The show is about the generational conflict between following religious and cultural traditions and adapting to a world that is rapidly changing. But the daughters want to marry for love.
Three of his daughters are old enough to marry, and Tevye and his wife are expecting to follow the tradition of arranged marriages. Tevye is a dairyman who struggles to support his wife and five daughters. At the time "Fiddler" takes place, many Jews in the Russian Empire were confined to living in the shtetls. Shtetl is the Yiddish word for small town or village. It's set in 1905 in a shtetl in Eastern Europe. TERRY GROSS: "Fiddler On The Roof" is one of the most popular shows in Broadway history and has been performed around the world. Joel Grey is most famous for starring as the emcee in the original Broadway cast of "Cabaret" and in the Bob Fosse film adaptation. We're going to listen back to Terry's 2019 interview with Steven Skybell, who stars as Tevye, and Joel Grey, who directs the production. UNIDENTIFIED ACTORS: (As characters, singing in Yiddish).īIANCULLI: That's music from the Yiddish version of "Fiddler On The Roof," which is now playing again off-Broadway. If you know the show, this music will sound familiar, but these lyrics won't. I'm David Bianculli, in for Terry Gross.īIANCULLI: One of the most popular shows in Broadway history is back on stage in New York. Susan Goodman, senior curator emerita at New York’s Jewish Museum, points to the artist’s 1908 “Le Mort,” in the collection of Paris’ Musée d’Art Moderne, as an example of a work that shows a fiddler seated on the roof, rather than flying above.This is FRESH AIR. “That’s how we are treating it - more of an allegory than an actual, physical person.” I think it’s more of an ethereal idea,” he says. Rosenthal and colleagues at Arena found no evidence that fiddlers actually played on shtetl rooftops. His palette for the Arena production combines Chagall’s and Andrew Wyeth’s schemes, he says, noting the former’s “dark whimsy.” Todd Rosenthal, who designed Arena’s set, did not remember which painting that was. “It was one option on a growing list of title possibilities the authors were considering.”īut the District’s Arena Stage, which will open a “Fiddler” production on Friday, states on its Web site that the play title “was inspired by a painting called ‘The Fiddler’ by Marc Chagall.” “The title of the musical does not refer to any specific painting,” Solomon says. The Guggenheim’s “Green Violinist” (1923-24), which similarly depicts a violinist hovering above roofs, is also cited as a precursor.
Only one of his feet is painted against the background of the roof of a tiny farmhouse, so one can hardly say the guy is standing on the roof,” Imanse notes.
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“It depicts a fiddler more or less flying free in space. That’s news to Geurt Imanse, who curates the Stedelijk’s fine arts collection. And Jerry Robbins, who directed the play, recorded in his notes after reading the script in 1963, “In searching for a comparative vision, the paintings of Chagall came the closest,” says Alisa Solomon, author of “Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof.”ĭespite consensus that “Fiddler” creators Jerry Bock, Sheldon Harnick and Joseph Stein had Chagall on the brain, there is some dispute about which Chagall works helped coin the title.Ĭhagall’s Wikipedia page finds in favor of his 1912 “Le Violoniste,” which is on long-term loan to Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum. But some of the contours of that union remain, as Tevye would say, as shaky as a fiddler on the roof.īoris Aronson, who had collaborated with Chagall in Moscow theater, quoted the painter in his design of the first “Fiddler” set.
The marriage between Chagall’s violinists soaring over shtetl chimneys and “Fiddler” seems to have been arranged celestially. Recent articles about the play’s 50th anniversary link the title to a Chagall painting - a claim that some theater Web sites echo. If Tevye the milkman had a ruble for every time someone connected “Fiddler on the Roof” to Marc Chagall, he would be a very rich man.
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