My wife and I just got back from Fiddler on the Roof - at the Stage 42 theater, appropriately enough, on 42nd Street, just a few blocks from Broadway. In Yiddish - only appropriate, since the play (written in English by Joe Stein in the 1960s, with music by Jerry Bock and lyrics by Sheldon Harnick) is based on stories written by Sholem Aleichem in Yiddish at the end of the 19th century.
I've had a long relationship with this wonderful play and the stories it is based upon. I read Sholem Aleichem as part of my Yiddish studies in shuleh at the end of the 1950s. I saw the play in the mid-60s on Broadway with my entire family, including my grandmother, who had escaped Kiev with her brothers around the same time as Tevye struggles to make sense of the world that is coming into being in Fiddler someplace not too far from Kiev. My wife played Yente in Fiddler in her summer camp, also in the mid-1960s. And we saw the movie with Topol as Tevye in the early 1970s.
And, what can I say, this marvelous play has special relevance to our own times because, well, it's about life in Russia and Ukraine, and on one level is about the intolerance of the ruling class (Russians) to people viewed as irrevocably others (in this case, people like my maternal grandmother and her brothers, and, by descent, people like my family and me). That's the political subtext and sometimes text of this story.
But the continuing forefront of the play is how Tevye, father of five daughters and seeming defender of tradition, finds his beliefs severely tested as his three oldest daughters each break way from tradition in the mates they choose to marry in successively more drastic ways. These stories are conveyed in wonderfully memorable songs, brought into motion by some astonishing dancing. In one case, of four men with bottles balanced precariously on their heads as they danced, I couldn't tell if the bottles were in some way attached to their hats (via velcro or whatever), they danced so well without disturbing the bottles [Note added 13 December 2019: But see comment below from Fiddler choreographer: Amazing! The bottles in this breathtaking performance were actually balanced on the dancers’ heads!]. If only Tevye were able to balance the vicissitudes of his life so effectively. If only everyone else was, then and today.
Steven Skybell as Tevye was just superb, as was every single other person in the cast. Hearing it in Yiddish, which I can understand just a little better than a bissel, was a joy. The story and the acting brought tears of every kind to my eyes. It's rare that I say this about any play, movie, or television show, but seeing that play was a truly life-affirming experience. Fiddler is supposed to close in early January 2020. See it if you can!
