Free The Secret Life of the American Musical: How Broadway Shows Are Built by Jack Viertel

who was slated to direct and choreograph.
    “Jerry kept saying to us, ‘What’s it about? What’s it about?’ And Joe Stein would try to patiently explain that it was about a milkman with five daughters who needed to get married, and Jerry would stop us and say, ‘No! I mean what’s it about ?’”
    Robbins was talking about the show’s subject, and Stein was describing its plot, which was, at bottom, a domestic story about family life. They are entirely different things, though the latter must serve the former. Finally, as they worked through the possible reasons that the show should exist at all, they hit upon the underlying idea. Fiddler is about the destruction of a culture and its hoped-for transmutation to a new place. The “little village” of Anatevka is one of many shtetls, tiny, poor, but self-sufficient Jewish communities within the larger, largely hostile country Russia. And what happens in the course of the show is that Anatevka is dismantled piece by piece, despite the best efforts of its citizens to hold it together. Once again, the world is in transition, and our little corner of it is threatened with oblivion (although Anatevka and River City, Iowa, are about as different as two little self-sufficient worlds could be). But this was a favorite theme of Robbins’s—most of his serious shows in some way confront the clash of cultures and the cost of the outcome. West Side Story deals with the arrival of Puerto Rican immigrants on American soil and how the world shifts. Gypsy is concerned with the death of vaudeville as show business marches on. Even The King and I , which Robbins choreographed but didn’t direct, reaches the height of its powers when dealing with what it means that the British have arrived in Siam, bringing a threatening modern world to a settled ancient one.
    Fiddler on the Roof , which was to be Robbins’s last Broadway show, takes the theme to its logical conclusion. Anatevka is destroyed and the diaspora moves on, to Chicago, New York, and the beginnings of Israel, where the culture will flower in different ways, carrying its ideas on its back along with its conflicts and its traditions.
    “Finally,” the show’s producer, Hal Prince, recalled, “when Jerry Robbins asked, ‘What’s it about?’ for the hundredth time, Sheldon snapped back, ‘It’s about tradition! What else can it be about?’ And Jerry said, ‘Okay—write a song called “Tradition.”’”
    Tradition, in the end, was the best way that the authors could think of to express what kept the people of Anatevka secure enough to stay alive and define themselves for as long as they did. In the course of their show, traditions crumble from within, as Tevye’s daughters take marital decisions into their own hands. The first marries for love, rejecting the tradition of arranged matches. The second binds herself to political radicalism, leaving the village behind to be with her imprisoned husband and betraying the tradition of the nuclear family. The third falls in love with a non-Jew, tearing asunder the last bit of the fabric of homogeneity left in the community. And just as the internal traditions are breaking down, the larger world is moving in to wipe this little village off the map. The Russians begin systematically expelling the Jews, so that by the final curtain, the stage will be devoid of virtually everything. Where once there was a thriving community held together by the integrity of a carefully defined way of life, now there is only empty space.
    This idea is so clear and so moving that it left the authors with a great challenge: how to give stature at the opening moment to a story that had once been a domestic comedy/drama but that had somehow morphed into a grand landscape of humanity confronting the end of an era. The answer came in two pieces. First, someone recalled Marc Chagall’s 1913 painting The Fiddler , which depicts a Jewish peasant with a violin perched insecurely on a rooftop. This