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

seemed like a more than apt metaphor. The show’s long-debated title became Fiddler on the Roof . Second, Bock and Harnick distilled all the discussions that had brought them this far into the number Robbins asked for—“Tradition.” It is, in some ways, not so very different from “Comedy Tonight,” in that our leading player (again Zero Mostel) steps out onto an empty stage and tells us what kind of an evening it’s going to be. Then he sings. Then he introduces the various factions of this little society—papas, mamas, sons, daughters—and they sing. In a stroke of great theatricality, each has a different melody to sing, but all four melodies fit together so that they can be sung at once, which makes the music itself a metaphor: the strength to survive derives from the weave; all together, these simple strands make a beautiful, complex, and enduring sound, far stronger than any one of them might create alone. In its finished form, “Tradition” gives voice to virtually everyone in Anatevka: the beggar, the rabbi, the matchmaker, the businessman—it’s a community portrait. It describes good times and bad, harmony and dispute, but, like “Comedy Tonight,” it leaves the plot for later. It parts company with “Comedy Tonight” in one important way, however: Prologus, the narrator in Forum , tells us what to expect, and then the show delivers exactly as promised. Tevye explains the world of Anatevka and tells us what to expect, but he hasn’t the foresight to see the oncoming end of things. He is brought up short by it just as we are. At the beginning, he knows some things about fragility, but hardly everything. Fiddler has more up its sleeve than “Tradition” can describe, and the ensuing action plays against what the number tells us. Tradition is everything, it says. Then the show demonstrates that it’s not enough. But the number sets up such a clear and profound idea in such an exciting way that what was once domestic never seems less than epic. And Tevye, the beleaguered milkman with the nagging wife, becomes an iconic figure, who, like Chagall’s fiddler, will live forever.
    The number also made it necessary for the rest of Fiddler to respect the size of the idea. It became of central importance to demonstrate and celebrate the traditions in question: the Friday-night Sabbath prayer, the bottle dance at the wedding ceremony, each an explicit expression of implicit strength and faith. The authors made sure that throughout the evening, even the most domestic events carried larger implications and fit within the weave. The opening number forced their hand.
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    Anatevka wasn’t the only world in transition on Broadway in 1964. The street itself was beginning to crack open as a new generation of theater-makers took matters into their own hands, responding to the end of postwar self-satisfaction and the beginning of a new age of anxiety—the ’60s.
    Hal Prince, who produced Fiddler , had turned to directing, and after a few faltering steps, he helmed the innovatively experimental hit Cabaret in 1966. “Willkommen,” its iconic opening, owed a lot, structurally, at least, to “Tradition” and to “Comedy Tonight,” but the show—an exploration of Weimar Germany—had a kind of presentational, neo-Brechtian quality that made it an effective transition from the well-established musical play to a newer kind of concept musical. It was presented as a series of seedy cabaret acts, a more stark, sexualized, and theatrical version of what Gypsy had done with its vaudeville sketches.
    Prince learned from the masters whose work he had previously produced, chiefly from Abbott and Robbins. Then he and Stephen Sondheim began turning out consistently fascinating, highly conceptualized collaborations, beginning with 1970’s Company . There’s plenty more to be said about these shows, which, more than any others since Oklahoma , revolutionized the form. But it’s worth a word or two here on