Fiddler on the Roof


Fiddler on the Roof is one of my favoirte plays. I saw the San Jose Civic Light Opera perform it, and it was so funny. I think it was the funniest play I had seen up to that point. After seeing it on the stage, I saw the movie, and it wasn't nearly as good. The movie tends to drag a bit in the middle, but the play didn't drag at all. My favorite section is when Perchik and Hodel fall in love.


The characters are:


The Songs:

Act 1:



Act 2:



The Story:

(This is going to be a really brief outline, because I don't have a story synopsis in front of me.) The play takes place in the villiage of Anatevka, Russia, in 1904. It centers around a dairyman, Tevya, and his five daughters. They are trying to marry off Tzietel, the oldest daughter. The matchmaker find her a match in Lazar Wolfm the butcher. However, the butcher was much older than Tzietel, and Tzietel didn't love him. Tzietel loved Motel, the poor tailor, and they promised each other that they would get married. (Something unheard of at that time.) Anyway, Motel asked Tevye if he could marry Tzietel, and Tevye said yes. And, to convince his wife, Golde, that the match with Motel was the right one, he created an elaborate dream sequence that played on Golde's superstitious side. Meanwhile, Fyedka have Chava a book to read, and Perchik, a young student from Kiev, began to stay with Tevye, trading lessons for food and lodging. Motel and Tzietel get married, and after the wedding, Russian "raiders" come and trash the place.


Perchik and Hodel soon fall in love also, and they get engaged. (Also unheard of at that time.) They inform Tevye this, and he gives them permission to be married. Soon after this, Perchik is arrested for demonstrating in Kiev, and is sent to a prison in Siberia. Hodel leaves to join him there.


Last, Chava and Fyedka fall in love. Chava tells Tevye, and he is outraged, because she wants to marry out of the faith. She gets married anyway, and Tevye disowns her. Soon after that, all of the Jewish people in Anatevka get a notice to move out. And that's where the play ends. It's kind of a sad ending.

A quick History, taken straight from the program:

The characters of Tevye the dairyman, his unimpressed wife, his five daughters and other dwellers in the villiage of Anatevka, first came to attention in the stories written in Yiddish by the popular fiction writer who called himself Sholom Aleichem (literally "peace be with you" in Hebrew). The stories appeared in vairous publications in eastern Europe and then spread to Yiddish publications in America and elsewhere, in the years 1905 through 1910. Over the years, they became world favorites in many languages.


This continuing interest was vastly accelerated when in 1953 Arnold Perl, a long-time admirer of Sholom Aleichem's work, and that of I. L. Peretz and other popular Yiddish writers, put together a series of short plays. They were based on Aleichem's stories, including one by Peretz, which under the title of "The World of Sholom Aleichem" vivified dramatically the life of the Jewish "Shetetls" in Czarist Russia, a picturesque, though impoverished life that had disintegrated considerably as a result of World War I and was thoroughly destroyed in World War II.


The success of "The World of Sholom Aleichem" encouraged Arnold Perl to plough the same field a bit more, and in 1957 Perl brought out a play about that indomitable milkman of Anatevka, which he called "Tevye and his Daughters."


This prompted Joseph Stein to believe that the Tevye stories could be made into a musical, and Fiddler on the Roof was the result.