To Russia, with Music

...But nobody fights success...

...the performers fall, leap and sway in a fluid manner that brings out Robbins' aptitude for illustrating and stylizing the body's natural movements, rather than discovering new ones, as do Martha Graham and Alwin Nikolais...

...Sholom Aleichem's simple charms are as attractive as his humor but I see no evidence in the stories that he was a scholarly historian of Old Russia...

...To make it he has torn jokes out of Sholom Aleichem, pasted them together like trading stamps and filled in the gaps...

...Nevertheless, the score and the choreography, both of which came in for little critical attention, seem to me to have made modest advances in the art of the musical, advances worth noticing in these impoverished times...

...Harnick is not alone in this practice...

...He has devised a choreography that is more like tumbling than the dance...

...The scenes, for example, are not tied together neatly...

...Jerry Bock's music has immeasurably improved and Sheldon Harnick's lyrics have declined...

...This one is...

...Even he, they felt, was being exploited, and kept away from the classics by the grasping hands of commerce...

...And the box office at the Imperial Theater is swarming, morning and evening...

...Courage loses two sons and a daughter...

...Instead, the structure is an abstract concept made dramatic—the breakdown of a rigid tradition in a distinctive community—and the story ends in dissolution as Tevye, his family and his neighbors separate...

...A feat indeed, and he does it without resorting to those seesaw intonations that pass for a Jewish characteristic in the theater but usually sound more like an affront to the native accents of Jamaica or Merionethshire...

...And anybody who believes him to be dry and unsentimental is advised to re-read the stories, starting with Tevye Wins a Fortune...

...There is some validity in these accusations, but not much...

...I was only out of sight/Waiting right/ Here . . . Everything is close at hand,/Simple and/Clear...

...The consequence is a gain in the force of the message, and a loss in the message itself...

...For the Thirty Years' War as a background, we have the Polish-Russian pogroms substituted...

...During the number If I Were a Rich Man he veers off into riffs of chasidic chanting that are sheer glottal gymnastics...

...Mostel's Tevye, the Courage in reverse, pushes a handcart about the proscenium...

...As a matter of observation, rather than fact, its affinities with Mother Courage are too many and too obtrusive to be overlooked...

...Only Maria Karnilova (herself a choreographer) who plays his wife Golde, stands up to Mostel on the boards, and she has found the most effective stratagem, perhaps out of self-protection: the noisier and more outrageous his wooing of the auditorium, the quieter and more restricted become her voice and attitudes...

...If anything, Joseph Stein's book is too deferential to the original...

...Mostel's acting is less resourceful...

...A musical should be strong on the music...

...His most triumphant creation is the final scene, the migration, played on a turntable with the members of the cast marching and countermarching in opposition, forestage and rearstage, without leaving their places...

...It has been suggested that he is a biting satirist, that the show has vulgarized his sentiments and, in the weekly theater guide of that resolutely Midcuit organ, the Herald Tribune's New York magazine, that it "adulterates its simple charms with touches that are Broadway rather than the backwater Russian village...

...She steals back from him with tiny, crafty weapons...

...I wonder whether there is a director in New York today who would dare try to discipline Mostel...

...He has, in truth, turned down a number of offers of legitimate roles: at Stratford-on- Avon in England, for example...

...So far, no damage to Sholom Aleichem...

...Nor can it be coincidence that the director, Jerome Robbins, did Mother Courage a couple of years ago, and that Brecht is percolating down to Broadway's creative strata, as witness the story in the Saturday Evening Post of the Kelly debacle...

...Few critics seem to have noticed this...

...But it doesn't aim to be...

...While a number with some life to it, such as Matchmaker, Matchmaker, for which Bock has written an engaging waltz melody, is sloppy on the clinching rhymes ("For poppa, make him a scholar,/For momma, make him a king,/I wouldn't holler/ If he were as handsome as anything"), not to mention the ideas...

...He begins by inducing a state of immediate comic hysteria among his audience...

...Miracle of Miracles and Sunrise, Sunset and Now I have Everything are exercises in insipidity...

...Joanna Merlin, Julia Migenes and Tanya Everett, the three oldest daughters, look instantly ravishable and sing like birds (one lark, two pigeons), but they hardly compete with Mostel...

...he has excelled himself here...

...He moves balletically, leaning dangerously into and out of the line of dance and completing every gesture roundly...

...Some of the daily reviewers have been back to see it a second time and have raked through their vocabularies for new and more sumptuous flattery...

...But further...

...This script is far more sprightly than that musty play of his, Enter Laughing...

...Even as a frame for Mostel it is anything but a joyful show...

...It is difficult to sing and Julia Migenes croaks on some of the lower notes, but that is hardly Bock's fault...

...The worst numbers are the pseudo-devotional Sabbath Prayer and L'Chaim: To Life, which reek of insincerity and juggle phrases from the Bible, translations of traditional blessings, and extracts from the Sabbath services, a regurgitation of religion with no feeling...

...The folk dances in Fiddler are more like a comment on the originals than an attempt at reproducing them,' and Robbins works them seamlessly into the plot...

...And when he copes with two or more distinct themes, as in The Tailor, Motel Kamzoil, he (or his orchestrator, Don Walker) pulls them into hard and clear coherence...

...His voice is untrained but his enunciation and timing are impeccable...

...Tevye "loses" three daughters, the first to a tailor, the second to a revolutionary, the third—horror of horrors—to a goy...

...it is of a piece, a collective score...

...I am not saying for one moment that Fiddler compares as finished art to Brecht's play, only that this was not a bad model to choose and that the choice finally recognizes that the blatantly epic form is suitable, if not inevitable, for musicals...

...Apart from some passages in Ulysses in Nighttown and The Good Woman of Setzuan, I have not seen indications that he is qualified to be anything but a musical comedy star—of the first magnitude, admittedly, but this is quite different from regarding him as a gifted straight actor...

...Fiddler is no Guys and Dolls, not even a My Fair Lady...

...The final scene is directly reminiscent of, possibly borrowed from, The Funeral...

...This is something of a relief from the Agnes de Mille set pieces, which die hard in the musical theater, even when they are given a modern flourish by, say, Bob Fosse or Herbert Ross . . . and just as Agnes de Mille proved a relief from the swooning, circling and arm-flapping of the '30s...

...The words and their meanings must be chipped down until they reach an ultimate in simplicity and naturalness, like Oscar Hammerstein's "If you'll excuse an expression I use, I'm in love with a wonderful guy...

...Stephen Sondheim's lyrics fight off artificiality as though it were a disease or a crime, as though it were not the essential quality of a song that pokes up ridiculously out of dialogue, or is even carefully led up to...

...Jerome Robbins' staging incorporates the dancing as well as I ever remember seeing it done in a musical, certainly with a great deal more ease than in his more vaunted West Side Story and Ballets USA, with their monotonously finger-snapping young men heaving about in tight T-shirts...

...Bock's music, though, atones for many of Harnick's defects...

...Far from the Home I Love is musically one of the most satisfying ballads in recent memory...

...Most of the other performers are silhouettes...

...This is a Broadway show, not an opera, and it is fruitless to mistake it for its betters...

...Some of Sholom Aleichem's throwaway lines are set up too obviously for heavy laughs, but they are superior wisecracks (the most famous is probably, "With God's help I starved to death"), and Stein often catches the same rueful mixture of self-pity and self-contempt in his additions to them...

...he can cross the melody or rhythm for a few improvisatory notes and come back into the bar to hit a sound dead center...

...In much the same way he sings with professional skill...

...Besides, one does not ask of an adaptation that it be true to its source, but rather that it sit well in the new medium...

...But the double surprise of the evening is the songs...

...With the exception of Anatevka, the gloomiest song since Oh, What a Beautiful Morning!, it hews to the Yiddish tradition without forcing the minor chords, and puts an exciting, contrasting beat behind many of the words...

...But from then on he behaves shamelessly, making the stage his private domain and repeating little tricks (the crossed eyes, the feminine shimmy and flounce) that began as trademarks and are rapidly turning into platitudes for those of us who saw him strain them to collapsing point in A Funny Thing Happened, etc...

...Harnick, who has shown a clever touch in the past and still contributes some stinging numbers to revues, is evidently yielding to the old belief that songs should struggle to come over like talking...

...Since Fiorello...

...But a number of the more serious critics have given this musical no credit other than its employment of Zero Mostel...

...The sets by Boris Aronson and Patricia Zipprodt's costumes carry intimations (naturally) of Chagall's curled shapes and opaque colors...

...while Sholom Aleichem's stories, which enjoy a high prestige count these days, have been denatured for the benefit of those middle-class Jewish dunces who bow to Broadway prices...

...Mostel is very much at home in this dance atmosphere...