenery was being put in at the National Theater, and production meetings continued every night. In the absence of the Chava sequence, Robbins was still struggling to find a big production number for the second act—he thought the audience wanted one. When he renewed the notion of a company song about Anatevka, Bock and Harnick came face-to-face with their “bête noire number 2.” In the first, light and humorous version, spurred by the arrival of a letter from New York, the villagers asked, “Is it really such a paradise, America? / Nothing but unhappy people go there / People who hunger for letters from where? / Anatevka, Anatevka.” For bringing the action to a halt, this song was abandoned after a few performances at the Fisher.

But Robbins clung to his desire for an act 2 wallop. Though
Fiddler
was successfully defying many of the conventions of a midcentury book musical—no overture, no flirty chorus girls, no reprises, no simple plot line, no happy denouement—Robbins wasn’t letting go of a presumed need for a big number to start off the second half with a surge of energy and to win the sort of ovation that “Tradition,” “Tevye’s Dream,” and “L’Chaim” were drawing in act 1. At the nightly meetings, he pushed for an occasion to put in something splashy. He liked Stein’s suggestion that a refugee from another town passes through Anatevka and, on his way out, disparages the town as a “mudhole,” prompting the locals to defend their home in a tuneful boast charming for its modesty. Bock and Harnick responded with a zesty song called “A Little Bit of This,” which began with Golde intoning, “What does he mean, a mudhole?” and soon had Tevye chiming in: “Let him go to Minsk or Moscow or Pinsk / Let him go to America. / What does he think he’ll find? / Everything is here! /Maybe not a lot / But every little thing a man could need or want we’ve got.” They wrote two more introductory options, all three of them leading to a chorus in which the people catalog their worldly possessions: “A little bit of meat / A little bit of fish / A pot and a pan and a glass and a dish / A little bit of wood / A little bit of twine / A slice of bread and a drop of wine / All very small, small indeed / But in Anatevka, all we need.” The song expressed a romantic ideal of the shtetl that Maurice Samuel and Abraham Joshua Heschel had made popular more than a decade before: that what the people lacked in material wealth they made up for in spiritual riches and communal cohesion. Though the number went through several transmutations before being fixed as the mournful hymn preceding the expelled Jews’ exit, this sentiment remained at its core: both a compliment to contemporary audiences for how far they had climbed from their humble origins and a reminder of all they may have sacrificed for their achievement.

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.