When my high school did FOTR in 1972 they couldn’t do hookups for Frumah Sarah to fly, so the girl who played her sat on the shoulders of a tall football player, and the billowing nightgown/smock she was wearing was about ten feet long, to cover the guy. So we saw his feet but nothing else of him. He ran around carrying her, and she leaned forward slightly, so it looked as if she was floating. The guy was listed in the cast as “Best Supporting Actor”
As an amusing aside, he went on to be an executive at the power company, and is now in prison due to some major financial shenanigans he took part in.
You know, Skald, the beauty of the internet is that we can’t see and judge each other based on physical appearance. To be honest I must have missed it if/when you’ve mentioned your race before. I never thought to put a color/gender to a poster until they mention it. My own username being gender neutral, a lot of folks have assumed I’m male when I’m not!
At my high school, our ghost was held aloft by me and and a buddy! I was also Fyedka - the Russian boy with the hots for a Jewish girl, a role I was to try a few times more in High School and College until marrying Mrs. Algher…
I’ve never seen the musical, but at the end of the film Chava and Fyedka say that they can’t bear to stay in Russia because of the cruelty there, so they are moving to Krakow.
Is the audience supposed to think, “Aw, what noble, good souls Chava and Fyedka are!” Or are we supposed to think, “Aw, what a pair of idiots Chava and Fyedka are, thinking they can outrun bigotry!”
I was severely confused about what this story is about. I thought that the Fiddler was a character in the film (in the short clip I saw years ago he does appear briefly), a freedom-fighter who inspired his people to throw off the yoke of oppression.
You may already know this, but he’s going to be in Jacksonville FL (not walking distance from Orlando but not impossibly far either) next month, supposedly his final Tevye tour.
I love this gag video of Topol and cast from the Australia production.
I remember watching this film as an older child and feeling weird about it because the people in the story could have been my great-grandparents, who were Russian Jews who immigrated to America in the early 20th century. There was a strange feeling of connection, yet disconnection, because what did I know about this culture, having been raised as a Catholic in present-day California.
My take was that perhaps Fyedka was from around there, and that in a big city nobody would know them and they could act as, or be the persons, they wanted to be. If Chava ever thought of converting, someone still might be bigoted. But in those days, with almost no ID’s, you could pass for who you wanted to be.
Bit of a story here, but I always think of this when I think of Fiddler:
One of my clients is an Orthodox Jew. One day we were at our office talking, with several other people around. A cel phone was on the counter in front of us and when it rang, the ring tone was Zero Mostel singing “If I Were a Rich Man”.
We all looked at my client expectantly - he did not react.
It rang a few more times and someone finally asked him, “Aren’t you going to get that?”
Looking surprised, he said it wasn’t his phone. Incredulously, I said, “What do you mean it’s not your phone? That’s from Fiddler on the Roof!”
We had a laugh at our unfounded assumption, and upon further discussion it turned out he had never seen the show. He speculated that many in the Orthodox community might not know it. If true, I wonder if that is due to avoidance of popular culture, or because of the subject matter.
It may be prejudice, but it’s also custom among many Orthodox Jews to mourn a child who has married outside the faith as though that child has died. It’s literally telling the child “You are dead to me!”
In fact, it’s only fairly recently that interfaith marriages are accepted in mainstream Judaism.
I’ve never read anything from Mostel’s alleged rant past “Hiya, Loose Lips!” in any biography, anecdote or recollection of the moment in question. Whether that means that Brochu is fictionalizing things a bit or whether it just means that none of Mostel’s biographers or colleagues bothered to continue the telling of that anecdote past that point, I don’t know. But the more important thing to take away from that is that Mostel did work with Robbins, albeit only at Hal Prince’s and Mr. Abbott’s request.
Edited to add: Regardless of that, it’s quite likely that the play is inaccurate in some or many points. It’s a biographical sketch, not a scholarly biography with a bibliography. I haven’t seen any indication of what source Brochu adapted it to that form from, so I can’t say for sure.
This. In researching my family tree I found relatives three generations behind me who married outside the faith. Their parents sat shiva for them, and my family had no further contact with them. Their children were dead to them.
Tevye struggles with this in the play, but even after all the other changes he accepted in his life, this was the line he could not cross. I find it tragic.
When I married outside the faith, my parents and grandparents had no problem, fortunately. It helped that they knew Mama Zappa, and grew to love her and like her. My mother told me later she and my Dad talked about my possible marriage to this Catholic girl I’d been dating forever. My Mom asked the hypothetical question “Could I love a grandchild less for being Catholic?” I am proud to say her answer was no, and she came to that answer immediately and permanently. My grandparents felt the same way.
After all that hand wringing, we’re raising our kids in the First Church of I Don’t Feel Like Getting Up Early - Reformed.
Anyway, I like Fiddler, but I have the extra connection that it’s about people who could have been my great-grandparents.
And ivylass, I truly love that so many of our kids’ generation views prejudice as an unfathomable historical relic. There are some things best not understood.
I asked the Conservative Rabbi about that when I converted. He smiled and replied, “I’m sure some do.”
There are pictures of pogrom victims in Nicholas and Alexandra.
I asked the Reform Rabbi who the Fiddler was. He is following Tevye at the end of the film. He reminds me of Death in The Seventh Seal who chases his victims about at the end of the movie. Rabbi is a fan of Fiddler and thought for a moment before he remarked, “Tradition.”
