Jewish orchestra

Is there any musical more perfect than Fiddler on the Roof? This month I saw the bare-bones off-Broadway production, now in its second year, in a language I speak not a word of. Force me to read a projected translation all the way through and I’m still loving it: it’s just that good.

If Fiddler on the Roof has long struck me as utterly without flaws, I’ve been bamboozled, in part, by the original Broadway cast album, that wisely omits the two weakest songs. Do The Rumor and Chavaleh constitute “flaws?” Not really. But I look at the impulse behind their creation. With so many heart-wrenching moments in the show’s second half, one can understand how the creators felt the need for a passel of humor and energy. The rest of the Bock & Harnick score is so excellent, The Rumor is only a comparative disappointment. It serves its purpose, and people pass through it and quickly forget they’ve been there.

Chavaleh is something else; I can’t think of anything remotely like it in the Golden Age canon. Fiddler was the last new show directed by Jerome Robbins, the master of choreographic storytelling. For the show’s protagonist, losing his daughter to an elopement outside his religious is so devastating, no traditional song could possibly express his pain. And so we’re briefly taken inside of Tevye’s mind for a glimpse of the memories he has of the third of his five daughters. The carefree dance of the girls is lovely and positive. Bock’s slow waltz with a surfeit of sixteenth notes has the feel of something that might be improvised on a clarinet. The father sings an air that seems to have no structure, so stunned and rocked to the core is he.

Little bird, little Chavaleh
I don’t understand what’s happening today
Everything is all a blur
All I can see is a happy child
What a sweet little bird you were
Chavaleh, Chavaleh

Little bird, little Chavaleh
You were always such a pretty little thing
Everybody’s favorite child
Gentle and kind and affectionate
What a sweet little bird you were
Chavaleh, Chavaleh.

It barely takes up a minute and the emotional punch comes in a monologue that follows the ballet. The quickness with which it makes its point is the sort of exemplary concision that’s all over Fiddler on the Roof. In our post-Golden Age, shows dwell on their emotional high points at such excessive length, the feelings outlive their welcome. Brevity is not just the soul of wit, it’s the soul of pathos. Scene after scene, song after song, Fiddler gets to the point, jabs you quickly in the heart, and moves on.

One can name dozens of reasons for its world-shaking success, but that’s what struck me throughout the Yiddish language revival, directed by Joel Grey. Move and move on; repeat. Fiddler on the Roof is musical theatre’s Hamlet, and we who make musicals need to study all those things it does so well. This tragedy is leavened with so much humor, there are nearly as many good jokes as in the other Hal Prince-produced hit Zero Mostel starred in in the early sixties, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. (Little known fact: Joel Grey played Hero on its pre-Broadway run, but was fired.) When I think of Broadway smashes I’ve totally loathed, my mind goes to the horror that was Miss Saigon, a just-as-tragic tale with absolutely no funny jokes. But this is part and parcel of the Eurotrash aesthetic: Why provide humor when so many people in the audience don’t speak the language you’re singing in?

Which brings us to the problem that this Fiddler is presented in Yiddish, the language the characters actually spoke, and English is projected on each side. I assume that, somewhere in the audience, there’s gotta be at least one oldster who knows some Yiddish. But really, we’re all reading. And that gets in the way of appreciating the jokes. The cast, led by Steven Skybell, certainly seems to be putting the right spin on everything, but there’s a delay. We read the punch lines rather than experience them as we do when the show’s done in English.

And consider this: the words (by Joseph Stein and lyricist Sheldon Harnick) are not designed to be true to tsarist Russia. They trade on a style of Jewish humor familiar to 1964 audiences, sometimes known as Borscht Belt. The cadences of Catskills comedians long ago vanished from our cultural landscape, although I don’t believe the wit of Fiddler on the Roof is lost on today’s audience. But what’s funny to mid-century Americans is markedly different from the way shtetl Jews spoke at the beginning of the century. So, much as I loved this production, I have to say that doing it in Yiddish adds nothing to its effectiveness. Would any Broadway fan prefer to see Man of La Mancha or Kiss of the Spiderwoman done in Spanish? Is our appreciation of Pippin or Les Miserables lessened by not seeing these in French? Those whose ancestors spoke Yiddish in Russia (I am one) may get a small kick out of hearing Fiddler on the Roof in the language of its characters, but this is small compensation for having to read so much of the text on a side curtain. Ultimately, presenting this most familiar of English-language musicals in Yiddish seems like something of a gimmick.

Of course, there have now been more major revivals of Fiddler on the Roof than Tevye has daughters, and I suppose you’ve got to palm them off on us theatre-going “suitors” somehow. Better in Yiddish? Meh, I say.

Dina and Jack are married

In the spring of 2013, I had an idea for a musical. Artificially giving myself a deadline, I thought I’d try to finish a draft in time to present it, in some form or other, as a gift for Joy on our tenth wedding anniversary. That gave me six months, but… I failed to meet the deadline. The following year, Joy would have a major birthday, so I pushed back the deadline till then. And was all set to unveil a staged reading of a new two-actor show on her birthday when Joy got sick and landed in the hospital.

The reason I thought it might make a good anniversary gift is that our wedding had been an original musical. Now, I wanted to write a show about a couple struggling to keep their romance alive while raising their first child. My characters experience something we went through as new parents. The happy ending – the rekindling of their passion – would play as a romantic expression, a sort of meta present.

As luck would have it, Joy was recovering at home, after another trip to the hospital, on her recent big birthday. It’s taken me some time to get to this particular essay because I’ve been attending to her needs. But September 10 marks the five year anniversary of The Music Playing, because we ended up doing it a week after her birthday, and it was a moving surprise.

Peter Filichia, a critic who caught a certain amount of controversy this summer, wrote up the reading in glowing terms (“may turn out to be the season’s best musical”) but today, I’m considering the journey the show’s been on in the past five years. It included a name change, to Baby Makes Three.

The people who poured into the rented space in 2014 knew a few things. They knew they were there to see a staged reading of the first draft of a new work, hardly a finished project. More importantly, they knew me and Joy, and many knew our child. So, as the show began, they had a reference point, and an emotional connection to the characters. My musical, that night, didn’t need to spend a lot of time saying who these two people were, or give the audience any reason to love them. All of that was a given. And that’s a key difference between The Music Playing, draft One, and subsequent drafts.

Because I didn’t have to introduce the characters and the qualities that make them appealing, I could launch straight into the drama. The Music Playing starts with a busy morning, and sets up the idea that the wife works, the husband stays home with the child, and there’s an issue with her trusting him with all the parental duties. That’s gripping enough if you already care for the characters. For an audience of strangers, I found, you can’t raise the curtain on fraught hysteria because it’s off-putting. Who are these people? They’re frenetic and stressed and therefore I don’t want to get to know them. The conflict seems a bit meh – a common problem parents have, but why should I be interested?

Reworking The Music Playing for strangers to enjoy meant taking a certain amount of time to get to that crisis point. I added a prologue in which the baby is born and the parents get to celebrate the new adventure they’re embarking on. It is my hope that this endears them to the viewer. Before long, the wife gets a big promotion and they get the idea that the husband should quit his job to become a stay-at-home dad. This might be termed an inciting incident; those watching should be wondering what will happen next. Then there’s a peaceful interlude

to transition from the prologue to the main body of the play. This begins with the energetic morning routine that originally began The Music Playing.

Does any of this work? I do not know. There needs to be another staged reading to answer questions like that. Performing this two-actor musical requires extraordinary commitment from the actors, who have to learn an unusually large quantity of songs. It’s not that Baby Makes Three is sung-through (it isn’t), it’s that most musicals have a larger number of people singing different numbers. On this point, it’s fair to compare Jason Robert Brown’s two-hander, The Last Five Years. Besides the great quantity of songs, there’s a need to hold the audience’s attention for half the running length. Twice I watched Norbert Leo Butz and Sherie Rene Scott negotiate scads of overlong songs, sans dialogue; two dislikable characters in an incoherent plot. And all I could think – on the positive side – was Wow, they’re talented. Takes a lot of incandescence to engage an audience for that amount of time.

Autobiographical musicals are alarmingly common, and often involve a strange sort of ego. Do you actually believe you’re so interesting that people who don’t know you are going to be interested? We live our lives and think the stuff that happens to us is notably dramatic. Being objective about this involves looking at your story as if it’s completely fictional and asking the hard dramaturgical questions to make sure those who watch are gripped at every turn. My hope is that Baby Makes Three plays as a made-up story about new parents facing situations many people face. The stay-at-home-father aspect seems a topic begging to be explored.

After the reading, someone pointed out that I’d done the Cole Porter thing by having a tall and handsome actor play the Noel role. Porter, perhaps as a joke, suggested Cary Grant play him in the biopic, Night and Day. The studio did just that, and Cole didn’t stop them: “If they wanted Cary Grant to play you in a movie, would you complain?”

Under the green-wood tree

I’m someone who sees metaphors everywhere. Metaphors are those floaty things my eyes sometimes get – oh, there I go again. It’s Joy’s birthday, a fairly notable one, and I imagine you don’t want to trudge through another blog post about how wonderful she is. But, if I can frame something she did recently as a metaphor for musical writing, we’d be back on topic. And such a frame would be the sheltering oak leaf cover on a hot day, a balm for rhetorical excesses, the elixir of expression…

We’re driving along one of those one-lane mountain highways where the curves are constant but the views are heart-stopping. And that’s a combination of the beauty of the mountains, close and far; the roller-coaster-esque lurching left and right; vertigo, perhaps affected by altitude, when you suddenly realize you’re gazing thousands of feet down; and, let’s face it, safety concerns. Now and then you focus on those low guard rails and wonder if they’re strong enough, or too low. One errant turn might send you tumbling down 5,000 feet of mountain greenery and that can’t be good.

Surprisingly, out of silence, the GPS announces a left turn but there’s no road to be seen, no sign of any sort. All there is is a break in the guard rail and you can’t see any road beyond that. Joy hears this as her cue, and, barely slowing, plunges us into the void, off the side of the mountain. Now we’re dropping down, at a steep angle, but I can see that we’re on pavement; a single lane. Could she possibly have gone the right way? She seems to think so, which makes one of us.

Eventually, we got out of the car and began a three-mile hike that brought into question how one defines “hike” as opposed to how one defines “mountain climbing.” Our valiant 7-year-old daughter uttered few complaints, which was astounding. The destination was a remote mountain stream, but we never found it; we only heard it, but, at that altitude, this may have been a group hallucination.

When I returned to civilization, I resumed thinking about musicals and how they’re created. I read yet another book on the subject, and, indeed, it’s the main stuff of this blog. To some extent, creators everywhere are looking for signs, hoping for a path on a map to follow. The comparison with our near-death experience in the mountains is inescapable. I wish we had an accurate map or a working GPS there, but, led by Joy, we were forced to find our own way. Some of us were 7, and it’s fair to say there was nothing in our experience that prepared us for the equipment-free mountain climbing we did.

Sally forth, musical writers, and, sure, seek advice. But know that you’re deep in the woods and the path isn’t always clear. Hell, it may not even be a path. And then, suddenly and unexpectedly, there’s a fork in the road. And you don’t need a fork because you’ve only packed granola bars.

There’s something admirable at the pioneer spirit. That madwoman hanging a left into an unviewable road down a precipitously steep hill? I love her. The metaphor also applies to her stunning career as a New York casting director. After turning thirty, she took a leap of faith on a new career, as an unpaid intern in a boutique casting company. The paid staff there took a shine to her, took her under their wings, and they were a dream team: These were people who went on to become some of major casting folk in this town. Before long, though, they all flew the coop, and Joy became the only paid employee, a casting director by default.

Is “baptism by fire” a metaphor, too? She and her boss cast a show with a huge amount of dance requirements, its director-choreographer a phenom of internationally high esteem. Somebody had to become expert in assessing dance ability, pronto, as somebody else was soon headed for rehab. With her boss out of the picture, Joy suddenly had to educate herself in running the company. Returning sober, her employer gratefully added Joy’s name to the shingle. Then he switched careers and left New York, leaving Joy all the clients in what quickly became Joy Dewing Casting.

The road was rocky; there wasn’t a map; there was limited information about how to do what she needed to do. Joy’s observation of how small businesses operate led to innovative ideas about how she should run hers. She got particularly fabulous people to work for her. In the first year she had a show on Broadway.

New York’s acting community adored her. A former musical theatre performer herself, she insisted each auditioner be treated with respect, and kept up a level of professionalism that’s now the stuff of legend. While Joy’s services are no longer for sale, I advise you, intrepid musical creator, to utilize the best casting director you can find. A good c.d. made a world of distance to me: Geoff Josselson of the aforementioned Dream Team cast Such Good Friends with Tony nominees Liz Larsen and Brad Oscar, as well as Lynne Wintersteller, Michael Thomas Holmes, Dirk Lumbard and others.

Some strange compulsion tells me to quote the man-falls-down-a-hole speech from The West Wing here:

This guy’s walking down a street when he falls in a hole. The walls are so steep, he can’t get out. A doctor passes by, and the guy shouts up, “Hey you, can you help me out?” The doctor writes a prescription, throws it down in the hole and moves on. Then a priest comes along, and the guy shouts up “Father, I’m down in this hole, can you help me out?” The priest writes out a prayer, throws it down in the hole and moves on. Then a friend walks by. “Hey Joe, it’s me, can you help me out?” And the friend jumps in the hole. Our guy says, “Are you stupid? Now we’re both down here.” The friend says, “Yeah, but I’ve been down here before, and I know the way out.”

Not sure why I’m quoting it. But it’s a metaphor.