Fiddler on the Roof is a musical with music by Jerry Bock, lyrics by Sheldon Harnick, and book by Joseph Stein, set in the Pale of Settlement of Imperial Russia in or around 1905. It is based on Tevye and his Daughters and other tales by Sholem Aleichem. Original Broadway production, which opened in 1964, had the first musical theatre run in history to surpass 3,000 performances.
About Fiddler on the Roof in brief
Fiddler on the Roof is a musical with music by Jerry Bock, lyrics by Sheldon Harnick, and book by Joseph Stein, set in the Pale of Settlement of Imperial Russia in or around 1905. It is based on Tevye and his Daughters and other tales by Sholem Aleichem. The original Broadway production of the show, which opened in 1964, had the first musical theatre run in history to surpass 3,000 performances. Fiddler held the record for the longest-running Broadway musical for almost 10 years until Grease surpassed its run. It won nine Tony Awards, including best musical, score, book, direction and choreography. It spawned five Broadway revivals and a highly successful 1971 film adaptation and has enjoyed enduring international popularity. It has also been a popular choice for school and community productions. The writers and Robbins considered naming the musicalTevye, before landing on a title suggested by various paintings by Marc Chagall, Le Mort, The Fiddler ) that also inspired the original set design. The show found the right balance for its time, even if not entirely authentic, to become \”one of the first popular post-Holocaust depictions of the vanished world of Eastern European Jewry\”. Harold Prince replaced the original producer Fred Coe and brought in directorchoreographer Jerome Robbins. During rehearsals, one of the stars, Jewish actor Zero Mostel, feuded with Robbins, whom he held in contempt because Robbins had testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee and hid his Jewish heritage from the public.
Other critics considered that it was too culturally sanitized, \”middlebrow\” and superficial; Philip Roth, writing in The New Yorker, called it shtetl kitsch. For example, it portrays the local Russian officer as sympathetic, instead of brutal and cruel, as SholomAleichem had described him. At the end of Fiddler, the family members are alive, and most are emigrating together to America. A girl from a poor family must take whatever husband brings, but Tzeitel wants to marry her childhood friend Motel, a wealthy butcher. The next two daughters, Hodel and Chava, are excited about the visit of Golde’s Golde, a Golde-tongued Goldsmith, to the village of Anatevka. The story illustrates how it could have bad results, but it could also have good results, as well. It was also influenced by Life Is with People, by Mark Zborowski and Elizabeth Herzog. Aleicheh wrote a dramatic adaptation of the stories that he left unfinished at his death, but which was produced in Yiddish in 1919 by the YiddISH Art Theater and made into a film in the 1930s. At the start of the musical, the characters are still alive and living in the Russian shtets of AnATEvka in 1905. The characters are a poor Jewish milkman with five daughters, explains the customs of the Jews in the village.
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This page is based on the article Fiddler on the Roof published in Wikipedia (as of Nov. 15, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
