Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof by Alisa Solomon

Author:Alisa Solomon [Solomon, Alisa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780805092608
Amazon: 0805092609
Publisher: Metropolitan Books
Published: 2013-10-22T04:00:00+00:00

Hisaya Morishige as Tevye in Tokyo: within a decade, Fiddler had played in two dozen countries.

Nevertheless, the mild outcry in the mail revealed the rising stakes in some quarters of the Jewish community. And soon it wasn’t enough for the show to represent honorable Jews; it had to behave like them, too. To be a Jewish ambassador, Fiddler had to be a Jewish exemplar.

Never was this expectation more blatant than in a brouhaha over the dismissal of a cast member in the fall of 1966. The actor in question was Ann Marisse, a seasoned though young performer who had replaced Joanna Merlin as Tzeitel in the late spring of 1965. (Merlin left the show when her pregnancy reached the point—four and a half months—where the costume shop couldn’t take out her wedding dress any further.) Prince found Marisse “strong and appealing” in her first performances. Taller than Tanya Everett and Julia Migenes, she commanded the space as the oldest sister and she sang well. She had taken over the part of Consuela in West Side Story and had racked up several other Broadway credits (including a role in the megaflop Cafe Crown). In Fiddler, she played for a year and a half without a glitch.

Then, in September 1966, she missed a performance on Rosh Hashanah without advance notice—or so management said. The producers typically allowed actors to take a day off for the High Holidays if they made a request in advance. Marisse called in sick the afternoon of the holiday instead but claimed she had already alerted her understudy. When the stage manager balked at the flouting of procedure, she cried discrimination. That incensed Prince. “It makes me especially angry in that she didn’t even ask to miss those couple of performances,” he told Robbins. “I called Joanna Merlin, and she seems anxious to return to the company for a number of months. Goodbye, Ann Marisse.”

She did not go quietly. “It is true that I am an actress and that you are the producer. I am in your employ and you pay my salary. Does this also imply that you have leased my dignity and my spirit?” she wrote to Prince, reminding him that her father was an Orthodox rabbi and that her husband was ordained, too. (Her husband threw in the tallis, though, for a career in Hollywood; some years later, he directed the slasher flick Graduation Day.) Marisse complained to Actors’ Equity, which affirmed that management acted within its prerogative, and threatened to go to the state’s Human Rights Commission, which has no record of having granted the complaint a hearing. When she took her story to the press, however, journalists couldn’t resist the apparent irony. As the New York Post put it, she was fired “of all things for not coming to work on the Jewish High Holy Days.”

The issue of Fiddler’s observance of the High Holidays had come up the year before. It’s a ready-made controversy: the contest between shul and showbiz for the soul

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