Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof (41 page)

Godik floated the possibility of a European and South American tour of the Hebrew company (playing in some cities in Yiddish), and Hal Prince approved as long as it didn’t touch down in cities where an English-language production was planned—and especially not in or near London, “because I think it would give the show a particularly Jewish reputation.” The tour never materialized, likely because Godik was already beginning to suffer cash flow trouble that would eventually land him in so much debt that he’d flee Israel. His attempt to mount the French production in Paris also fell through because he couldn’t secure a theater before his license to the rights ran out.

But through his casting of Rodensky, Godik had enormous international impact on the future fate of
Fiddler
, if only indirectly. And not only because Rodensky eventually played the part in Germany (pulled past his reluctance by the Israeli ambassador in Bonn, who warned him that if he didn’t do it a German actor would embody the Jewish patriarch, no doubt as an antisemitic stereotype). More significantly, because Rodensky couldn’t keep up with Israel’s brutal schedule of nine or ten shows per week, he handed over the matinees and some other performances to his understudy, Chaim Topol. The younger actor scrutinized the master—“the greatest Tevye ever,” in his estimation—watching him from the wings night after night and learning from him the importance of striking the right balance between comedy and gravitas, of not overplaying the humor in the first act so as to avoid undermining the drama of the second. Topol admired how Rodensky “tore my heart” every show and he determined he would “go Rodensky’s way” in his approach to the role, too. Rodensky led the cast in the Hebrew-language film of
Tevye and His Seven Daughters
by Menachem Golan (who had produced
Sallah
)—a version based directly on the Sholem-Aleichem play (complete with Shprintze’s suicide and Khave’s return to the family) in Berkowitz’s high Hebrew and with the Zionist tinge of verdant back-to-the-land farming scenes and the remnant of the family heading for Palestine at the end. It was released in 1968. By then, Topol was on his way to starring as Tevye in a movie, too.

*   *   *

While Topol was going on for Rodensky several times a week in Israel, the Broadway production, nearly two years into its run, was still selling out nightly, a national company was packing houses across America, and negotiations for the motion picture rights were under way. Foreign productions were in the works for the Netherlands, Finland, Australia, Norway, Sweden, and Denmark; the British producer Richard Pilbrow was preparing the London production. The conditions were excellent: not only would the show be staged at Her Majesty’s Theater—one of the few decent houses for musicals in London—the space would be available for rehearsals. And the London
Fiddler
, slated to open in February 1967, would be the only big musical coming to town that winter. “There will be virtually no competition,” Pilbrow told Prince at the end of September. “London is starting to await
Fiddler
and February is the best possible time!” As soon as the show was announced, orders for charity benefits started “flooding in.” The producers were sure they’d clean up. Everything was in place. Except one thing: Tevye.

At first the British producers hoped to cast the stout and likable Shakespearean Leo McKern—they were “wild” about him, saying there was “no other Englishman about whom we feel any enthusiasm at this time”—so when he turned them down in late August, they turned to Hal Prince for help. Granting that Prince would think they were out of their minds, Pilbrow told him that “the one hope, whether any of us like it or not, of the entire theatre knowledgeable public in the U.K. is that the star of
Fiddler on the Roof
should be Zero Mostel.” Prince’s office opened the negotiations. “If he should turn us down,” Prince admitted to Bock, Harnick, Robbins, and Stein, “we are in real trouble.” They had “already sounded out Scofield and Redgrave and a list as long as your arm of less likely candidates.”

Mostel demanded 10 percent of the show’s gross and a four-month commitment, including the rehearsal period. London would go no higher than 7.5 percent and no lower than a six-month contract. And now it was late September.

Prince thought that, barring Mostel, the show should feature an Englishman, but the London producers complained they’d run out of options quickly and wanted Prince to provide a well-known American. He didn’t have much time to spare or to consult with the
Fiddler
team, he told them, “when the authors are off in Boston troubling over a new show [Bock and Harnick’s
Apple Tree
], when I’m on my way out of town with a new one [
Cabaret
].”

Back and forth went their increasingly testy—and then mollifying—letters and telegrams as the actors under consideration either said “no thanks” or were vetoed by a producer on one side or the other of the Atlantic (among them, Theodore Bikel, Kirk Douglas, Danny Kaye, David Kossoff, Alfred Marks, Anthony Quayle, Peter Ustinov, even Laurence Olivier). “You must deliver [Herschel] Bernardi or suitable substitute for opening on February 16,” one of Pilbrow’s partners cabled Prince as the weeks raced by. But Prince saw no reason to imperil the thriving Broadway production, where Bernardi had successfully taken over the central role. What’s more, he reminded his British colleagues, since Bernardi was an unknown in London he would not instantly mean box office there. Besides, he sniped, “as the play is being produced in fourteen languages this coming season, obviously there are actors in other countries capable of undertaking Tevye. After all, he’s not an American folk hero, he’s a Russian.”

In the midst of all the to-and-fro, Prince’s secretary sent Pilbrow a query: “Hal would like to know if the Israeli movie
Sallah
has been in London and if so, have you seen the fellow who plays the father?” And on October 4, Pilbrow wired Prince with an all-caps list of eight men newly in contention. One name was so unfamiliar to the London producers that they got it wrong: “CHYAM POPAL.” Pilbrow elaborated in a follow-up letter: “Somebody totally unknown, if brilliant, with such a gorgeously strange name, could seem like a masterpiece of casting (you will note I can talk myself into almost any point of view)!”

It took more than a week for the producers to get their hands on a copy of
Sallah
, and meanwhile a colleague in Israel raised doubts about Topol’s command of English. But when the film finally arrived, the producers fell in love and they summoned Topol to audition in late October. They had no clue that the cable reached him while he was playing Tevye several times a week in Jaffa. They simply didn’t know that he had any connection to Godik’s production, nor that he had appeared on national TV in the United States six months earlier on “The Danny Kaye Show” singing
Fiddler
’s “To Life” with the host in Hebrew. As for Topol, at first he thought the invitation was a joke.

Joe Stein and Jerry Bock flew over from New York to see the audition along with Pilbrow and his team. When Topol arrived, they wondered if they had contacted the right man. In
Sallah
, they’d seen a charmingly rumpled, sixty-something patriarch, a little bent but not bowed. Into the Drury Lane, where the tryout was held, strode a tanned and slender thirty-one-year-old sabra. But when he sang “Rich Man” and presented some of Tevye’s monologues, he thoroughly won them over. The audition, Pilbrow gushed, was “far more exciting than we ever dared to hope.” Amid a marvelous week, he continued, “the most marvelous thing is that Topal [
sic
] is, without a doubt, some sort of special genius. I suppose one should beware of getting too excited, but quite literally, his presence on the stage is like a whirlwind, and a very warm, funny, touching whirlwind at that. I hope I am not exaggerating, but I think he could take the town by storm and make us quite pleased we never had Ustinov, Mostel, McKern or whatever.”

That is, of course, what Topol did. But it took plenty of work, including daily tutorials with an English teacher. (“I have five dah-tohs,” he’d tell Perchik as he introduced his family, providing grist for comic imitators forever after.) Directly from staging the show in Amsterdam, Dick Altman and Tommy Abbott arrived to do the same in London. Altman worried that Topol’s raw vitality would open a wide gulf across from the gentility of the British actors in the rest of the cast (apart from the man playing Perchik, an immigrant from Hungary). And though Prince admitted that he didn’t like many of the actors, the Anatevkans eventually cohered as a plausible community. When Jerry Robbins arrived to see the first preview and polish the show—the only time he stepped in to adjust a new production—he found a company that was “doing everything correct.” By his standards, though, that wasn’t enough. For “Tradition,” he told the cast exactly what he’d told the New York actors two and a half years earlier: “Think of long necks. I want pride—you’re all proud of your tradition.” And in Topol’s estimation, at least, the number instantly changed from a nice opener to a galvanizing one.

The production premiered on February 16, 1967, to critical acclaim—apart from the now standard grumble or two from local protectors of Sholem-Aleichem’s “authenticity.” Houses stayed full; by March the show was fully booked until the following Christmas. Topol moved out of his hotel, rented an apartment, and brought his family from Tel Aviv. He figured he would be staying a good while. In May, Prince’s office released figures reporting that
Fiddler
worldwide had so far turned a nearly 600 percent profit.

Then came an unlooked-for boost some four months into London’s run: Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War. During the tense “waiting period” of late May 1967—after Egypt’s president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, responding to false reports that Israel was mobilizing for war on its border with Syria, massed thousands of troops in the Sinai Peninsula, blockaded Israel’s port to the Red Sea, and signed a defense pact with Jordan—Topol spent all but the three hours he was onstage every night in the same state of anxious preoccupation as his compatriots back home. For more than two weeks, Israeli citizens anticipated national annihilation. Though their generals knew this was not a real danger, civilians hastily prepared shelters and rabbis busily sanctified public parks as cemeteries in case of mass casualties, while the Israeli news media, frequently comparing Nasser to Hitler, broadcast his braggart threats to wipe out their nation. In London, Topol raced from the stage to his dressing room whenever he could, to catch the latest updates on the radio.

When fighting began on June 5—with Israel’s crushing assault on Egypt’s air force—Topol hurried to catch the first available flight home and reported for reserve duty. While his understudy went on at Her Majesty’s, Topol traveled up and down Israel, entertaining the troops as he’d done back in his Nahal days, but this time as a solo act. On June 10, it was all over. Israel had not only defeated Syria, Jordan, and Egypt but conquered swaths of their territory, tripling Israel’s geographical size and putting some one million Arabs under its rule. As Tom Segev observes, the threat of extermination had never been real, but the fear of it was. And the collective, conclusive relief of victory took the form of a communal euphoria that enveloped world Jewry. (Over the following decades, as Israel’s occupation of some of the captured lands persisted, the euphoria gave way to bitter division within Israel and among Jews outside; by the time a generation had come of age in an Israel that had become a regional superpower, a young director would look to
Fiddler
as a means of evoking sympathy for Palestinians. But in 1967—more than forty years before Moshe Kepten would become the first Israeli to direct the show—such an interpretation, like the unending occupation itself, was unimaginable.)

By June 14, Topol was back at Her Majesty’s. He had left London as a star; he returned as a hero.
Fiddler
became a site for celebration, drawing Jews as well as Gentiles to the theater—some for repeat viewings—to bask in Jewish perseverance and to pay homage to Jewish survival. The show didn’t change, but the atmosphere around it did. As Tevye, Topol the robust sabra embodied the persecuted Jewish past and the triumphant present moment. His recording of “If I Were a Rich Man” hit number five on the British pop charts.

Before long, Topol also became something of a diva. In the fall, he wrote a lengthy letter to Jerry Robbins complaining about too many weak understudies coming on for absent actors and throwing him off his rhythm and about sloppiness among the tech crew. He suggested that Robbins “should come over for a few days and try to save the show.” Pilbrow quickly followed up with a note assuring Robbins that the show was in “extremely good shape”; Prince told the director not to take Topol at face value “since the rest of his behavior recently has been so screwy, i.e., his willingness to stay with the company an additional year if we close the production when he leaves (he and it being so closely identified).” A couple of weeks later, Bock and Harnick looked in on the production while they were in London working on a project with the playwright John Arden. While overall things looked “damned good,” they reported, “actually the worst offender was Topol, who added about 50 shtick-ad libs, in addition to [playing] heavy handed, almost as if it were about the legend of Topol, not Tevye.” The producers did not agree to the star’s offer to stay another year if they would close the show when he left. And his proposal left Prince wondering if there was something about the role itself that pushed actors into a state of hubris. After Topol left in February 1968 and Alfie Bass took over, the London production continued to flourish—“history repeats itself,” Prince crowed to the show’s creators—running for nearly five years. But it was hardly the end of the confident Israeli’s identification with Tevye.

Shortly before Topol’s last performance, the film director Norman Jewison flew over to catch the show at the urging of his producer, Walter Mirisch. In 1967, the Mirisch Company had tapped Jewison for
Fiddler
and though shooting was not slated to start until the spring of 1970, the search for the star was already on. When Mirisch saw a notice in the paper saying that Topol would soon be leaving the show, he and Jewison took off for London.