On stage
KANFER, STEFAN
On Stage On the Roof and Off By Stefan Kanfer In the biography of her father, Sholem Aleichem, Marie WaifeGoldberg recalls the day she came across a Chinese edition of his stories. Why,...
...And the equations in the Middle East, from suicide bombings to wipeouts of Hamas leaders, are a far cry from the days of the kibbutz and the United Arab Republic...
...Stein's book was, in fact, a model of tongue-and-groove construction...
...We might start with the journalists...
...In between they were allies of McCarthy...
...The philosopher is not only misunderstood, he is misquoted...
...The current Tevye, Alfred Molina, arrives with an additional burden for this role—he is a Gentile...
...Bock's music was a canny blend of minor-key themes from klezmer solos, Eastern European café entertainment, and Tin Pan Alley...
...But he's a nice man, a good catch...
...En route to her destruction, others suffer as well, some fatally...
...When did they...
...Their unsuitable suitors, however, prove a memorable trio...
...A large cirrus cloud of a man, Mostel made some astonishingly light-footed movements...
...But he's anice man, a good catch...
...Her former squeeze, C-Trip (Anthony Mackie), is naturally driven to distraction by this turn of events...
...But the current production at the MinskofTTheater came in with several shadows hanging over it...
...Only a few of the 600,000 who bought the book in China would have read any part of the Bible or ever seen a Jew...
...The song that crystallized parental emotions entered the American mainstream...
...show me the glint of light on broken glass...
...Only David Gallo, who supplied the sets, and Wendall ?. Harrington, who furnished the video design, come off well in this gross and misbegotten evening...
...He had a point...
...Jewry is under attack in Europe, but in a different manner...
...And it won't make one bit ofdifference if I answer right or wrong...
...Should this matter...
...Tevye's "If I Were a Rich Man" was more than a cascade of rhymes, it was the essence of a simple man fantasizing in the face of despair: Id build a big tall house with rooms by the dozen, Right in the middle of the town...
...Then there is the business of Leo Strauss...
...Surely no anti-Bushman would be so self-pitying—his play predicts that dissent is about to be quashed by the government...
...These men and women were not automata—has Robbins never read the dispatches of the late Michael Kelly, who died in Iraq, or of John Burns, whose work for the New York Times was a model of lucidity and objectivity...
...Ipromiseyou ?? be happy...
...How could they put themselves in the place of so typical a Jew, so drenched in Biblical lore, as Tevye...
...But only when he's sober—so you're all right...
...Actually, one of Strauss' critics wrote the line, and it was printed in Executive Intelligence Review, a magazine published by Lyndon LaRouche, a bizarre believer in Jewish cabals...
...Between and sometimes during scenes, there are riffs fromHamlet, hip-hop recitations, and quotes from Tin Pan Alley favorites like "Black and Blue" and "Summertime," as well as such spirituals as "Didn't It Rain...
...Robert Petkoff as a red-hot revolutionary, and David Ayers, as a good-hearted wise goy, are almost as entertaining...
...Since that unique amalgam of the hilarious and the poignant, every performer who plays Tevye is compelled to build the character from Ground Zero...
...He takes on the coloration of those around him, but patiently and deviously works to defeat them...
...Surely some of his best producers are Jewish...
...And in the rush of assimilation, American Jews yearned for some information, however sugarcoated, about the days when Ellis Island was the port of entry for their forebears...
...The plot has been updated before, but never so audaciously as in Regina Taylor's Drowning Crow...
...His threepronged solution to the Jewish Problem: "One-third conversion, one-third emigration, and one-third starvation...
...If you please, Reb Tevye—' "Pardon me, Reb Tevye— " Posing problems that would cross a rabbi's eyes...
...Then a thought occurred to her: "Perhaps they go beyond the parochial frame, and see in Tevye the dignity of the lowly, of people much like themselves...
...Only a handful ofbooks about the Holocaust had been published...
...Seven years later a film adaptation was released, and garnered several Oscars...
...If originality were the only criterion, this rap-stained version would merit close attention...
...Some Chekhovian elements are discernible in the chaos...
...His is a serious, even somber, figure dragging a horseless milk wagon behind him, one more weight to be shouldered, like family responsibility and religious belief in the face of torment...
...The author, one Kitty Clark, views him as a proto-fascist (never mind that he fled the Nazis) who believed in keeping Americans ignorant by pumping them up "with nationalism and religion...
...The playwright took that incident and made it the basis of a drama—except that in the case of The Seagull, the beautiful creature of love is a young girl, maimed by a manipulative and self-centered writer...
...Against all odds, though, Fiddler prevailed...
...And surely this would be unthinkable in the America he presents with such blind, deaf and dumb outrage...
...The entire opus can be found in Catalyst, "Utah's Progressive Monthly," evidently the main source of Robbins's political theories...
...It was always easy to get laughs from a persona who addresses God as a familiar, but Molina will have none of it...
...All very well in their time, they would seem self-conscious and gaudy in an age of minimalism...
...A?t...
...Right...
...As Tevye's wife, Goldie, Randy Graff is a standout...
...An essay about the late University of Chicago professor is quoted in the Playbill...
...A sample: "Many of the major players occupying the White House are descendants of the Jewish-American New York intellectuals who veered from the radical Left (anti-Stalinist Trotskyism of the 1920s and '30s) to the radical Right (hence the neo...
...many a Caucasian has played Othello in blackface, and until Jacob Adler essayed the part of Shylock on Broadway in 1903, it had always been filled by Christians with heavy makeup and false noses...
...With the exception of Tevye, the Anatevkans were portrayed as simple folk, children's book illustrations from a bygone era...
...Decked out in Vicki Mortimer's period costumes, the rest of the large cast does credit to the vibrant score, performed by an onstage orchestra led by Kevin Stites...
...in the couple's hands, their paean to marriage, "Do You Love Me...
...True...
...Is it possible to make Fiddler appealing in the new millennium...
...Like a Solomon the Wise...
...But those who buy tickets to Embedded, the fatuous farce he wrote and directed, could hardly be blamed for coming to that conclusion...
...There's more to life than that...
...You've heard he has a temper...
...And even if you're not...
...Surely no enemy of the White House would be so careless in his research...
...If Robbins is not a mole, if he is truly serious about a Semitic neocon conspiracy, a monstrous Hitlerian elite running American foreign policy, then by default he would have to be one of those Hollywood celebs surrounded by sycophants, cosseted by film studios, preaching to the choir, overpraised, overindulged, overrated, overpaid, smug and slipshod...
...Should any of them want to have another go at Chekhov sometime, they might bear in mind his dictum: "Don t tell me the moon is shining...
...These include Woof (read Paul Wolfowitz), Pearly White (read Richard Perle), Rum-Rum (Donald Rumsfeld), and Gondola (Condoleeza Rice)—played, respectively, by Kate Mulligan, Andrew Wheeler, Brian Powell, and Riki Lindhome...
...There would be one long staircase just going up, And one even longer coming down, And one more leading nowhere, just for show...
...There are now shelves of Jewish history in Barnes andNoble...
...She uses it as a sack in which to cram some 200 years of African-American experience...
...There are no other justifications, and no other truths...
...Right...
...Harnick's lyrics shrewdly conveyed an epoch and its characters...
...But this extraordinary success was not without its detractors—many of them Jewish intellectuals...
...After all, a show that portrayed the beleaguered Jew of Eastern Europe as a violinist perched on an eave was hardly the stuff of musical megahits...
...They hear in his voice the universal outcry against injustice which stirs man in the rice paddy as much as in Tevye's Anatevka...
...Taylor, whose script maligns the far superior Raisin in the Sun, is totally out of her depth...
...That universal outcry was first heard on the stage 40 years ago, when Fiddler on the Roof, freely adapted from the Aleichem tales, opened at the Imperial Theater...
...For adaptor Regina Taylor is not content with updating a 19th century work...
...He derives little consolation from his actress mother, Josephine (Alfre Woodard), who tries to comfort him, but gets only his contempt for appearing in cheesy commercial plays...
...David Leveaux has taken some brickbats for muting the entire production...
...Objectively, no...
...This from an actor/director/ impresario well known for his opposition to the present Administration's domestic and foreign policies, who just won an Oscar, whose film and stage works are freely produced in Los Angeles and New York, and whose Embedded keeps extending its run at the Public Theater...
...heroism...
...Chekhov picked up the bird...
...Allright, he's sixty-two...
...Still, in such an obviously Jewish show, Molina seemed an odd, almost perverse, choice...
...Their private conversations reveal that the war took place for only one reason—to distract the public from the disintegrating economy at home...
...As their three oldest daughters, Laura Michelle Kelly, Sally Murphy and Tricia Paoluccio are long on vocal skills and short on individuality...
...Set in a tiny Jewish village in the year 1905, the production seemed to have limited appeal...
...In 1964 there were still many in the audience with firsthand recollections of life in Eastern Europe...
...early on, C-Trip declares, "The play ain't representing life as it is or is supposed to be, but the visions in my head...
...Under Jerome Robbins' direction Fiddler was careful to euphemize the pogroms that wrecked property and murdered innocents under the rule of Czar Alexander III...
...The show presents the war from a trio of viewpoints...
...When the battle in Gomorrah (read Iraq) goes badly, when innocents are slain by friendly fire, these reporters feed their readers and viewers military propaganda about U.S...
...I don't remember growing older...
...How can I help to ease their way...
...Alas, setting The Seagull on South Carolina's Gullah Islands does not justify the spillage of energy at the Biltmore Theater...
...If this seems chaotic, it is precisely Taylor's intention...
...There was one less beautiful creature of love in the world, and two fools went home, and sat down to dinner...
...By placing a play within a play, he allowed Tevye's daughters to mock the Matchmaker, who in days of yore overruled such minor items as requited love and mutual attraction: Hodel, ohHodel, have I made a match foryou...
...Then there is the shadow cast by history itself...
...Foster), an officer fond of quoting Stephen Sondheim's lyrics, are censors in olive drab...
...In their place are an unsentimental birch forest, looming sky and skeletal buildings, cannily designed by Tom Pye and subtly lit by Brian MacDevitt...
...Director Marion McClinton, whose hand has been less than firm in recent August Wilson productions, is unable to do much with a cast of gifted performers...
...All of which would indicate that Robbins is secretly on the other side of the Iraq question...
...the friend shot awkwardly and wounded a woodcock...
...There are also videos of contemporary black celebrities, and still photographs of prominent blacks from Dred Scott to Denzel Washington...
...As for the Cossacks, they appeared to be noisy bullies who smashed furniture when ordered, but who could dance up a storm when the occasion arose...
...As Motel, the shlemihl turned mensch, John Cariani warbles well, and moves with the agility of Chaplin...
...A novelist turned TV hack, Robert Trigor (Peter Francis James) has a fling with a local belle, Hannah Jordan (Aunjanue Ellis...
...He's tall...
...Some, like the Jessica Lynch caricature, Jen-Jen Ryan (Kaili Hollister), are saccharine...
...The original sets were by Boris Aaronson, who derived his inspiration from the floating worlds of Marc Chagall...
...When you're rich, they think you really know...
...The shrewdly commercial book by Joseph Stein, and the infectious music and lyrics by Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick, prompted critic Irving Howe to note acrimoniously, "American Jews suffer these days from a feeling of guilt because they have lost touch with the past from which they derive, and often compound this guilt by indulging themselves in unearned nostalgia...
...I had to kill it for him...
...The less, for example, they know about Eastern European Jewish life or even the immigrant Jewish experience in America, the more inclined they are to celebrate it...
...Yet Fiddler turned out to be more than some of its parts...
...he also produced a variety of ad-libbed musical sound effects, animal cries and melodic trills that made every solo an adventure...
...Some, like the growling gasbag Colonel Hardchannel (V.J...
...Chava...
...Next come the embedded journalists, lackeys who parrot whatever the Army hands out...
...For two generations now, musicians at weddings (of almost every denomination) have felt compelled to play "Sunrise, Sunset" as if it were a part of the liturgy: Is this the little girl I carried...
...The most important men would come to fawn on me...
...Not that this is entirely his fault...
...Israel was three years away from the Six-Day War...
...These do not cease until he puts a bullet in his brain, effectively ending the drama...
...Amole, as fans of John Le Carré know, is a spy who buries himself deep in the enemy camp...
...Given this background, a Fiddler revival would seem to be a shoo-in...
...It is hard to know where to begin the autopsy on this theatrical corpse...
...True...
...Is this the little boy at play...
...The first one was cast by Zero Mostel, the initial Tevye...
...shows an affection that was never as credible in earlier versions...
...if he lacks the inspired lunacy of Mostel, he adds a palpable dignity...
...What words of wisdom can I give them...
...What remains unchanged, happily, is Jerome Robbins' choreography, a high-energy outburst of folk-dancing and whirling-dervish ballets...
...Now they must learn from one another, day by day...
...But to repeat is not to honor...
...The suicide occurs much too late to have any effect—save that of relief from all the ostentatious yammering and loudly dropped names...
...Clark's is an extraordinarily ignorant essay...
...He and a friend had gone hunting...
...Don't ask me what...
...It seems unlikely that Tim Robbins is actually a George W Bush fan, a pro-Iraq War belligerent and propagandist for the neoconservatives...
...These malign figures, according to Robbins, are the philosophical children of Leo Strauss...
...Molina turns out to be a full-throated, convincing Tevye...
...That is, from side to side...
...They would ask me to advise them...
...A fine tin roof with real wooden floors below...
...In 2004 every aspect has altered, making it impossible to view Fiddler in the old way...
...Finally, there are the villains of the piece: vicious, masked warmongers who design and direct the combat from the safety of their Beltway offices...
...The good news is that this production is far more than a stone-by-stone reconstruction of the doomed Anatevka...
...First come the grunts themselves, all victims of large forces they cannot hope to understand...
...He may be low on the worldly scale, but he can think for himself, have a view of himself and of his situation in the general scheme of things...
...Nancy Opel is a bit too glamorous for the role of Yente the Matchmaker, but no laugh escapes her...
...without forcing the issue, he has helped Fiddler to keep its balance on the very slippery roof of Broadway 2004...
...I'vefound him...
...Within the limits imposed by Broadway commercialism, he preserved much of Aleichem's irony and, on closer examination, created a village of notable archetypes—the matchmaker, the rabbi, the feuding businessmen, the coltish boys and girls who were at once attracted to, and terrified by, each other...
...Pace Robbins, he did not say, "Moral virtue only exists in popular opinion where it serves the purpose of controlling the unintelligent majority...
...He's young...
...Chekhov remembered the origin of his play, The Seagull...
...Some are simple...
...It ran for seven years (3,242 performances), won numerous Tony awards, and then went out into the world, playing in more than a dozen foreign versions (including an Asian one...
...He's handsome...
...He 11 beat you every night...
...Will you be a lucky bride...
...He's handsome...
...Why, she wondered, would the Orient have any interest in that homespun shtetl philosopher, Tevye the Milkman...
Vol. 87 • March 2004 • No. 2
