Theater: Zero’s Hour

Fiddler on the Roof. Zero Mostel is a bundle of Zero Mostels, and a fresh one comes to view with each new performance. He can dance like a bear, sing like a frog and outstare an owl. A rhinoceros cannot readily distinguish Mostel from a rhinoceros. What links all of Mostel’s roles is his gift for reaching the heart of a character and sympathetically synchronizing every heartbeat in the house with his. This gift is greatly evident in Fiddler on the Roof, a pleasantly nostalgic musical of Jewish community life in a tiny Russian village just prior to the abortive 1905 revolution. But for Zero, Fiddler’s heartbeat would be considerably fainter.

Mostel plays Tevye, a poor dairyman by trade and a Jewish cracker-barrel philosopher by bent. Tevye has five unmarried daughters on his hands, a strident wife (Maria Karnilova) at his elbow, and God’s voice in his inner ear. He quivers before his wife and quips with his God. He plans to arrange his daughters’ marriages in the time-honored way. They plead love. “Tradition,” thunders Tevye, stabbing the air with an irate prophet’s forefinger and then lowering his hand like a falling leaf, in wry self-mockery. The eldest daughter marries a tailor without a sewing machine. The second follows her student-revolutionary fiance to Siberia. The third elopes with a Gentile. Tevye’s buffetings are preludes to a communal sorrow, an edict ordering the Jews to sell their property and leave the land.

Fiddler is sweet in spirit, true in tone, and its shawled, long-skirted women and bearded, black-hatted men look more like folk than showfolk. Jerome Robbins’ dances are closer to the soil than to concrete, and a male wedding dance with empty wine bottles perched on the men’s hats is a tingling display of rigid torsos and agile Slavic slides.

Paradoxically, Fiddler’s conscientious good taste may have robbed it of the richer seasoning of the Sholem Aleichem tales it comes from. Fiddler does not swell with Aleichem’s yeasty joy, pain and mystery of living. Zero does.