Ear­li­er this week Bar­bara Isen­berg wrote about rem­i­nisc­ing with Bel Kauf­man about Sholem Ale­ichem. She is the author of Tra­di­tion!, is an award win­ning jour­nal­ist who has been writ­ing and lec­tur­ing about the­ater for over three decades. Bar­bara has been blog­ging here for the Vis­it­ing Scribe series all week.

Broad­way musi­cals are known for being not just writ­ten but rewrit­ten, and many com­posers, lyri­cists and book writ­ers have stacks of unused mate­r­i­al in their clos­ets or com­put­ers. With plot changes comes the need for new scenes, and with the new scenes comes the need for new songs. This was cer­tain­ly the case with Fid­dler on the Roof, the sub­ject of my new book, Tra­di­tion!: The High­ly Improb­a­ble, Ulti­mate­ly Tri­umphant Broad­way-to-Hol­ly­wood Sto­ry of Fid­dler on the Roof, The World’s Most Beloved Musi­cal.

When director/​choreographer Jerome Rob­bins came onboard, he asked play­wright Joseph Stein, lyri­cist Shel­don Har­nick and com­pos­er Jer­ry Bock for rewrites many times. Stein wrote five drafts of his book. The song­writ­ers turned out about 50 songs, of which the show uses few­er than one-third. 

Con­sid­er the all-impor­tant open­ing num­ber, for which ​“Tra­di­tion,” was a late arrival. Before Rob­bins got involved, the show opened instead with ​“We’ve Nev­er Missed a Sab­bath Yet,” a song about get­ting ready for the Sab­bath that matri­arch Golde sang with her daugh­ters. Among its lyrics were cau­tions about get­ting those noo­dles made, chick­ens plucked, liv­er chopped and chal­lah baked in time to light and bless the Sab­bath candles.

But that song didn’t promise audi­ences the show Rob­bins had in mind. Again and again, he’d ask his authors what their musi­cal was real­ly about, and he refused to accept their answers that it was sim­ply a sto­ry of a milk­man and his five daugh­ters. Final­ly, Har­nick replied that the show was about tra­di­tion, and, replied Robbins,”That’s it. Write that.”

Today among the best-known and beloved songs ever writ­ten, ​“Tra­di­tion” sent ​“We’ve Nev­er Missed a Sab­bath Yet” scur­ry­ing. With it also went such Bock and Har­nick cre­ations as “ Pop­pa Help Me,” ​“A Butcher’s Soul,” ​“The Sto­ry of Jacob,” and ​“Baby Birds.” Gone was a love song called ​“As Much As That” and one of pro­duc­er Harold Prince’s per­son­al favorites, ​“Dear Sweet Sewing Machine.”

Sim­i­lar­ly, Tevye first sang not ​“If I Were a Rich Man” but rather, ​“That’s Life,” a lament about his lame horse. Among its lyrics was the stan­za: ​“So you’d like to be lazy and fat, of course/​Well, it’s your rot­ten luck to be Tevye’s horse.” But Rob­bins was wor­ried about hav­ing a real horse onstage that could make some of the high­ly-styl­ized sets look out of pro­por­tion. So he sent song­writ­ers Bock and Har­nick back to try again.

For­tu­nate­ly, the song­writ­ing team soon hap­pened to be at a ben­e­fit when a moth­er and daugh­ter came out to sing a Hasidic chant. Both men were tak­en with how the women sub­sti­tut­ed non­sense syl­la­bles for words, and Shel­don Har­nick aug­ment­ed their ded­ed­e­dums with some very descrip­tive lan­guage from Sholem Aleichem’s short sto­ries. ​“I’m very smart,” Har­nick once said.” I know where to take from.”

Bar­bara Isen­berg is the author of Mak­ing It Big: The Diary of a Broad­way Musi­cal, State of the Arts: Cal­i­for­nia Artists Talk About Their Work and Con­ver­sa­tions with Frank Gehry. Her work has appeared in the LA Times, the Wall Street Jour­nal, Time, Esquire, The Huff­in­g­ton Post, and London’s Sun­day Times. She lives in Los Ange­les. Read more about her and her work here.

Relat­ed Content:

• Tevye the Dairy­man and Motl the Can­tor’s Son by Sholem Aleichem
• Read­ing List: Jews and the Theater
• Read­ing List: Jews and Broadway