fiddler

PROGRAMME NOTE WRITTEN BY RACHEL KEEGAN FOR HATTON OPERATIC SOCIETY'S PRODUCTION OF 'FIDDLER ON THE ROOF' IN JANUARY 1993

FIDDLER ON THE ROOF is a musical adaptation of the Yiddish author Sholem Aleichem's short stories about a Jewish community in pre-Revolutionary Russia. Librettist Joseph Stein (who had the advantage of being able to read the stories in the original Yiddish) used four of these stories to provide the main plot - MODERN CHILDREN (1899), HODEL (1904), CHAVA (1905) and GET THEE OUT (1914). Other stories were also drawn upon - for example, the following passage from THE BUBBLE BURSTS (1899) forms the basis of the show's best known song If I Were a Rich Man:

"God in Heaven! If I had only a tenth of what all this is worth! What more could I ask of God and who would be my equal? First of all, I would marry off my oldest daughter, give her a suitable dowry and still have enough left over for wedding expenses, gifts and clothing for the bride. Then I would sell my horse and wagon and my cows and move into town. I would buy myself a Synagogue seat by the Eastern wall, hang strings of pearls around my wife's neck, and hand out charity like the richest householders"

The title of the musical (and indeed the whole decor of the original production) was inspired by the works of the Jewish painter Marc Chagall who came from the same background as Sholem Aleichem. Many of Chagall's paintings of Jewish festivities include a fiddler - a legendary figure who appeared at significant moments of life such as births, weddings and funerals. One such painting, The Green Violinist, shows a fiddler superimposed on the roofs of a peasant village.

FIDDLER ON THE ROOF opened on Broadway on 22nd September 1964 with Zero Mostel as Tevye and Beatrice Arthur (Dorothy in TV's The Golden Girls) as Yente the matchmaker. The show had received lukewarm out-of-town notices (a drab story about the persecution Jews hardly seemed like hit show material) and nobody was more surprised than the authors when it went on to a record-breaking run of 3242 performances. The show was equally successful in London - it opened at Her Majesty's Theatre on 16th February 1967 with the Israeli actor Topol as Tevye and Miriam Karlin as Golde and ran for 2030 performances. Alfie Bass enjoyed great success as Tevye later in the run. Topol recreated the role of Tevye in a film version in 1971.

FIDDLER ON THE ROOF has gone on to be one of the most successful musicals of all time. To quote from Alan Jay Lerner in his book The Musical Theatre (1986):

"... I am certain that as I write, 'Fiddler on the Roof' is being performed somewhere in the world..."