Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof (34 page)

Motel (Austin Pendleton) stands up to Tevye (Zero Mostel) and wins the hand of Tzeitel (Joanna Merlin).

Convy had lobbied for “Now I Have Everything” to be taken away from Pendleton and given to him. The song’s sentiment fit Perchik better, he argued, and he didn’t have to point out who was the superior singer. Bock and Harnick had already begun working in Detroit on a replacement number for Motel. Harnick credits two inspirations: a note Robbins gave him and Bock in a meeting telling them that in response to winning Tzeitel, Motel needed, musically, an outburst of exuberant happiness, and a line Stein had written for Motel in that moment: “It’s a miracle!” Harnick fished in the nightstand of his hotel room for a Gideon Bible so he could brush up on some godly interventions and churned out lyrics for “Miracle of Miracles” fitting a pious young man with their references to David and Goliath, the wall in Jericho, and manna in the wilderness. Bock set Harnick’s words to buoyant music made to order for Pendleton: the melody and chordal harmonies were simpler than those of “Now I Have Everything” and the range was tighter. The songwriters rehearsed with Pendleton on the sly, and during the second week in Washington they presented the number to Robbins. “Okay, show me,” the director said—the first words he’d spoken to Pendleton in days. “Let me see what your instincts are. Do whatever you want to do.” The dance music arranger, Betty Walberg, played the accompaniment on the piano and Pendleton sang and strode around a bit. “Play the music again,” Robbins told Walberg, and he improvised some simple movement: arms tracing a circle on their way to clapping hands, little skipping steps, a joyous sink to the knees. “Okay, now do those,” he told Pendleton, whose excitement swelled even though he was learning the gestures “through a cloud of rage.”

Acquiring the number didn’t pull Pendleton out of his fury, though, and when Prince caught him backstage one Tuesday night, between his final exit and the curtain call, to invite him for a postshow drink, Pendleton thought he was about to be fired. At a table in the back of the bar at the Willard Hotel, where most of the cast was staying, Prince played what turned out to be one of the most important roles in
Fiddler
: the offstage good cop to Robbins’s tyrant. Prince put a double Jack Daniel’s in front of Pendleton, sat down, and leaned in. “What’s the problem, Austin? Is it Jerry? He’s being mean to you?” Prince asked, as Pendleton recalls. Then he added, sounding as conspiratorial as he could, “If I was directing and a producer ever did this to me, I would kill him, but I’m doing it. Don’t listen to Jerry. Fuck him. You have two shows tomorrow. Just go out and do them. Over this past week, we gave you ‘Miracle of Miracles,’ and you’re still out there depressed all the time. It’s stupid. It’s nothing. What do you want? You have one of the best songs in the show. Just don’t listen to him.”

In the two shows the next day, Pendleton felt his vitality begin to come back, and then Robbins called the first rehearsal of “Wonder of Wonders” with the orchestra. With the whole cast sitting out in the house, Pendleton and Merlin took up their positions onstage and cued the lines leading up to the song. “It was a miracle!” Pendleton said, and the strings came in with their introductory arpeggios. Pendleton bounded through the song, with the skips and handclaps and a breathless gush in his singing. When the horns blared in for the big finish, Robbins vaulted onto the stage. “Fabulous!” he cried. “You’re great!” It was as if the weeklong skirmish had never happened. With only a few performances to go before the company moved on to New York, the song went in that night.

Meanwhile, Mostel’s favorite song had been taken out. It came near the end of the show, after the eviction edict is delivered to Anatevka. “We’ve been waiting for the Messiah all our lives. Wouldn’t this be a good time for him to come?” Mendel asks. Tevye answers, singing about how the Messiah, when he does show up, will apologize for having taken so long. But the Jews weren’t easy to find, “over here a few and over there a few.” Still, he’d make everything work out. The song had to go, the authors understood, because at a moment of pathos the audience could not accept a wry comic number. Mostel hollered about how stupid Robbins had to be to reject it, but Mostel was not in the audience, Harnick noted. “From the stage he couldn’t see that in the context the song didn’t work.” True enough: Broadway musicals of the mid-1960s were not yet hospitable to tonally jarring juxtapositions that would become postmodern commonplaces later (in works by Kander and Ebb, for example).

But “When Messiah Comes” didn’t fit for deeper reasons that make its ejection more than an amusing footnote to the creation of
Fiddler
. First, the lyrics refer obliquely to the Holocaust—“Would that be fair / If Messiah came, and there was no one there?”—and
Fiddler
was recalling the Old Country as the place left behind for the promise of America, not as the graveyard it became. The Messiah’s tuneful apologies clashed with
Fiddler
’s forward-looking way of looking back. More important, the song hammered home the central doctrinal difference between Christians and Jews—that hardly minor matter of whether or not the Messiah had actually shown up just yet. With its universalizing impulse—and the desire among midcentury Jewish spectators to blend in as a distinct but well-fitting member of the American mosaic—
Fiddler
couldn’t afford to draw excessive attention to this contrast. This was the one place the show threatened, indeed, to be “too Jewish,” and that, more than the out-of-place comic tone, is likely what caused the audience to feel, in Harnick’s estimation, “a little uncomfortable.” Robbins pulled the song.

*   *   *

Even as he kept working on the second-act Anatevka extravaganza, Robbins was quietly preparing what no one dreamed the show needed: another first-act dance number. The wedding celebration featured some embellished horas and then Perchik’s city dance. And the inn scene’s “L’Chaim,” with its athletic feats and comic contrast of Jewish and Russian styles, more than sufficed as a crowd pleaser. Why couldn’t Robbins leave well enough alone?

Simple. He could not forget “Mr. Redbeard,” the man performing a
flashen-tantz
at the weddings he had visited as part of his fieldwork, and the men’s revelry in the homosocial Orthodox world, where, “without any constructing elements except a rudimentary rhythm and an avid impulse to express their communal joy—the men stomped, kicked, hit the floor and … tossed their arms about, flung their bodies around.” Back in March, when Robbins had written to the authors with the long list of changes he expected them to make to the script and score, he offered only one unqualified declaration of enthusiasm: “The wedding scene is going to be wonderful, I think.” Robbins knew an occasion for an elaborate production number when he saw one; less than two weeks from the Broadway debut, he had not yet finished turning the original story’s lean mention of the wedding into a showstopper.

As a teenager performing in Maurice Schwartz’s production of
Di brider ashkenazi
, Robbins had seen up close how a staged wedding could combine ceremonial dignity and theatrical fireworks. Eight or nine times a week, for nearly six months, Robbins took part as a supernumerary in the Yiddish play’s marriage scene. Robbins doesn’t mention the solemn, lavishly staged nuptials (or anything else about the production) in his notes and letters on
Fiddler
, but Schwartz’s savvy showmanship could not have failed to make an impression. Beyond the spectacle,
Fiddler
’s wedding scene carried forward an impulse that had made Jewish weddings a staple on the Yiddish American stage: they permitted immigrant audiences to maintain, through a secular form, pleasurable ties to ritual practices they may have left behind. At a further remove—over the distance of time and historical catastrophe, as well as geography—the Jews in
Fiddler
’s audiences could lay claim to such a tie, even as the vigor of the dancing refuted the shame that may have been associated with it: the choreography debunked the common stereotype of weak, effeminate male Jews, so recently accused of having gone like sheep to the slaughter.

Coming right in the middle of
Fiddler
, the wedding scene would be central in more ways than one. In thoroughly theatrical terms it makes the show’s essential gesture in a brilliant confluence of form and theme. It provides a fond and historically authentic representation of a traditional wedding ceremony—the chuppah, bride’s veil, ring placed on the index finger, stomped-on glass, and so on—and swathes it, musically, in an American sensibility. Visually, the scene goes (to borrow key words from the Jewish ceremony) according to the laws of Moses; aurally, it goes according to the heartstring tugs of Tin Pan Alley. Fittingly a waltz, the song Tevye and Golde sing over the action—the tune that had made Bock’s wife cry in their Westchester basement when he and Harnick first played it early in their work on the show—lilts with the thoroughly universal wistfulness of parents wondering, “When did she get to be a beauty, when did he grow to be so tall? Wasn’t it yesterday when they were small?” Robbins was tempted to cut the song. He couldn’t see how to stage it. What are Tevye and Golde
doing
? he needed to know. Bock and Harnick took turns stating the obvious: “Just have them sing it.” For once—and crucially—they prevailed.

No one in the company knew about the late-night work sessions Robbins had conducted with Tommy Abbott and Betty Walberg during the weeks in Detroit, trying out choreographic ideas that Abbott kept track of. And though sometimes Sandra Kazan arrived early to rehearsal and caught Robbins onstage, clad in khakis and a white T-shirt, silently sketching out moves with his body, she had no idea what they were for. So the male dancers could not fathom why they were suddenly called for a 10:00 a.m. rehearsal in the theater lobby in Washington a week into their run there. Many who did not have demanding parts in the “L’Chaim” dance had long figured that nothing taxing was being asked of them and had stopped keeping up a daily workout routine.

Robbins didn’t say much by way of explanation when the dozen men assembled in the carpeted lobby: “This is the dance at the wedding to entertain the bride and groom. Here we go.” He showed the troupe some steps—walking in a circle with some bounce in the knees, to begin—and then passed out glass bottles and told the dancers to put on yarmulkes and do the steps again with the bottles on their heads. One by one, the bottles thudded onto the carpet. Robbins instructed the men to try again. And again. Sammy Bayes finally made his way through the sequence, but the movement looked so tentative and stiff as he used all his energy to concentrate on not dropping the bottle that Robbins finally allowed the men to put on hats. But he permitted no tricks—no holes cut into the crowns, no Velcro. He wanted the audience to feel the tension—for the sheer theatrical thrill as well as for the emotional echo of the precarious eponymous fiddler trying to scratch out a tune without breaking his neck. The dancers definitely felt it. Bodin wasn’t the only one “scared shitless”: all the men knew they would be dancing on a wooden stage and that the choreography called for some of them to slide across the floor on their knees. Glass splinters were not an option.

But the more they practiced, the more undemanding the bottle balancing seemed—standard for those who had stayed in shape and were used to “pulling up” into the dancer’s efficient posture of tucked-in pelvis and lifted rib cage. Robbins selected for the role four men who found the trick easy enough to be able to make it
appear
arduous. Then he showed the group the next section, which most of the rest of the corps would join, featuring far more difficult moves—“whips and hooks,” Robbins called them, body flings that required quick twists and jumps and changes of direction. “You’re working yourself into a state of joy,” he told the men. Within a couple of hours—like magic, to Prince, who watched part of the rehearsal—the men absorbed the choreography. That afternoon, Robbins called a “put-in” rehearsal. The entire cast played through the wedding scene and they burst into applause—and some into tears—when they saw the new number for the first time. That night it went into the show.

It’s impossible to know exactly what moves Robbins took from Mr. Redbeard’s frolics or from the communal cavorting among the men at Orthodox weddings, but certainly Robbins embellished on what he observed. Years earlier, when choreographing “The Small House of Uncle Thomas”—the second-act ballet in
The King and I
—Robbins hit a dead end trying to create authentic Siamese dance, despite his extensive research into the genre. Only when Richard Rodgers urged him to take some license with the movement vocabulary was he able to break through his inhibition and devise an exciting fourteen-minute dance drama that conveyed Thai-ness with its cocked legs, flexed feet and wrists, and wide-stance demi-pliés but that actually borrowed from the Balinese legong dance, Peking opera, Japanese Bunraku and Kabuki, and Cambodian dance—as well as from Martha Graham and, most important, from Robbins’s own imagination. In the “Bottle Dance,” Robbins similarly captured the spirit of the original by maintaining some essential elements—balanced bottle, arms pumping heavenward, the group in a frenzy—and then built on them with sheer choreographic ingenuity and showbiz panache.