The Writers
Bock and Harnick
Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick were a writing team that started working together in 1956. They collaborated on 5 Broadway shows together in just seven years. Some of these productions included Fiorello! Tenderloin and She Loves Me. Fiddler on the Roof was certainly their most successful show and the team’s first major hit. With Bock as the composer and Harnick as the lyricist, the two collaborated to create an original score that would eventually win them a Tony. While Harnick grew up Jewish, Bock did not. When writing the show, the pair did not have much interest in creating music that was strictly tied to the turn of the century time period or Jewish tradition. Bock has since said that he had no intention of doing research into traditional Jewish Klezmer music, additionally, Harnick claims that he wanted to avoid using too many Yiddish words in his lyrics in order to keep the show accessible to the entire audience. The two stopped working together in 1970 but briefly came back together in 2004 to write new music for the Broadway revival of Fiddler on the Roof.
Click here to listen to an NPR interview in which the pair discuss the revival as well as some of their experiences with the original production.
Joseph Stein
Joseph Stein, who wrote the book for Fiddler on the Roof, was born in New York City to Jewish immigrant parents. Until 1945 Stein was a social worker who wrote comedy on the side. This was until he met Zero Mostel, who would later star as Tevye in the original production of Fiddler. Mostel paid him 15 dollars to use a joke on his radio show. This encounter with Mostel allowed Stein to break into the Broadway community with his first show called Plain and Fancy, which was about the Pennsylvania Dutch. When Stien was a child, his father would read Sholem Aleichem’s short stories to him. As an adult, Stein revisited this work and fell in love with it, particularly the stories in the book Tevye’s Daughters. This led him to team up with friends Jerry Bock, Sheldon Harnick, and Jerome Robbins (the director and choreographer) to adapt the short stories into what would eventually become Fiddler on the Roof.
Click here to watch Stein talk about his career with Lin-Manuel Miranda
