NEW YORK — The sky over Central Park brightens Sheldon Harnick’s living room, a spacious haven more than a dozen floors above Manhattan’s streets. Misty, colorful paintings by Harnick’s wife, Margery Gray Harnick, line the white walls. On the baby grand piano sits a score for a certain Broadway show – “Fiddler on the Roof” – with lyrics by Harnick.
That was many sunrises and sunsets ago. It has been 50 years, and now the “Fiddler” anniversary party is on.
The evergreen musical is the centerpiece of Arena Stage’s season, with performances beginning Halloween and running through the New Year. (Arena leader Molly Smith directs, with Jonathan Hadary as Tevye.) Bartlett Sher of Lincoln Center’s “The Light in the Piazza” and the intensely admired 2008 “South Pacific” revival is set to direct “Fiddler” on Broadway next year.
Two new books are out: Barbara Isenberg’s making-of chronicle “Tradition!” and Alisa Solomon’s “Wonder of Wonders,” which details the creative process but also explores the deep roots and tenacious staying power of the musical that in the 1960s and ’70s became the longest-running show Broadway had ever seen.
You’d think “Fiddler” needs no defense, yet it has always been attacked in some quarters as a kitschy, schmaltzy version of the shtetl life lived by late-19th-century European Jews and the irony-rich Sholem Aleichem stories that were the show’s source.
“We still have this show that’s beloved. So something’s going on there that’s quite interesting. The musical is powerful and thrilling in its own right,” Solomon says.
In 1971, film critic Pauline Kael called “Fiddler” “the most powerful movie musical ever made.” Isenberg’s book records the tears shed by one person after another as they beheld director-choreographer Jerome Robbins’s vibrant folkloric dances and listened to the noble and plaintive songs by Harnick and composer Jerry Bock — “To Life,” “Matchmaker, Matchmaker,” “If I Were a Rich Man.” The recollection of so much weeping, though: It feeds the myth of schmaltz.
Such has been the half-century balance of “Fiddler,” with the musical about a devout milkman struggling with changing traditions proving to be an unstoppable force. Seventy more productions will take the stage before the end of the year, from middle schools to light opera companies.
“ ‘Fiddler’ was something special,” Harnick says, recalling the intense research put in by all the show’s creators, recent descendants of immigrant Jews: book writer Joseph Stein, composer Bock, Robbins and producer Hal Prince. “It was that important to all of us. It was all of our growing up experiences.”