This story was originally published in the Forward. Click here to get the Forward’s free email newsletters delivered to your inbox.
Jason Alexander showed up to a Zoom call with a full beard. Was it for a role?
“If it’s not, I don’t know what I’m doing,” the Tony winner and eight-time Emmy nominee said from his home. “It’s like a pet. You have to walk it and groom it and let it play with other beards.”
Jokes aside, Alexander is preparing to take on one of the greatest bearded, Jewish roles in the theatrical canon: Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof, the culmination of a lifelong love of musical theater.
“My mother said that when she and my father went to see it in 1964 or ’65 they took me with them,” Alexander said of his first brush with Fiddler. He has no memory of it, but according to the family lore, “not only did I go, but I sat there in awe and wonder and didn’t make a peep, and smiled and loved it. And so they knew they at least had a theatergoer, if not a theater participant, at that early age.”
Alexander, best known for his nine seasons playing George Costanza on Seinfeld, performed a bit of Fiddler in the 1989 revue Jerome Robbins’ Broadway, for which he earned a Tony and Drama Desk award, but the show proper was always the one that got away.
A little over a year ago, when Tom McCoy of La Mirada Theatre in Greater Los Angeles heard Alexander wanted to do the show, he said he’d love to have it be part of their season. Lonny Price, who starred with Alexander in the original production of Stephen Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along and has helmed Broadway shows like 110 in the Shade and Sunset Boulevard, was approached to direct.
Price (who also saw the original Fiddler, with Zero Mostel’s replacement Herschel Bernardi) calls it “the quickest ‘yes’ in the world,” even though it means an extended stay away from his home in New York.
“It was a bucket list show for me,” Price, who knew all the creators of the show — and directed a revival of lyricist Sheldon Harnick and composer Jerry Bock’s The Rothschilds — said in a Zoom interview.
Alexander and Price reunited during the making of Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened, Price’s documentary about Merrily, and had been looking to collaborate. Fiddler was a no-brainer, and both shared a vision for what the show was trying to communicate to audiences today.
“I was particularly drawn to it again now because of what’s happening in the world,” Alexander said. “We’re once again in a place where there’s a lot of race hatred, and antisemitism is a big part of that. And I just wanted to do a piece that is proudly Semitic and Jewish, and talks about Jewish tradition and Jewish culture and Jewish history.”
“Sadly, it’s always in vogue, this story, because there are always people being discriminated against and being scapegoated and being punished for no reason but who they are or what they believe,” said Price. In the postwar period, when Harnick, Bock and book writer Joseph Stein conceived the show with director Jerome Robbins, antisemitism was unfashionable.
“That was the anomaly that period,” Price said. “In every other period of history, we’ve been running for our lives.”
But while Price and Alexander both felt the call to make a statement with a boldly Jewish show, they also connected with the more universal message of Fiddler that has made it a global success.
“If you ask a dozen people what they think Fiddler is really about, you’ll probably get a dozen different answers,” Alexander said. “But for me, the core of the play is about a community, as evidenced by Tevye, whose entire structure is based on these traditions, on what came before.”
Pivotally, Alexander said, though Tevye bases his life around these traditions, they “don’t work for his children.”
Three times in the play, Tevye — crying “Tradition!” — is confronted with the new needs of his daughters. In the end — even with Chava, who marries a gentile — Alexander thinks he picks his children.
“This incredible political tension that we feel between conservatism and progressivism, to me, lies right there in those moments,” Alexander said.
On a more personal level, Alexander, who said he read the Sholem Aleichem stories in Hebrew school, can relate to Tevye as a father.
“I am very fortunate in that my children live within a mile and a half of my home in either direction,” said Alexander. Naturally, the scene where Hodel leaves for Siberia hits hard. “Jason Alexander is a far more sentimental man than Tevye is supposed to be!”
But, Price said, Alexander is an ideal Tevye.
“Zero was a wonderful actor, but a clown — and I mean that in the highest sense of that word,” Price said, adding that Luther Adler’s take on the dairyman was “probably humorless.” Alexander is the best of both worlds.
“Jason has a very unique combination of serious actor and tummler, and that’s really what the part needs,” said Price. “I’ve not seen the combination of skills be so right, so appropriate for a part.”
But, Price said, this won’t be a production that places Anatevka on the moon or sets it in the 1950s. It will use the original Jerome Robbins choreography, and even the original orchestrations with a full pit of 20 players.
“This is going to be as close to 1964 as anyone has seen in a long time,” Price said. “This is going to be a very — forgive the word — traditional Fiddler on the Roof, and I’m happy for that.”
As for the not strictly theatrical traditions, the cast has been working with an adviser. Alexander is, due to his “truly lapsed religiosity,” learning the prayers and the process of an Orthodox Shabbat dinner.
“I was never, ever drawn to the religiosity of Judaism, or frankly, any religion, but I was always drawn to the cultural traditions of Judaism and what we would call ‘the sechel of Judaism,’” Alexander said, using a word for wisdom or common sense.
The role isn’t changing that — Alexander said he’s not about to break out the kiddush cups at home, instead hoping that all his dinners exude the gratitude of a Shabbat meal.
“I live in a very, very Orthodox neighborhood, and my neighbors more than compensate for me, I promise,” Alexander said.
Will they see the show? “I’m sure they’re all wondering what the beard’s about,” he laughed.
Jason Alexander stars in the play Fiddler on the Roof from Nov. 8 to Dec. 1. Tickets and more information can be found on the La Mirada Theatre’s website.
This story was originally published on the Forward.
