Gateway High School Fiddler on the Roof Review
Keith Parsky as Tevye dances with Richard Puente as Fyedke during "To Life." Courtesy of Rebecca Dvorin Strong
Editor'southward Notation: Fifty years ago, on November. 3, 1971, the movie accommodation of 'Fiddler on the Roof' premiered. In honor of that anniversary, we are publishing a series of commodity about the impact of 'Fiddler' and its legacy. You lot tin read more than of the stories here.
A total spotlight comes upward on Keith Parsky, center stage.
He's wearing a false beard; he tried to grow his own, merely he's a teenager, so information technology was patchy. This is his commencement ever starring role, in this, his senior twelvemonth of high school. The threat of the Vietnam draft looms. So, less menacingly, does the cryptic sense of loss that comes to all teenagers when they outset contemplate leaving dwelling. The yr is 1971.
This graphic symbol lives deep inside him. He has known this man, in his soul, forever. He feels he was born to play him. He takes a breath.
"A fiddler on the roof," he says. "Sounds crazy, no?"
In Dec, 1971, Brighton High School — a heavily Jewish public school in a heavily Jewish suburb of Rochester, N.Y. — performed "Fiddler on the Roof" as its fall musical. The pic version of the musical, which would brand the story of a shtetl dairyman and his rebellious daughters a global miracle, had premiered merely a calendar month before.
The Brighton Cossacks. Jeff Zax, my dad, stands in the center of the front row. Courtesy of Rebecca Dvorin Stiff
I know this because my dad, Jeff Zax, performed in the show as a dancer. (That's him as a Cossack — he's the ane in the center with the large hair, and bigger sideburns.) At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, he reconnected with a group of high school classmates over Zoom. He told me they'd discussed their senior year production of "Fiddler," and that some members of the group had gone on to distinguished careers in the arts. It sounded like a standard kind of reminiscence: old friends fondly revisiting a moment they had shared, aught more.
Simply it kept coming upward. Someone shared photos from the evidence. People spoke about the director, a theater teacher named Tom Avery, and the ways that his guidance had echoed through the residual of their lives. Information technology became clear that, while loftier school theater often has an enormous emotional pull for those who participated in it, this had been no ordinary production. 50 years after it ran for three performances over 1 frigid weekend, this play was still not just nowadays in the hearts and minds of its cast and coiffure, but was felt, by many of them, to take been formative in their lives.
In a way, it'southward non surprising. Since "Fiddler on the Roof" premiered on Broadway on Sept. 22, 1964, it has been experienced, by generation upon generation, as a securely personal meditation on the joy and heartbreak wrapped up in Jewishness — and, more broadly, a reflection of the ways that people tin both love and abrasion against their traditions. Of course a group of teenagers performing it in a town structured in office by a post-war urge to create rubber, even maybe insular, Jewish communities would feel it securely.
Even then, whatever made the Brighton "Fiddler" and then remarkable, for its Jewish and non-Jewish cast alike, had to be more than just a sense of cultural resonance. I wondered if it might concord a inkling every bit to what makes "Fiddler" equally uniquely powerful as information technology is. And so I decided to ask.
"I'yard 66 years old," Karin Kasdin, who played Golde, told me, "and it's nonetheless one of the highlights of my life."
In the early 1970s, Rochester had begun to feel a steady population refuse, but Brighton, an upper-middle class suburb, was growing. Its population had nearly doubled since the middle of the century. And a meaning proportion of that population was Jewish.
The cast of Brighton High School'south 1971 "Fiddler on the Roof." Courtesy of Susan Boehm
Some families had lived in the surface area for decades. That was true for Keith Parsky, whose father was the only Jewish funeral director in boondocks. Kasdin's grandmother had arrived in Rochester direct upon immigrating from the Erstwhile Country, alone, equally a teenager who couldn't speak a word of English. Susan Boehm, who played Yente, was the granddaughter of the owners of Rochester's Jewish Ledger.
Other families, similar my father'southward, were new; my grandparents are Boston natives. Rebecca Dvorin Stiff, who played Chava, Tevye and Golde's rebellious third daughter, relocated there with her family unit in 1960. Anna Lank's parents —Lank was the production's choreographer, and played Fruma Sarah — had lived in the immediate area since the late '40s.
It wasn't an American shtetl — not quite. Jews were all the same in the minority, although only simply. "I thought the globe was maybe half Jewish, half Protestant," said Ginny Hammond Sobota, who played Tevye'south eldest daughter, Tzeitel.
The plan for Brighton High School's 1971 production of "Fiddler on the Roof." Courtesy of Rebecca Dvorin Potent
There was a fluid, well-nigh egalitarian spirit to the town. Strong attended Christmas mass each year with Kathleen Wakefield, who played Tevye'due south 2d daughter, Hodel. John Sloman, Motel the Tailor, was "a total Jew wannabe" who was in and out of my dad's house. ("I tin still say borei pri hagafen," he said.) Anybody knew, vaguely, that at that place were some antisemitic students at the high school, but almost no one remembers encountering them. When Jewish students graduated, left dwelling and began to run across people who had never before interacted with a Jew, they were stunned.
If possible, their non-Jewish peers were even more than so.
"What was weird was going away to college, and having roommates who had never met a Jewish person," Wakefield said. "I thought, oh my God, yous know, the world is really different."
Just the town, for all its freedoms, had some shtetl-like qualities.
If you weren't Orthodox, yous went to ane of 2 synagogues, either B'rith Kodesh, Reform, or Beth El, Conservative. (My father's family was, and remains, Beth El.) Everyone knew everyone. Considering Parsky'due south male parent tended to all of the area's Jewish dead, his family name was something of a macabre joke. Every Jew in town knew that "going to see Parsky" didn't mean going to hang out with Keith.
The town was, then equally now, overwhelmingly white. No i remembers seeing more than than one or two Black students at the high schoolhouse. There was a sense, despite the neighborly mixing of religions, that 1 was meant to associate with one's own.
That suggestion seems troubling now. But it had deep roots in the traumas of Jewish life in the first function of the 20th century, from the struggle of clearing to the pogroms and the Holocaust. Some parents were Shoah survivors. Some had fought in the war. At B'rith Kodesh, said Boehm, one rabbi e'er ended his sermons the same way: "Never forget, it could happen here, it could happen anywhere."
Keith Parsky and Karin Kasdin perform the Shabbat scene in Brighton Loftier School'south 1971 "Fiddler on the Roof." Courtesy of Rebecca Dvorin Strong
"I remember there was a large segment of Jews that must accept been profoundly impacted, and said, we gotta stay close to our faith," Parsky said. "In my parents' circles, they wanted to cling to the traditions. At that place was a definite wariness of other faiths that was expressed to me every time I dated someone non Jewish."
"The woman might similar you lot," his parents would say, "simply her parents might not."
The town's younger generations understood why their parents could be rigid. But information technology was the '70s. The students of Brighton had come up of age in the era of protest and rebellion and free love. Half of the class of '71, in my dad's memory, wore neither robes nor shoes to graduation. The world was in the middle of a palpable shift; yes, even in Brighton.
A December nine, 1971 clipping from the Brighton-Pittsford Post advertises Brighton High'south "Fiddler on the Roof" with a shot of the cast rehearsing "Tradition!" Courtesy of Rebecca Dvorin Stiff
And when Brighton Loftier chose to perform a musical nearly a family unit torn between the Judaism of their forefathers and the liberty of the new globe, between the life they'd always known and the radically different one coming for them, that musical gave its cast and coiffure a way to sympathize something essential about the generational cultural upheaval they were experiencing. Information technology brought them together, and it changed them.
"Await, 'Fiddler' is the story of a family's dissolution," said Lank. "The younger generation going, 'No.' The eldest girl marries, simply not who her father wants. The centre daughter goes even farther. The youngest girl doesn't marry a Jew. The world is coming apart."
"They're having to leave Anatevka externally," Lank said, "and internally, the family unit is dissolving equally well."
It'southward been 50 years, but yet, every time Ginny Hammond Sobota speaks with Keith Parsky, she calls him "Papa." When he and Karin Kasdin take run into one another over the years, he's chosen her "my darling wife." The whole production, Kathleen Wakefield said, carried with information technology "a very powerful sense of family."
Susan Boehm's rehearsal schedule for "Fiddler on the Roof." Courtesy of Susan Boehm
That was, in part, because and so much of the cast saw their own family in the show. Kasdin, a sophomore at the time of the production, said she wanted the role of Golde "so desperately I couldn't sleep at dark." The character was, to her, her grandmother, that lonely boyish who had come to this land all on her own. Susan Boehm'due south grandparents came from about every Onetime Country there was: Ukraine, Poland, Belarus.
"Three of my grandparents immigrated from Russian federation right at the time that the play takes place," said Rebecca Dvorin Strong. "My grandpa was even a tailor."
The resonances ran specially deep for Parsky. For years in his early on childhood, he believed people came to his father'southward funeral parlor but to slumber; he would ask his mother why his father always came abode sad. "I saw bits of him die with every person he buried," Parsky said.
So "the Jewish way of death, and Jewish way of life," came to exist fundamental to Parsky's consciousness. He took to entertaining the children who would come with their families to arrange burials. On loftier holidays, his family would progress from shul to shul, keeping upwardly the relationships that made the concern successful. He would mind in on his father's conversations: "He was always talking almost Earth State of war II, e'er talking about the Russian pogroms."
Keith Parsky as Tevye. Courtesy of Susan Boehm
To play Tevye, a grapheme always speaking to God, and always, in doing so, masking his pain in his sense of humor — it's difficult to imagine a childhood that could offer a more disconcertingly apt preparation. "I had been this cupboard actor, nobody knew about me," Parsky said. Merely his whole life had readied him for the function. "I felt this was just, this was going to be my time."
It was Parsky's Tevye that, more than than annihilation, shaped the production. He was brilliant in the role, at least per the accounts of his castmates: Boehm said he was "luminous." (The school paper's entertainingly formal review: "Keith equaled and surpassed the audience's expectations.")
"In productions, they say the person at the meridian sets the mood," said Boehm. "He just had a deepening of this grapheme, from his heart, that was far beyond his years."
That spirit — not merely depth, only too, Boehm said, "this very powerful joy" — was, for many, healing. The bandage didn't merely bring the stories of their parents and grandparents to the show. They brought the miseries, large and small, that they were offset to confront in their own lives.
Rochester had experienced racial upheavals in the '60s, during the ceremonious rights motion. "It was a bigoted city," Parsky said, and, increasingly, the teens in sheltered Brighton knew it. The Vietnam War seemed similar information technology might be approaching its end, just non rapidly or clearly plenty for anyone to feel safety. "Nosotros thought we were all going to be in it," Parsky said. "Ours was the terminal group — we had lottery numbers, but it was our year when they stopped picking."
And there were intimate, personal pains, many of them besides tender to talk over openly.
Ginny Hammond Sobota equally Tzeitel and John Sloman as Motel the Tailor. Courtesy of Ginny Hammond Sobota
John Sloman was still in shock over his mother's sudden death a year and a half before. Time had passed, but he had barely begun to grieve. "I have kind of a spotty retentivity virtually those couple of years of loftier school," he said, "because, you know, I was — I now know — experiencing PTSD."
"No guidance advisor talked to me — nobody talked to me," he said. He took up interim as an outlet. "In rehearsal — or working on a grapheme, or in operation — but being someone else was such a respite for me," he said.
"Being John, at that bespeak, was super painful."
Anna Lank was grappling with the isolation that came, she said, from being "a little fat girl." Karin Kasdin had always been shy and insecure. Taking the stage every bit Golde, at the eye of the family unit and the heart of the show, "completely changed my life," she said. Rebecca Dvorin Strong had only broken up with her high schoolhouse fellow: "I was admittedly shattered," she said, "I was crying every twenty-four hour period."
Ginny Hammond Sobota was recovering from an eating disorder that had left her feeling isolated. "Information technology was then long ago that nobody knew what it was," she said. "Information technology was meaningful to accept such a unifying experience in the light of that."
With the exception of sophomores Karin Kasdin and Andy Hammond, Ginny's blood brother, who played Perchik, most of the main cast were seniors. They looked frontward to graduating with the standard mix of anticipation and trepidation. Some were eager to escape from homes where they had rarely felt happy or safe. Some were reluctant to move far from a community they felt close to.
What "Fiddler" brought them was a new sense of family. Like whatsoever high school, Brighton had its cliques: "We had greasers and we had jocks and theater people and artists and writers," said Strong. During other productions, each group had stayed in some fashion aloof from the others. In fictional Anatevka, those boundaries dissolved. For much of its cast and crew, they never came back. "It was," said Kathleen Wakefield, "an astonishing experience."
Tzeitel and Cabin's wedding scene, after Perchik and Hodel start the controversial mixed-gender dancing. Courtesy of Ginny Hammond Sobota
That strange openness was reassuring, even propulsive. It gave the students a sense that even as they were first to carve up, with various degrees of readiness, from their families, the world would present them with opportunities to brand new ones. Tevye's family fractures and reforms, but the musical ends hopefully: The Jews have been exiled, they are going their divide ways, but they are clearly and determinedly looking frontwards.
Then, too, the bandage felt the possibility of reformation — a glimpse of it, only when, for many of them, it was needed.
"It gave my life significant at a fourth dimension when I didn't feel I had whatever," Kasdin said. "Information technology gave me an identity, and it gave me love."
In that location was nigh no set to speak of, only a few scraps of painted wood. The cast made many of their own costumes. The theater crowd wasn't big plenty to circular out the bandage with Cossacks, so the football team was strong-armed into filling out their ranks. Anna Lank taught them to trip the light fantastic toe, with "frustration, elation and pride."
It was a loftier school production if e'er at that place was 1: a scrap ramshackle, very bootleg. It didn't matter. The heart was there.
"A friend of mine reported to me that when she attended the play she happened to be sitting behind my mother in the audition," Strong said, "and that my female parent pretty much but cried from the moment the orchestra started directly through to when it concluded."
Rebecca Dvorin Potent as Chava (L) and Ginny Hammond Sobota as Tzeitel (R) perform "Matchmaker, Matchmaker." Courtesy of Virginia Hammond Sobota
Strong loved "Matchmaker, Matchmaker" best. Performing it with Kathleen Wakefield and Ginny Hammond Sobota was an feel of intense connexion. "We were holding hands, we were just revving ourselves up for bursting onto stage with the most excitement we could muster," she said.
Keith Parsky, equally Tevye, performs "If I Were a Rich Man." Courtesy of Ginny Hammond Sobota
Parsky was partial to "If I Were a Rich Man" and the testify-closing "Anatevka," only best of all was "To Life." He loved the sense of community in that scene, and the elementary hope of its message. It was about, he said, "everybody's aspirations to have a good life, and to be that happy."
Lank was touched most past Tzeitel and Motel's wedding. Susan Boehm loved "Do You Love Me;" and then did Karin Kasdin. Singing that song with Keith, she said, "I felt similar his wife through and through."
The magic backside the scenes constitute its style to the audience. "People seemed to like the show, and they talked about it for years," Parsky said. For decades, whenever Anna Lank went back to Brighton, people still identified her equally Fruma Sarah
The theater was at capacity every night, and each functioning ended, according to the student newspaper, with a standing ovation. "The play was certainly an first-class experience for BHS," its reviewer wrote. "Ane that will long be remembered."
And so, with much of the cast crying as the final curtain went downward, information technology concluded.
A review of "Fiddler on the Roof" in the Brighton Loftier School newspaper, Trapezoid, from December 20, 1971. Courtesy of Rebecca Dvorin Potent
"There was a profound sense of loss," said Rebecca Dvorin Potent, "of this imaginary family that I was a part of, and these imaginary parents who were my parents onstage, and the whole imaginary village and customs."
"People knew me as Tevye, subsequently that," Parsky said. "It was like peaking at 18. Where does information technology go from here?"
The seniors left. The family broke apart. Dealing with schoolhouse after they left "was incommunicable," said Karin Kasdin. "I hated it. I admittedly hated it." She kept interim in community theater, but no student production could always measure upwards. "I never did another large musical at Brighton High."
In the spring, just before nigh of the main cast graduated, many of them made a pilgrimage. A nearby Catholic high school was performing its own "Fiddler," and they wanted to run across.
"When they were doing one of the scenes at the start of the Sabbath prayer, the guys took their hats off," Ginny Hammond Sobota said. It was a misunderstanding of Jewish tradition if e'er there was one. "We were groovy up. We thought that was so funny."
"Their gear up was then unbelievable," John Sloman said. "It looked like they lived in the Swiss Alps."
Information technology wasn't only that watching a Catholic loftier schoolhouse's idiosyncratic take on their very beloved, very Jewish show was foreign. It was likewise that afterward their ain "Fiddler," nothing else would ever compare.
Anna Lank, in the green gown and pearls, performs as Fruma Sarah. Courtesy of Rebecca Dvorin Strong
Kathleen Wakefield never saw the musical over again: "The experience of the play was what I wanted to concur love, and shut to me," she said. For many, the motion-picture show was a thwarting. "I don't really have any recollection of it being important," said Sloman. "I thought that, you know, ours was the be-all and end-all."
"I didn't love Topol, in that function, to exist honest" said Susan Boehm. "I thought Keith was more appealing."
The resonance they found in the show, together, was a one time-in-a-lifetime thing. "I nevertheless, whenever I hear 'Tradition,' I lift my easily and do the hand motions we did," Sobota said.
For some of the cast, it wasn't just the ending of a play, but besides the ending of a manner of Jewish life they would never quite recapture.
Some Brightonites stayed their whole lives, but the "Fiddler" cast scattered. Their sense that they lived in a changing world, a forcefulness that had helped brand "Fiddler" then powerful, carried them forward. In the end, many of their lives looked little like the lives that their parents — who, Anna Lank said, "all made that deliberate decision to alive in a community with like-minded and like-religioned people" — might accept imagined.
Many of those changes were for the good. Similar Tevye's three oldest girls, the Brighton students chose their own paths. Some of the Jewish bandage stayed observant, and some didn't. Some sought out close-knit Jewish communities for their own children; for others, it wasn't a high priority. Despite his family'southward warnings, Keith Parsky married someone who isn't Jewish. So did Lank, although Lank's husband recently converted, and Strong. "I don't think that's because I played Chava," Strong said. "I call up that's simply a coincidence."
John Sloman, as Motel, and Ginny Hammond, as Tzeitel, stand up under the chuppah during their nuptials scene. Courtesy of Ginny Hammond Sobota
But one of the lessons of "Fiddler" is that even choices that bring happiness have costs. When Hodel joins Perchik, her joy is inflected by grief at leaving dwelling far behind. Like Anatevka, said Kasdin, Brighton's Jewish community was "very tight, very supportive."
Leaving was difficult, simply she didn't regret it. Even then, she said, "I never did notice that once again."
"The Jewish communities I've found since and so gave rise to dissimilar sorts of communal experiences," Anna Lank said. "But never that intense."
"In my mind, they're inextricably linked — my leaving Brighton, and leaving Anatevka."
In some ways, Brighton hasn't changed. Rochester'due south population has continued to refuse, just Brighton'southward has stayed level. Finer the same number of people live there now equally in the 1970s. My dad'south childhood home — "stucco," John Sloman recalled, "with a trivial triangular entranceway" — looks just the same. My grandmother however lives in that location.
But synagogue membership has gone down. And the high schoolhouse recently renovated its theater. "Information technology's simply recently that I've stopped expecting to be recognized when I go back," said my dad.
Sloman became an actor and interim coach. Y'all've seen him on "Mad Men," or perhaps "General Hospital." He came to the theater in a fourth dimension of personal crunch, and it helped him move forrad.
That was in part, he said, considering of the guidance of Tom Avery, who directed "Fiddler." "No one ever loved the theater more him," Sloman said. "He was tough on me, because he knew that he had to toughen me upward. He knew where I was going, maybe before I did."
Susan Boehm and Tom Avery, who directed "Fiddler on the Roof," performing in a community theater production in Brighton. Courtesy of Susan Boehm
After college, Susan Boehm moved to New York and studied with Sanford Meisner, one of the keen acting teachers of the 20th century. She performed on and off Broadway, and across the country, doing some theatrical producing forth the manner. In the late '90s, she decided she'd had plenty of performing, but kept working on the business organization side of the film manufacture.
Lank spent years in the theater, including as a founding member of an avant garde Jewish theater visitor, The New Artef Players, that aimed to capture the spirit of the erstwhile Yiddish theaters on the Lower East Side. Karin Kasdin founded a community acting school in suburban Pennsylvania, the Kasdin School of Dramatic Arts, and ran it for close to 2 decades. Rebecca Dvorin Strong became a painter, and Kathleen Wakefield, a poet. My dad did some musical theater, mostly Gilbert and Sullivan, late in college and early in graduate schoolhouse. After that, he stopped performing until the pandemic, when he began taking vocalization lessons, surprising u.s.a. all with a singing vocalism so powerful that, if yous're around when he's practicing, yous sometimes take to leave the house to concentrate.
And Keith Parsky — well, he about became an role player. He studied theater in higher, and environmental law, with the understanding that if theater didn't piece of work out, he could autumn dorsum on his legal training. He graduated in three years, and had an audition lined up at the Royal University of Dramatic Fine art, in London, one of the nigh prestigious conservatories in the world. One nighttime in January 1975, living with his family in Brighton while he planned out his future, he and his father had a eye-to-middle. They drank a six-pack, and Parsky told his father that he knew he wanted him to pursue police, not interim.
"He said, 'No, son, I'm your biggest fan, I just want y'all to have something — like whatsoever begetter,'" Parsky said.
Parsky left to see a friend. He was there for about five minutes before his female parent called and said, "Come home quickly, your father's sick." In that location was snow, and the roads were hard. "I get there in time to run into my dad being carried out," Parsky said. "I was the last person to talk to him. He had a massive coronary, he passed away that night. So I went to law schoolhouse."
He didn't listen practicing police, and when he made a midcareer switch to being a Tv set anchor, spending a few years every bit an evening news host in Guam, it felt like a mode of honoring his old dramatic dreams. (These days, he'due south back to the legal side of things and working at the Section of the Interior.)
And Tevye, his one tremendous role, stayed in his life.
"One of my sons got to play Tevye in junior loftier," Parsky said. "I said to him, his son — or daughter — is destined to play Tevye. 'Fiddler' has been practiced to our family unit."
It's the end of the night. The students of Brighton High School pace the phase in a slow circle. Their characters will ever exist in relation to ane another, but their footsteps propose a journey: They are moving further and further from home.
"Information technology was solemn," said John Sloman, "and horrible."
A ticket for "Fiddler on the Roof." Courtesy of Susan Boehm
With the release of the pic, just weeks earlier a full spot showtime came upwardly on Keith Parsky, eye stage, "Fiddler on the Roof" had become a true global phenomenon. Across the world, people of all faiths and cultures watched Tevye, Golde and their girls effort to concur their ain in a changing world, and saw, in that clan of weary, fierce Jews, their own families, and their own stories.
The stories of Brighton High could, in a way, belong to anyone in the globe who happened to hear Jerry Bock'south songs and Sheldon Harnick's lyrics at the right moment, and found, within them, a small just authentic portrait of the earth.
And yet.
The concluding chip of dialogue in the movie belongs to Tevye. "All right, children," he says, to his two youngest daughters, "allow's go." It's an instruction, and an invitation. The eldest girls, Tzeitel, Hodel and Chava, take made their ain way. Shortly, even with the long and difficult road ahead of them, these two girls will, as well. There is a clarity, in those words, about the perpetual moving away involved in homo life — from youth, habitation, family, health — that is both universal and particular.
Tevye is addressing his girls, with all their individuality, and with all his unspoken questions almost where their uncertain futures will have them, and who they will get. And he is addressing all of us. We volition all, at some point, have to exit the familiar backside. Nosotros might too do it briskly, and with humor.
Every person to experience "Fiddler on the Roof" becomes, for a moment, Tevye'southward kid, looking out alongside him at a waiting expanse, preparing to go. For the students of Brighton Loftier, that moment was a perfectly individual experience.
It was new, because it was theirs.
Source: https://forward.com/culture/477761/fiddler-on-the-roof-high-school-brighton-new-york-1971/
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