HAPPY 60th, FIDDLER ON THE ROOF By Peter Filichia
The 1964-65 season gave birth to a dozen new musicals, but only one has ever enjoyed a Broadway revival.
FIDDLER ON THE ROOF, of course.
Make that, revivals, plural. Wonder of wonders, miracle of miracles, there have been five remountings of the musical that celebrates a significant anniversary this week.
After 60 full years, it’s nice to know.
Part of FIDDLER’s success of course came from the magnificent score that composer Jerry Bock and lyricist Sheldon Harnick provided.
Few opening numbers are as strong as “Tradition” in establishing time, place and characters.
“If I Were a Rich Man” is more a solo musical scene than a song.
As for the joyous “To Life,” Harnick must have smiled for at least a half-hour after he’d found an especially felicitous rhyme: Tevye sings, “Here’s to the father I tried to be,” followed by Lazar Wolf’s “Here’s to my bride-to-be.” How often is “to be” used in two distinctly different contexts?
In MERRILY WE ROLL ALONG, when Franklin Shepard and Charlie Kringas appear on The Jeffrey Nye Show, the host asks them the oft-posed and uber-trite question, “Which comes first – the music or the lyrics?”
We never need to wonder that about FIDDLER. Check out the 1967 London cast album (starring Topol, the future star of the 1971 film). Its bonus tracks reveal that Bock went to the piano before Harnick made an appointment with his pad of paper.
Hear Bock say, “Sheldon, here’s a gay little folk thing that I think has some interest for us – where I don’t know.”
He then plays the piano and hums along with, “Bup-bup-bup-bup-bup-BAH-bup-bup-BAH-bup-bup-bup-bup-bup” – which eventually became the main melody of “The Tailor Motel Kamzoil.”
After that’s done, Bock says, “Shel, this theme may be Tevye’s theme, whatever that is. Or may not. It’s got a certain Yiddish-Russian quality. It’s overly sad, which might be a point of humor. On the other hand, it could also be legitimately sad, which might be more poignant than humorous. And here it is.”
And what follows Bock’s “Bah-bah-bah-bah-BAH-bah-bah-BAH-bah” –
the tune we now know as “Sabbath Prayer.”
Next Bock says, “This came on a rhythmic thing that might be wonderful for chorus. Just a block hunk of something for the middle of somewhere. See if this strikes you.”
And indeed, Bock’s singing of “Rut-rut-rut-rut-rut-rut-RUT-rut-rut-rut-RUT-rut” struck Harnick as exactly right for the middle of “Tevye’s Dream,” where Frumah-Sarah comes in: “What is this about your daughter marrying my husband?” all the way to “How can you allow your daughter to take my place?”
Bock’s next cut is “We Never Missed a Sabbath Yet,” the show’s original opening song. Tevye and Golde’s younger daughters ask to go out and play, only to have their mother tell them there’s still too much work to do. Meanwhile, older daughter Hodel has her nose in a book, which leads Golde’s muttering, “With a million things I really need, God gives me daughters who can read!”
You’ll then hear a few bars of what would eventually become “Tradition.” Here, though, it has among other lyrics, “There’s noodles to be made, and chickens to be plucked, and liver to be chopped, and challah to be baked.”
Next: “Shel, I just hit something that I’m very happy about. It has an authentic folk Russian feel, a la Moisieyev. It gives me the spirit of the girls in TEVYE,” he says.
Confused? Bock wasn’t referring to the character, but to the musical itself – for indeed, TEVYE was FIDDLER’s title during the days when Fred Coe was planning to co-produce it with Hal Prince.
(And wasn’t Coe forever sorry that he didn’t?)
Back to Bock, who says the music is “a flirting idea. Coquette. It has the bubble, the slight tease, but it’s unashamedly sentimental.”
Under those circumstances, it must be “Matchmaker, Matchmaker,” right? Not at all. Harnick didn’t hear it as “flirting” or “coquette,” “but “unashamedly sentimental,” which is why the lyric he wrote to it turned out to be “Sunrise, Sunset.”
The inner thoughts that Tevye and Golde have at the wedding of their daughter – “Is this the little girl I carried? Is this the little boy at play? I don’t remember growing older; when did they?” – are sentiments to which every parent can relate (or will).
Here’s Bock singing his melody, utterly unaware that with Harnick’s lyrics, it would be played and/or sung at virtually every wedding, bar-mitzvah or bat-mitzvah for the next six decades and counting. It is undoubtedly the most played of the hundred or so songs that the team ever wrote. It’s even mentioned three times in Wendy Wasserstein’s play Isn’t It Romantic?
And starting in 2011, after New York’s state legislature approved the Marriage Equality Act, Harnick took a suggestion from Reverend Joshua Ellis and wrote some new lyrics for gay and lesbian weddings. Then he added ones for Gentile gay and lesbian weddings, for “Is there a canopy in store for me” isn’t relevant to their ceremonies.
The entire decade of the ‘60s saw 12 songs from Broadway musicals make Billboard’s Top 40. They ranged from first-place achievers
“Hello, Dolly! and HAIR’s “Aquarius” and “Let the Sunshine In” all the way down to MAN OF LA MANCHA’s “The Impossible Dream” which managed to take the 35th slot for a week.
“Sunrise, Sunset” never received a cover recording that cracked the list. Even when jazz saxophonist Cannonball Adderly made his album of FIDDLER songs, he included “Chavaleh” and “Dear Sweet Sewing Machine” both of which would be dropped from the score. But he ignored “Sunrise, Sunset.”
Parents certainly haven’t at tens of thousands of subsequent events.
“Sunrise, Sunset” actually describes the entire musical in five words: “Laden with happiness and tears.” Audiences at FIDDLER grin, chuckle and laugh at one scene shortly before they turn grim-faced at a character’s serious life-altering moment. Minutes later, they return to belly laughs only to tear up seconds later.
As for the song’s observation that “swiftly go the days,” indeed, they do, as is proved by the 21,900-plus since FIDDLER ON THE ROOF came into all our lives.
One final FIDDLER story. At a West Virginia community theater some years ago, all was going well until the tender scene in which Tevye brings Hodel to the train station. With her suitcase in hand, she’s leaving for Siberia to be with Perchik, her fiancé who’s been arrested for sowing the seeds of the Russian Revolution.
Here Hodel sings the score’s most tender and heartbreaking song, “Far from the Home I Love.” We know that she’s seeing her father for the last time, and Tevye knows it, too. Both endeavor to be brave.
However, the poignancy of this song and scene were undercut by – of all things – Hodel’s suitcase. Even those with less than 20-20 vision could see printed on it the faded letters that once previously and more prominently said “Professor Harold Hill.”
Peter Filichia can be heard most weeks of the year on www.broadwayradio.com. His new day-by-day wall calendar – A SHOW TUNE FOR TODAY – 366 Songs to Brighten Your Year – will be released on October 15th, but is now available for pre-order on Amazon.
