Early Fiddler

Several years ago I happened upon the galley of Ghost Light, a memoir by Frank Rich, in the discard box at Northtown Books. I picked it up, amused to speculate that I was probably one of the few people in Arcata who knew who Frank Rich was, and very probably the only one who had known him personally. Not only that, but the last time I saw him, I'd been lamenting about the lack of publisher interest in my proposed book on the arts in America, and he said he was having trouble finding a publisher for this book. I didn't know it was being published. And now the book found me.

He was still theatre critic for the New York Times then--he's since become a political and cultural columnist (and has published several more books.) He'd taken me to lunch that day at Orso, a great Italian restaurant in Manhattan that was his favorite. But we'd met years earlier, when he was an editor (and the film critic) at a weekly national magazine called New Times. (Completely unrelated to the publication of that name today.) He was my first editor there. I wrote several articles for him while I was living in Cambridge, Mass. and eventually met him when I Amtraked down to Manhattan. A few years later, after Frank moved on to review film for Time Magazine, New Times devoted most of an issue to my piece, "The Malling of America."

But it was only earlier this year that I actually read Ghost Light, and learned all kinds of things I didn't know about Frank. I knew he grew up in Washington, but I didn't realize how much theatre had been a part of his childhood and adolescence. Both of his parents, and later his stepfather, encouraged this devotion. As a teenager he even got a job at the National Theatre.

We are close to the same age, so I recognized a lot about the cultural context of his experiences. But I couldn't match his experiences with theatre. At that lunch he flattered me by referring to my "obvious love of the theatre." But I had nothing like his background in seeing Broadway shows, especially in the era of Washington as a tryout town.

This memoir is about more than shows or even growing up in the 50s and 60s. He writes about his mother and father as individuals, and about the complexities of his step-father, who helped him in many ways, but who also was physically violent. It's an absorbing, very readable book.

But the point of bringing it up here is Fiddler on the Roof. As an adolescent, Frank spent summers at an arts camp in Stockbridge, Mass. His closest friend there was named Harry Stein. That was another big surprise for me. I also knew Harry Stein--he was an editor at New Times after Frank left, and then at Esquire. I visited him at the Esquire offices once and he introduced me to Nora Ephron. (Harry later wrote a column on ethics for Esquire and became known as the "ethics guy.") But I didn't know that Harry and Frank knew each other, and certainly not that Frank and Harry were boyhood friends.

Nor did I know that Harry Stein's father was Joseph Stein, the man who wrote the play, Fiddler on the Roof, as well as many others. According to
Wikipedia, his show biz career began with a chance encounter with Zero Mostel, leading him to write for various radio stars and then as part of the legendary writing team for the Sid Caesar television show (along with Mel Brooks, Neil Simon, Woody Allen, Larry Gelbart and Carl Reiner.) He is apparently still writing, by the way--this article mentions a 2007 musical based on Thorton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth, that had its first production at the Westport Country Playhouse in Connecticut--a storied theatre where in recent years Westporters Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward have been heavily involved.

It turns out that Frank and Harry were present for a lot of the early history of Fiddler, and Frank writes about it in Ghost Light. Joe Stein was going through a bad patch in his career. His last few musicals hadn't gone well, and his TV series was being regularly ridiculed on That Was the Week That Was, a wonderful early 60s satirical TV show that I completely loved at the time. So Harry--and then Frank--were worried from time to time that his new show was going to be another flop.

Joe had permitted Frank and Harry to witness the very earliest manifestation of the musical he based on stories by Sholom Aleichem: a backer's audition. It happened one night after dinner at the Stein's apartment, while Joe read from the script while the composer played the songs on the piano and the lyricist sang them. This was the first pre-production, mimeographed script Frank had ever read. At that point, the show was entitled The Old Country.

But it was several years before the show got to an actual stage. It had changed producers, its title and its star--now it was Joe Stein's first inspirer, Zero Mostel. The first thing that worried Harry and Frank was the title. They thought Fiddler on the Roof was silly, and might doom the show. "Harry and I admitted to each other that it sounded like a children's show, not a real Broadway musical. What was wrong with The Old Country?"

After a tryout in Detroit (where it got unenthusiastic critical notices), Fiddler came to Washington in the summer of 1964. Neither Frank nor Harry had seen it when they were allowed to attend what they thought was a dress rehearsal. They were shocked by the lackadaisical behavior of Zero Mostel. He sang a song that sounded like gibberish to them, which he interspersed with obscene gestures directed at director Jerome Robbins, who he despised. Harry and Frank pleaded with Joe Stein to cut that terrible song, called "If I Were a Rich Man."

After the rehearsal, Harry was especially upset. "I can't believe it," he said. "I can't believe my father has another bomb."

But despite their trepidations, when they saw the first performance they were entranced from the opening number, "Tradition." "...as soon as the orchestra played its last note, I looked at Harry," Frank writes. "His face was plastered with a smile, and I saw him share it with his father..." The audience loved the show.

It turned out that they had seen not a dress rehearsal but a technical rehearsal, which is all about getting light cues correct and so on. The actors were just walking through parts of scenes. And of course, "If I Were A Rich Man" is probably the best remembered song from the show.

During its Washington run, Fiddler was Frank Rich's first theatrical adventure as a kind of insider. He and Harry went to every show, made some friends, had a crush on one of the actresses. This is one of the fun parts of the book, which is definitely worth finding and reading, even if it doesn't present itself to you in a free box.