September 22: Zero as Tevye
“Fiddler on the Roof” opened on Broadway on this date in 1964 and ran for 3,242 performances. The show rescued Zero Mostel from McCarthyism’s blacklist, which had plagued him since his refusal to cooperate with the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1955. To achieve this rescue, Mostel had to work closely with Jerome Robbins, who choreographed “Fiddler” and had been a cooperating witness before HUAC (see http://jewishcurrents.org/jewdayo/july-29-jerome-robbins-2277/). The musical is based on Sholem Aleichem’s Tevye the Milkman, about the disintegration of traditional Jewish life in the villages of Eastern Europe at the turn of the 20th century. The wild popularity of “Fiddler” helped to mark the end of the assimilationist, name-changing phase of Jewish adaptation to America. In the late 1960s, Mad magazine parodied the musical with “Antenna on the Roof,” in which Tevye sings not about “Tradition!” but about “Possessions!”
“Perchik: Money is the world’s curse.
“Tevye: May the Lord smite me with it. And may I never recover.” —from the screenplay by Joseph Stein
Vicki Presser -
A lovely entry. You might want to consider an item sometime about Sheldon Harnick, who wrote the lyrics in “Fiddler.”
In an interview on NPR sometime in the last few years, he noted that they were careful not to use Yiddish in the play for laughs.
Bob Cartwright -
Actually, Zero Mostel had escaped the black list 6 years prior to Fiddler on the Roof.
In 1958, Mostel played Leopold Bloom in Ulysses in Nighttown, a play based on the novel Ulysses.
It was an Off-Off-Broadway play but the reviews Mostel received were overwhelmingly favorable. He was written up positively in Newsweek. Mostel received the Obie award for best Off-Broadway performance of the 1958–59 season.
In 1959, he appeared twice on TV and including the role of Estragon in a TV adaptation of Waiting for Godot. In 1961, he played Jean in Rhinoceros for which he won his first Tony Award for Best Actor.
In 1962 he played Pseudolus in the Broadway musical A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.
He also won a Tony Award for Best Actor in a Musical for this role.
mort mecklosky -
I believe the blacklist was used in hollywood primarily,not the theatre. Why wasn,t Zero in the film?