As the holiday season
approaches, it’s high time to pay tribute to one of December’s favorite films.
No, I‘m not talking about It’s a
Wonderful Life or Elf or Home Alone. This post is devoted to a
movie that’s been a star of many a holiday singalong: the 1971 screen
adaptation of the musical theatre classic, Fiddler
on the Roof.
The whole history of this
long-running Broadway hit is captured in a fascinating book by Alisa Solomon, first
published in 2013. It’s titled Miracle of Miracles: A Cultural History of
Fiddler on the Roof. Solomon begins with author Sholem-Aleichem and his
creation of a lovable Old Country dairyman named Tevye, burdened with three
marriageable and strong-willed daughters. Her book’s first section, and its
driest, explains early attempts to put the Tevye stories on the American stage.
Section Two bursts to life with an insider picture of exactly how the
Broadway hit came to be. Solomon has
interviewed the still-surviving members of the Fiddler team and mined the archives to get a full picture of the
joys and kvetches associated with the
mounting of a Broadway blockbuster that at one time seemed the most desperate
of gambles.
In section three, Solomon
visits productions of Fiddler in
places as far-flung as Israel, Poland, and Brownsville, Brooklyn, where ethnic
divisions almost derail a heartfelt junior high production in which most of the
young actors are Latino or African-American. But one chapter, “Anatevka in
Technicolor,” is devoted to the
big-budget film. What’s striking is how, though the material remains the same,
the aesthetics in play and film are so different. Under Jerome Robbins’
brilliant direction and choreography, the stage version avoided kitschy Borscht
Belt stylistics to capture the flavor of a fragile community rent asunder both
by outside enemies and by inner stresses. But there’s a fanciful folk spirit to
the staging, enhanced by Zero Mostel’s larger-than-life portrayal of the leading
character. Audiences around the globe quickly came to love the show’s universal
qualities, to the point that book author Joseph Stein was asked, at the Tokyo
opening of Fiddler, how the team had
managed to understand so well the essence of Japanese family dynamics.
When Norman Jewison was invited
to direct the film version, he was best known for the Oscar-winning In the Heat of the Night, which for its
day was bold in addressing racial discrimination in a small Southern town. Jewison
favors what might be called poetic realism on screen. He wanted to show
audiences an Eastern European Jewish shtetl that was more real than charming.
And he wanted at all costs to avoid turning his characters into outsized
caricatures. That’s why he chose as his Tevye a sturdily handsome Israeli,
Topol, who was younger and more macho than the various stage Tevyes had been.
Filming in what was then Yugoslavia, Jewison captured the look of the fields
and forests, the ramshackle homes, and especially the tiny synagogue, modeled
after the few still-standing “shuls” that survived in the countryside of
eastern Europe. The portrayal of Teyve as an attractive and appealing “mensch,”
notes Solomon, made for a nice antidote to the on-screen portrayal of Jewish
neurotics of the Woody Allen ilk who dominated the movies of that era.
Still, for all its Jewish
authenticity, the film too has inspired those from many cultures to tell their
own stories. One Bollywood director dreams of transplanting the basic story to strife-torn
Kashmir . And Lin-Manuel Miranda admits that In the Heights, his pre-Hamilton
musical about a changing New York Latino community, borrows from his
admiration for Fiddler. Who knew?
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