September 22, 1964, 60 years ago: Fiddler On the Roof premieres at the Imperial Theatre in New York. It becomes the longest-running musical in Broadway history, a record long since broken.
Jerry Bock wrote the music, and Sheldon Harnick wrote the lyrics. They had previously collaborated on the 1959 musical Fiorello! about former New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia. Joseph Stein wrote the "book," based on Tevye and His Daughters, a 1905 collection of short stories by Ukrainian-born Jewish writer Solomon Naumovich Rabinovich, who wrote under the pen name Sholem Aleichem.
The story takes place in Anatevka, a shtetl (a Yiddish word for a small town made up mostly of Jews) in the Russian Empire in 1905, a year of a failed revolution. The narrator is Tevye, a middle-aged milkman with a wife and 5 daughters, but no sons. This is key, because, traditionally -- and not just in Judaism -- it is the father of the bride who pays for a wedding. And, as Tevye says, "I realize, of course, that it's no shame to be poor. But it's no great honor either."
He begins the play with talk of tradition, and a song titled "Tradition," and says that, for the people there, in their poverty, where they have little freedom due to the impressive regime of Czar Nicholas II, their lives are as precarious as the perch of a fiddler on a roof. Someone asks the local rabbi if there is a blessing for the Czar. He says, "May the Lord bless and keep the Czar... far away from us!"
Like everyone else in Anatevka, Teyve is poor. How poor is he? He has to deliver milk himself, since he can't afford to replace his lame horse. He begins the song "If I Were a Rich Man" in a good mood, imagining what it would be like, but ends it in sadness, asking God if it would "spoil some vast eternal plan."
One of his daughters is supposed to marry the richest man in town ("rich" being relative there), a butcher who is even older than Tevye. But she loves a tailor instead, and the tailor talks Tevye into allowing their marriage. But another daughter loves a Christian boy who had protected her from his people, and Tevye refuses to cross the line of allowing his daughter an interfaith marriage, so they run off and elope.
Finally, a constable arrives, and tells the town that it must be abandoned in 3 days, so that native Russians can take it over. Tevye decides to take his wife and remaining daughters to America, while the married ones and their husbands go to Poland, then also still under Russian control. The fiddler plays one last song, and then leaves the stage as well.
In the original production, Tevye was played by Brooklyn-born Jewish comedian Samuel Joel "Zero" Mostel, a triumph for him after having been blacklisted during the Red Scare of the 1950s. Calling his former film studio "18th Century Fox," he said, "What did they think I was going to do, sell acting secrets to the Russians?" Maria Karnilova played Tevye's wife Goldie. Beatrice Arthur and future game show host Bert Convy were also in the original cast.
Mostel also played Tevye in a 1976 Broadway revival. When the musical first played in the West End, London's version of Broadway, in 1967, Tevye was played by Israel-born actor Chaim Topol. He would also star in the 1971 film version, revivals in the West End in 1983 and 1994, and a Broadway revival in 1990. Herschel Bernardi starred in a 1981 Broadway revival. The most recent Broadway revival, in 2015, starred Danny Burstein.
A 2004 Broadway revival starred Alfred Molina, who would play Tevye by night, and, by day, still in New York, would film scenes as the villainous Dr. Otto Octavius, a.k.a. Doctor Octopus, a.k.a. Doc Ock, for the film Spider-Man 2. He even filmed a scene of himself in costume as Doc Ock, singing "If I Were a Rich Man," resulting in the character's mechanical arms dancing along with him.
He was succeeded the following year by Harvey Fierstein, better known as a playwright. He told an interviewer that someone asked him how, as one of America's most prominent openly gay men, he could play the role of a husband and father. His response was that, when he was cast as Edna Turnblad in the musical version of Hairspray, he had never been, or played, a woman before. In contrast, Tevye was a Jewish man, and he had been a Jewish man his whole life. Of course, his famously gravelly voice wasn't made for singing on Broadway. But it worked just fine for the scatting in "If I Were a Rich Man."
Mostel died in 1977, Karnilova in 2001, Bock and Stein in 2010. As of September 22, 2022, Harnick is still alive. (UPDATE: Harnick died on June 23, 2023, 10 months short of what would have been his 100th birthday.)
The Imperial Theatre is still in operation, at 249 West 45th Street, between 8th Avenue and Broadway. Among the other shows that have premiered there are Babes in Toyland in 1930, On Your Toes in 1936, Annie Get Your Gun in 1946, Call Me Madam in 1950, The Most Happy Fella in 1956, Oliver! in 1963, Pippin in 1972, They're Playing Our Song in 1979, and Dreamgirls in 1981.
One day, when I was about 12 or so, the film version of Fiddler On the Roof was on TV, and my parents told me that this was my heritage. I had grown up with the idea that my father's ancestors were Polish and from a city like Warsaw, while my mother's ancestors were Jewish and from a little shtetl in the Russian Empire, like Anatevka.
It was many years before I found out that the truth was the other way around: My mother's ancestors came from a good-sized city, Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania (although also controlled by Russia at the time), while my father's ancestors came from Borki Wielkie, in northeastern Poland, barely more than a village. Oh well.
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