The fiddler is back. Not that he has been away for very long. Unlike the Wickeds and Les Miserables of this world whose original productions became semi-permanent features on the musical theatre landscape, the original Fiddler on the Roof has been regularly reborn since it premiered in 1964, with the latest version opening this week at the Regents Park Open Air Theatre.
For there is nothing semi-permanent about audience appetite for Tevye, the milkman whose five daughters must be married but without diluting the tradition in which they were raised.
There is no tiring of the father who embodies the uniquely Jewish relationship with God to whom he not only prays but with whom he argues. Nor can there be any doubt about the eternal appeal of Jerry Bock’s bittersweet music, Sheldon Harnick’s lyrics and Joseph Stein’s book which so seamlessly sews together the stories written by Shalom Aleichem in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
The Yiddish writer could have had no idea that he was laying the foundation for one of the most successful musicals ever created. Nor that its depiction of shtetl life would serve as a memorial to the culture and communities lost to the Holocaust. It is a show in which the constant threat of a pogrom reflects 21st century anxieties about antisemitism.
When the Menier Chocolate Factory staged Trevor Nunn’s revival of Fiddler in 2018 starring Andy Nyman as Tevye, antisemitism was on the rise. This week Britain’s streets are stalked by swastika-bearing men on the lookout for anyone who is not white or English enough. All this adds relevance to one of the most uplifting shows ever created
Andy Nyman playing Tevye in a 2018 production of the play Photo: Johan Persson
Jordan Fein’s production at the theatre is led by fellow American Adam Dannheisser who has an impressive list of stage works to his name (including a Broadway revival of Fiddler in which he played Lazar Wolf, the wealthy butcher rejected by Tevye’s daughter Tzeitel).
Yet Dannheisser is not the household name the role normally attracts. Perhaps that is the point. With Daniel Fish, Fein co-directed the London production of Oklahoma which broke with every convention set by previous productions of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s musical. It remains to be seen if Fein is attempting something equally ground-breaking with Fiddler, the show which coincidentally Alan Lerner described as “the triumphant finale to the glorious Belle Époque that began with Oklahoma.” What we do know is that he wants his Fiddler to be joyous. “You are watching people in a really hard world. The joy and the fun has to be present, or it’s too heavy,” he said this week.
There was also, he said, a concerted attempt to have Jewish cast members. “But it’s a complicated thing because what it means to be Jewish can mean so many things. I’m Jewish. I’m not necessarily Jewish, but I identify as Jewish.”
Zero Mostel as Tevye
Fiddler premiered on Broadway in 1964 with the hugely talented loose canon of a performer Zero Mostel in the role of Tevye. Mostel’s approach was the same as he used for all his stage performances. He ad-libbed and improved his way through the show, sometimes to the detriment of everyone else on stage.
On one occasion, the show’s book writer went backstage after a performance in which Mostel had been doing his usual clowning about. “Listen,” Mostel said to Stein. “when I’m on stage it’s between me and the audience. Everybody else has gotta get outta the way.”
“Including the play?” replied Stein.
However, if Mostel thought it was he who made the show soar (which might well have have been true with his previous show A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum) then he must have realised that Fiddler on the Roof has a charisma all of its own when he saw star after star follow him in the role of Tevye with no negative impact on the show’s box office takings.
That lesson would have hit home even more when an Israeli actor who had cut his performative teeth in the IDF entertaining troops would star in the film version directed by Norman Jewison (who, despite his name, was not Jewish).
For the screen version Chaim Topol had beaten some stiff competition to the role of Tevye including stars such as Rod Steiger and Danny Kaye. Another option – Frank Sinatra – could only have come about, it seems today, in an alternative universe.
Paul Michael Glaser, left and Chaim Topol, right, in 1971
Though only in his late 20s, Topol had first staked his claim to Tevye after the producers of the first London production of Fiddler in 1967 invited him to audition for the role. To be convincing as a character who was 30 or more years older than the actor playing him was a remarkable feat. But it wasn’t one he wanted to repeat.
When I met Wicked creator Stephen Schwartz recently he said that Topol was less than helpful when the star played in the 1974 out-of-town try-out of Schwartz’s musical The Baker’s Wife which also has a book by Stein and is currently being revived at the Menier.
Stein and producer David Merrick had wanted Mostel in the role of Aimable, the ageing French baker with a much younger and more attractive wife. But Mostel opted for the much better paid gig of playing Tevye again in a touring production of the show. Merrick then pushed for Topol.
“He felt his name would be a good selling point and that, having successfully played another of Joe’s memorable characters, Topol would be good for this one too,” said Schwartz.
“But Aimable is a very different character from Tevye and Topol resisted playing an older man who doesn’t seem immediately virile and in charge.”
However, over the following decades Topol would literally grow into the character of Tevye. By the time he reprised it for the London Palladium revival in 1994 he was well into his
60s and had a Tony Award for his New York performance in the role to boot.
Topol during a dress rehearsal of Fiddler on the Roof at The Capital Theatre, in 2005, in Sydney Photo: Getty
Since then, the Broadway, West End and even the UK’s regions can’t go for long without a Fiddler on the Roof. After Alfred Molina played Tevye in New York in 2004, our own Henry Goodman channelled some of the dignity of his landmark Shylock into his Tevye in a production that transferred from Sheffield to the Savoy.
There have been pared down versions of the musical at the Watermill in Newbury, in 2002, and in 2017 at the Liverpool Everyman. In the same year Chichester’s revival starring Omid
Djalili as Tevye and Tracy-Ann Oberman as his wife Golde was the finest Fiddler on the Roof never to make it to the West End.
Then came Nyman’s in 2019 whose Tevye was the angriest I have seen. In a slightly strange alignment of starring roles Nyman is now playing the penny-pinching yet rich merchant Horace Vandergelder in the current acclaimed production of Hello, Dolly! at the London Palladium starring Imelda Staunton.
Fiddler at the 70th Annual Tony Awards, in New York, in 2016
Like Tevye, Horace has a money song and Nyman executes it well. But because this Horace is being played by an actor who was a recent and notable Tevye, a lesson emerges about characters who sing about money. When they are rich like Horace you can feel the audience’s empathy evaporating. When they are poor like Tevye their love only deepens: If I Were A Rich Man is not only a brilliant song, it speaks to every person who has ever struggled to pay a bill.
Fiddler on the Roof is the show that made Jewish experience universal, not because of money but because of Tevye’s battle to hold onto his traditions. Yet after the Broadway smash the creators were advised (I wish I knew by whom) that the show was “too Jewish” for London
The proof of how wrong they went down in musical theatre history when Stein travelled to Tokyo for the Japanese premiere. After the performance a fan approached Stein expressing his surprise that the musical with such themes as holding on to tradition could have ever worked in a place like New York. “It’s so Japanese,” he said.
Fiddler on the Roof is at the Open Air Regent’s Park theatre until September 21 openairtheatre.com
