Mervyn D. Kaufman

Recently I had reason to create a whole bunch of similarly-formatted lookup tables for a programming project. So, to simplify my task, I wrote a snippet of code and labelled it "Hashmaker, Hashmaker, Make Me a Hash."

Silly? Patently. But it shows how deeply the music and story of "Fiddler on the Roof" have driven into my brain. And, of course, I wasn't the only one. Not by millions.

The interesting question is, Why? Why is this particular musical so meaningful? It's not really the music -- "Tradition" and "Matchmaker, Matchmaker" and "If I Were a Rich Man" are fun, and "Sunrise, Sunset" is one of the all-time great musical songs -- but they don't grab you the way that the songs from "Guys and Dolls" or "Oliver!" do. What makes "Fiddler" great is the deep sense of history and emotion, reinforced by the songs -- the sense of a dear old world being destroyed and the characters trying to find a way to live in the world that is coming. A book about "Fiddler" that says it described "The Making of a Musical" should surely describe that.

I don't think this one does. There is very little sense of Joe Stein's quest to take Sholem Aleichem's Tevye stories and turn them into a unified tale. (A lot gets left out -- including the suicide of one of Tevye's daughters). There certainly isn't much sense of why Stein and Bock and Harnick picked this story. What we have here almost feels like the middle volume of a trilogy: The first page takes us to an off-Broadway staging, after the cast has already signed on and they are trying to turn the rough draft into a final product. And it ends about the time the movie is released. There is no history, and no sense of what is to be.

Of course, we can't blame Richard Altman for not knowing what would happen after the book was written! But this isn't really "The Making of a Musical"; it's "What I Saw and Did While Jerome Robbins Directed Fiddler on the Roof and then I Got Tasked With Taking It Around the World." It's all about how the musical was produced, not what made it what it was. And a depressing fraction of it consists of complaints about various Tevyes -- especially Zero Mostel, but a lot of the others were problems, too.

I suppose there is nothing wrong with that. Someone interested in the theatre might learn a lot from it. But I wanted to learn how to create a great theater tradition, not just stage it.… (altro)