Taking a Deeper, Darker Look at 'Fiddler'

A DELICATE BALANCE The Bottle Dance number in “Fiddler on the Roof” takes place at the wedding of Tevye’s eldest daughter.

OH, YOU THINK YOU’RE so smart, don’t you? You think you know everything about “Fiddler on the Roof.” I thought so too.  You know that the story takes place in 1905 or so in a Russian shtetl  called Anatefka (“Where else could Sabbath be so sweet?”). Yes, you know every song and most of the lyrics (“Up till this moment, I misunderstood/That I could get stuck for good” – “Would it spoil some vast eternal plan/If I were a wealthy man?”). 

 WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW Sholem Aleichem began life as Solomon Rabinovich in what was then part of the Russian Empire in 1859. He died in 1916. His pen name is a spelling variation of the expression “Sabbath peace” in Hebrew.

 Every Broadway actor who played Tevye, the hard-working dairyman blessed with five marriageable daughters and no sons, from Zero Mostel to Danny Burstein. The year the show opened on Broadway (1964). How long it ran (eight years). How many Tony Awards the first production won (nine). How many times it’s been revived on Broadway (five, and that doesn’t count “Fiddler on the Roof in Yiddish,” which was technically Off Broadway). The men who created it (Sheldon Harnick and Jerry Bock, both of whom are still with us, and Joseph Stein, the book writer, who isn’t). Maybe even a little about Sholem Aleichem, on whose Tevye stories the musical is based.

 Ah, but unless you’ve seen the PBS documentary “Fiddler – Miracle of Miracles,” which I watched on the Great Performances anthology series recently, you do not know everything.

 Quick: What was Jerome Robbins’s inspiration for the bottle dance? How is Robbins’s decision to “name names” before HUAC related to “Fiddler”? What does the art of Marc Chagall have to do with the show? What current (non-Jewish) Broadway megastar appeared in a school production of “Fiddler” and still remembers the choreography? Why would the “Matchmaker” number prompt a discussion of turn-of-the-20th-century “white slavery”?

FEAR OF YENTA Tevye’s three oldest daughters in the “Matchmaker” number, which begins as a hopeful song about finding true love and ends with the realization that things could go the other way.

What song, which the creators loved and audiences hated, was cut from the original show? (Hint: It was about scheduling the Messiah’s arrival.) What was considered the show’s most universal song? (Hint: The documentary shows Mostel singing it on television and the Temptations – yes, the Temptations, in matching yellow 1969 costumes – performing it on another variety show.)

 The 90-minute film’s talking heads include the living and the dead. Among them: Harold Prince, Harnick, Bock, Bartlett Sher, Itzhak Perlman, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Joel Grey, Alexandra Silver, Stephen Skybell, Harvey Fierstein, and an assortment of authors and scholars.

 In the beginning, the show was a hard sell. One producer who had been approached about the stage version said that he liked the show very much, but “What am I going to do for an audience after the Hadassah benefits are done?”

 The gentleman was mistaken. When “Fiddler” was produced in Japan, a local man asked someone associated with the production if American audiences really enjoyed the show. The answer came: “Yes. Why wouldn’t they?” The local man explained, seeming puzzled: “It’s so Japanese.”

 Grey sums up the “Fiddler” secret. “Everyone thinks it’s about them.”