FIDDLER ON THE SCRIPT

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Ave atque vale
Saturday, 06 November 2010

Joseph Stein, 1912-2010

Joe Stein wrote the scripts for musicals, which is no way to become a household name. But you'd be hard put to find a household that doesn't know some of his work, including the blockbuster that closed out the Golden Age of the Broadway musical, Fiddler On The Roof. He died a couple of weeks ago, and his collaborator on that show, the composer Jerry Bock, followed a few days later. I met Stein a few times over the years, and met his son, too - Harry Stein, also a writer - although it took me a while to figure out the connection. In the end, Joe Stein was a lifelong Broadway liberal, while his son migrated right and wrote a very funny book about the shock this caused his old friends, I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next To A Republican. I gather it caused some grief at family gatherings, too. B
 ut, putting politics aside, Joseph Stein was a marvelous writer and one of the last great craftsmen in an American theatre which has all but entirely lost a century of accumulated knowhow.

Every time I met him, he wasn't so much writing as rewriting - for a revival, for a second chance to get right something screwed up first time round. 'This is maybe the tenth variation,' he estimated, fingering the latest script of The Baker's Wife, before adding blithely: 'But, oddly enough, the show is now fairly close to the first draft we had 15 years ago'. Which is how it goes in musicals, a sort of upside-down board game where the hardest thing to do is stay put at the original starting-point and avoid getting kicked round the board on double twos until you wind up back where you started a decade and a half earlier.

The Baker's Wife began as an intimate character comedy, adapted from a Marcel Pagnol/Jean Giono film of the 1930s, about the arrival of a new baker and his young wife in a Provencal village. By the time David Merrick's production began its try-out in 1976, the show was already wildly cartwheeling away from the writers' intentions, and Stein and his composer Stephen Schwartz eventually insisted on closing it out- of-town.

So why would anyone want to write a musical? More particularly, why would anyone want to write the script - the 'book' - of a musical? If the show fails, you're the first to be blamed, as everyone sighs in unison with stage sage weariness: 'Ah, book trouble'. If the show hits, the best you can expect is that nobody notices you. Even the few who do notice assume the guy is only responsible for the dialogue scenes - the bits between the numbers nobody remembers. Whereas, if he's doing his job, he's the fellow who's enabled the songs, structuring the entire drama from which springs all the good stuff - the showstoppers, the big ballad, the dream ballet.

'The high moments in a musical are given to the composer and lyricist,' Stein told me, 'but that's the nature of the game, so what you get satisfaction from is the finished product, not the individual elements. Very often, I'll write a scene and part of that scene will change and become a lyric. In Fiddler On The Roof, 'Do You Love Me?' was originally just dialogue and it surprised and delighted me when Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick said, 'We can musicalize that.' If you listen to the song, it's still dialogue - 'Do you love me?' 'Do I what?' 'Do you love me?' 'Do I love you?' - but, when they musicalized it, they made it special.'

To have your well-crafted scenes pilfered by your collaborators requires a self-effacement which doesn't come easily to most writers. Distinguished figures from Ogden Nash to Truman Capote have written the books of musicals, but most have been happy to return to the comparatively sane worlds of books, plays, TV and motion pictures. One of only a handful of full-time practitioners, Stein was high up on every producer's list of troubleshooters when shows started to fall apart. Take Irene (1973), a fluffy vehicle for Debbie Reynolds, written by Hugh Wheeler and staged by John Gielgud - 'a strange choice for director of a musical,' mused Stein. On the road, it was a disaster. 'When I was called in, I asked, 'What about Hugh?' They said, 'He's gone.' We're down on the program as collaborators a
 nd I never met him till after the show opened. I had one brief meeting with Sir John, who was thrilled . . .' He paused theatrically. '...to leave. He'd had it. He couldn't wait to get out. So I made a serviceable entertainment out of a shambles, as a professional favor.'

On such occasions, he preferred not to take credit, because it wasn't really his baby. 'Are you ashamed of this show?' Debbie Reynolds demanded. 'I said, 'Well, no. Not really.' She said, 'Then your name goes on it.' She insisted.' Most writers would have joined Gielgud on the first train out, but you can go on a long making a serviceable entertainment out of a shambles: Irene wound up running two years on Broadway.

He came into musicals from television. 'I was working on the Sid Caesar show, and I was asked by a producer, who was looking for another Oklahoma!, to do a show about Pennsylvania. So Will Glickman and I wrote a story about the Pennsylvania Dutch.' Plain And Fancy, if not quite a checked gingham blockbuster on the Oklahoma! scale, proved to be one of the surprise hits of the Fifties. It also set the tone for the rest of his career. Although his choice of source material was unusual - Eugene O'Neill, Sean O'Casey - the whole was remarkably homogeneous. 'The plays of mine I like best - starting with Plain And Fancy, then Juno, Zorba, Baker's Wife - are basically about simple, elementary people in a very unsophisticated environment, centered around a larger-than-life figure,' he said to me. '
 I don't write the kinds of things Doc Simon writes - about sophisticated people. I like it, but I can't write it.'

Stein's simple folk weren't that ordinary once they started singing: Take Me Along had Jackie Gleason, Zorba Anthony Quinn. But he insisted he wasn't in the business of celebrity vehicles. 'When I write for the theatre, I am not writing for a star. The only time I ever did was for Sammy Davis in Mr Wonderful. Aside from that, I write my play and then it's cast, hopefully with someone who can play it. He may be Zero Mostel or Tony Quinn. But Zero was not in my mind when I was writing Fiddler.' Nonetheless, when the writer goes home, the star's still there every night getting the final word. As Tevye, Mostel took to throwing in odd Yiddish phrases and ad-libbing, much as he'd done on A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum. 'On A Funny Thing', said Stein, 'he got away with it because 
 it was that kind of show. On Fiddler, he got away with it because Zero could get away with anything. He was an enormous talent but - how shall I put it? - not the most disciplined. I once went backstage after a show where he'd been cutting up a little and he said, 'Listen, when I'm on the stage, it's between me and the audience - everybody else has gotta get outta the way.' I said, 'Including the play?' '

The real punchline to the story is that, after Mostel left, seven other Tevyes followed before Fiddler closed in 1972, having played 3,242 performances, overtaken My Fair Lady as Broadway's all-time long-runner and been staged in more than 30 countries: the show was bigger than any star. Trouble is, how do you follow Fiddler? It's a question which not only Stein but most of his Broadway confreres found difficult to answer. Alan Jay Lerner hailed it as the 'triumphant finale to the glorious belle epoque that began with Oklahoma!', but the key word there is 'finale'.

'I disagreed with Alan,' said Stein, when I reminded him of Lerner's line. 'People's emotions haven't changed. The problem is, since Fiddler, there haven't been any musicals on the level of My Fair Lady or those great shows. You can't say, 'My God, this wonderful show failed on Broadway.' No such show came along.'

And nor did they in the years since. Even the 'serviceable entertainments' Broadway fell back on came to seem less serviceable than they'd once been. Joseph Stein lived a long life and kept at it more or less till the end, but he outlasted the theatre he loved. Sunrise, sunset, swiftly flow the days.


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