Did you catch “Fiddler on the Roof”? If not, you have until Sunday before Harvey Fierstein and company strike the set and head for the next burg. And if you missed it, all I can say is “Feh.”
San Francisco Chronicle critic Robert Hurwitt found Fierstein’s Tevye annoying. True, Harvey did do a lot of mugging. Though when it came time to get serious, as the show does in a few scenes, Harvey’s gravel-voiced gravitas was spot on.
I didn’t mind the mugging. In fact, I loved the show because, well, I love the show. You’d have to cast Lady Gaga as Golde or mount a puppet-porn version to ruin “Fiddler on the Roof.” Otherwise, it’s an invincible work of theater.
Until now, I had never seen it on stage. I knew “Fiddler” only from Norman Jewison’s handsome but plodding 1971 film version. Its overly earnest star, Topol, had been my template for Tevye, the Croatian exteriors my only image of Anatevka.
So it was a revelation to see “Fiddler” in all its theatrical glory. The play is much funnier than the film, and more moving. For much of the second act, Robyn and I wept, even though we knew every song, every line.
My late father loved “Fiddler.” He saw the show on Broadway, starring his friend, Herschel Bernardi, as Tevye. Though Heshie (as we called him) couldn’t get my dad a seat in the theater, he was able to watch from the wings.
Thanks to my dad’s influence, I am totally old school when it comes to musicals. I love classics from the golden age, and am cool to shapeless, plotless spectacles like “Cats.”
I rank “Fiddler” as one of the best — maybe the best — of all time, alongside shows such as “West Side Story,” “Show Boat” and “Oklahoma!”
As if you didn’t know, Jews created all of them.
That’s no newsflash, as the connection between Jews and musical theater is by now a cultural cliché. Without the Gershwins, Rodgers & Hammerstein, Leonard Bernstein and Steven Sondheim, we’d still be living in caves.
As they sing in “Spamalot,” the Tony-winning musical from the assiduously non-Jewish Monty Python: “There’s a very small percentile/That enjoy a dancing gentile … But you won’t succeed on Broadway/If you don’t have any Jews.”
Though “Fiddler” has been performed around the world (check out the Japanese version on YouTube), I think it’s fair to say the show speaks most directly to the Jewish heart.
It’s basically the story of my grandmothers.
My mother’s mother, Tillie, grew up in a Latvian shtetl; my father’s mother, Lillian, in a Ukrainian shtel. Tillie sailed to New York on the Caledonia; Lillian ended up in Chicago.
Neither ever saw “Fiddler on the Roof.” They didn’t have to. The way of life depicted in that show, so exotic and nostalgic to today’s audiences, coursed through my grandmothers’ veins. And through them, I feel connected to that lost world.
As delightful as I find the story of Tevye, his daughters and his balabusta wife, the part that gets to me most is the savagery of the Cossacks, the hasty packing and the Jews’ slow trudge out of Anatevka.
Of course these are fictional characters, but only just barely. How many real-life Jews faced similar roundups, similar anguish, similar exile? I sat in that theater after the curtain fell and thought, “This is why we have an Israel.”
Every day at work I comb through international headlines and hysterical press releases. Kaffiyeh-clad protesters blast the Jewish state. Pompous diplomats whine about Israeli “apartheid.” Pundits wonder if the ever-dying people will finally face a tipping point.
Plenty of Jews, too, fret over Israel and the state of the Jewish union. That’s not surprising. Self-reflection is a Jewish trait. We nurture all reasonable doubts.
But let’s learn from “Fiddler’s” fictitious milkman. After 2,000 years of exile, ghettos, wanderings and crematoria, we’re home and we’re not budging. There is no other hand.
Dan Pine can be reached at [email protected].