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[0:00] David Armstrong: Hello, this is a special encore episode of Broadway Nation in celebration of the 63rd anniversary of the off-Broadway musical phenomenon, The Fantasticks, which opened at the Sullivan Street Playhouse in Greenwich Village on May 3rd, 1960, and went on to play there for an incredible 42 years, not closing until January 2002.

[0:24] David Armstrong: Then four years later, the show reopened at the Snapple Theatre Center in Times Square, where it ran another 11 years.

[0:32] David Armstrong: As you will hear, even though this show was performed off Broadway, it had a significant impact and influence on not only the final decade of the golden age of Broadway, which is the subject of this podcast, but also well beyond and right up to today.

[0:48] David Armstrong: For example, one thing that's always interested me is that The Fantasticks ends its first act with a delirious happy ending and the entire cast posed in a joyous tableau.

[1:00] David Armstrong: Then the second act picks up with that same image, but the bloom is now definitely off the rose, or as Tom Jones's lyric puts it, now the plum is too ripe.

[1:11] David Armstrong: Act two then tells the story of what happens after Happily Ever After.

[1:16] David Armstrong: Sound familiar?

[1:18] David Armstrong: Yes, this is remarkably similar to what happens in both Sunday in the Park with George and Into the Woods.

[1:25] David Armstrong: So it seems to me that more than two decades after the premiere of The Fantasticks, Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine were still being strongly influenced by its structure, either consciously or subliminally.

[1:38] David Armstrong: This episode was recorded back in September of 2020, so there are a few references that are now out of date.

[1:44] David Armstrong: Here we go.

[2:04] David Armstrong: Welcome to another episode of Broadway Nation, the podcast that tells the extraordinary story of how immigrants, Jews, queers, African Americans, and other outcasts invented the Broadway musical and how they changed America in the process.

[2:17] David Armstrong: I'm David Armstrong, and I call this episode the Golden Age of Broadway Part 3.

[2:30] David Armstrong: As the 1950s came to a close, Broadway musicals were at the very center of American culture.

[2:36] David Armstrong: Through their chart-topping original cast albums, their songs, stories, and characters were known and loved coast to coast.

[2:43] David Armstrong: Broadway show tunes were the biggest pop hits of the day, recorded by the most popular singers and bands.

[2:49] David Armstrong: Broadway shows, their creators and their stars were often featured on the covers of major magazines and highlighted on the highest-rated television programs.

[2:57] David Armstrong: And many of the hit musicals of the 1940s and early 50s were being transformed into immensely popular major motion pictures that expanded the Broadway audience even more.

[3:08] David Armstrong: Then in 1960, as if on cue, two immensely popular shows will kick off the decade by foreshadowing several major changes in American culture.

[3:19] David Armstrong: Changes that will dramatically affect the Broadway musical and by the end of the decade leave its future in doubt. While Broadway was at its zenith in terms of prestige and influence, meanwhile, down in Bohemian Greenwich Village, the off-Broadway theater movement was growing into a disruptive, counter-cultural alternative to mainstream theater.

[3:45] David Armstrong: And in the process, it was giving birth to small, quirky, unusual musicals that would never have flown on Broadway, most notably The Fantasticks.

[3:54] David Armstrong: Tom Jones, who wrote the book and lyrics, and Harvey Schmidt, who composed the music, began working on the show while they were still in college in Texas.

[4:02] David Armstrong: And although they had at first conceived it as a large-scale Rodgers and Hammerstein style musical, circumstances led them to collaborate with director Word Baker to reinvent it as a small cast, small stage, bare bones production.

[4:15] David Armstrong: The plot of The Fantasticks is based on Edmund Rostand's 1894 French play called Les Romanesques.

[4:22] David Armstrong: This is kind of a reverse Romeo and Juliet story in which two fathers pretend to hate each other in order to trick their defiant teenage children into falling in love and getting married.

[4:33] David Armstrong: The Fantasticks premiered in the intimate 153-seat Sullivan Street Playhouse, and the show's simple platform set and thrust stage created an intimate and engaging effect.

[4:45] David Armstrong: Word Baker's direction was highly stylized, and it combined traditional musical theater staging with French mime, commedia dell'arte, kabuki, noh, and other Asian and avant-garde theater techniques.

[4:57] David Armstrong: And The Fantasticks features one of the most captivating and delightful scores of the era, both refreshingly unconventional and reassuringly traditional at the same time.

[5:07] David Armstrong: And out of it came several very popular hit songs.

[5:19] David Armstrong: Soon it's gonna rain.

[5:30] David Armstrong: Soon it's gonna rain.

[5:35] David Armstrong: Soon it's gonna rain.

[5:47] David Armstrong: The impact of the show was so strong that the original off-Broadway production ran for an incredible 42 years, from 1960 until 2002, a total of 17,162 performances, making it the world's longest-running musical, a title it still holds.

[6:06] David Armstrong: And during that long New York run, The Fantasticks was produced virtually everywhere throughout the United States, and in at least 67 other countries around the world.

[6:21] David Armstrong: Author Scott Miller writes that The Fantasticks was a musical born of one of the most fascinating periods in American history, the 1950s, when traditional domesticity was being challenged, when organized religion was being challenged, when the unquestioned authority of parents and other experts was being questioned, and when young Americans were becoming obsessed with individuality, with rebellion, with freedom, with art as a means to criticize social and political structures, and most disconcerting of all, with modern jazz.

[6:52] David Armstrong: All of this would find full bloom in the 60s, but the seeds were here in the 1950s with the beat writers, when composer Harvey Schmidt and writer Tom Jones, two young turtlenecked Bohemians in 1950s Manhattan, were creating this masterpiece.

[7:08] David Armstrong: I completely agree with Scott.

[7:10] David Armstrong: The Fantasticks is a masterpiece, but it became so popular, and its avant-garde style was so absorbed into our mainstream theatrical culture that the show's radicalness and innovation is now often overlooked.

[7:27] David Armstrong: That same year, the satirical musical comedy Bye Birdie became the very first Broadway show to include any kind of rock and roll music in its score.

[7:56] David Armstrong: As well as the very first to dramatize the impact on American culture of the post-war baby boom generation, the largest in history and the generation gap that its dominance created.

[8:07] David Armstrong: It was only four years prior to Birdie's 1960 premiere that Elvis Presley had first emerged on the scene as a rock music sensation.

[8:16] David Armstrong: Of course, the birth of rock and roll is its own uniquely American story of how black and white music came together and combined with sexual liberation to revolutionize an art form.

[8:27] David Armstrong: But I'll leave that to somebody else's podcast.

[8:29] David Armstrong: In 1956, Elvis had made his first legendary appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show, during which, because of his infamous pelvic gyrations, the television cameras would only show him from the waist up, and his singing could barely be heard over the screaming of the young girls in the audience.

[8:46] David Armstrong: And all of this turned Elvis into a superstar.

[8:49] David Armstrong: Then in 1958, he was unexpectedly drafted into the army and had to put his singing career on hold, much to the dismay of devastated teenage girls across America who were sent into waves of grief and despair.

[9:02] David Armstrong: Inspired by these real-life incidents, the creators of Bye Birdie invented a fictional version of Elvis named Conrad Birdie and devised a plot about what might happen if a sexually provocative young rock star was suddenly thrust into the small town, middle-class, middle American lives of the citizens of Sweet Apple, Ohio.

[9:23] David Armstrong: The show's authors took every opportunity they could find to satirize mid-century American values, society, and culture.

[9:30] David Armstrong: But if you've only seen the movie of Bye Birdie, then you really haven't seen the show because much of the satire was watered down for the film.

[9:38] David Armstrong: Bye Birdie was the surprise hit of the season.

[9:41] David Armstrong: The New York Daily News called it the funniest, most captivating, and most expert musical comedy one could hope to see in several seasons of showgoing.

[9:51] David Armstrong: This one show not only launched Dick Van Dyke and Chita Rivera into major stardom, it also launched the careers of three young men in their early 30s who would go on to have a tremendous influence on the final decade of the golden age of Broadway and beyond.

[10:21] David Armstrong: And at the age of 15, he entered the Eastman School of Music at the University of Rochester.

[10:26] David Armstrong: He then studied classical music composition in Paris with the famous teacher Nadia Boulanger, and then returned to the United States to study with Aaron Copland.

[10:35] David Armstrong: In 1949, he met lyricist Lee Adams at a party, and a long and successful musical partnership was born.

[10:42] David Armstrong: The duo started out contributing songs to numerous reviews.

[10:45] David Armstrong: Then in 1958, producer Edward Padula was auditioning writing teams for a new musical about teenagers.

[10:52] David Armstrong: Strouse and Adams were eventually selected, and during the next year they wrote over 50 possible songs for the show.

[10:58] David Armstrong: And because the show was being written by this team of unknowns, they had to pitch the show and perform their songs at over 75 backers auditions in order to raise enough financing to put it on Broadway.

[11:11] David Armstrong: The show, eventually titled Bye Birdie, became an enormous hit, going on to win six Tony Awards, including Best Musical.

[11:18] David Armstrong: Strouse and Adams won a Tony for Best Score their first time out, and this was in a season that included Lerner and Loewe's Camelot and scores by Jule Styne and Meredith Willson.

[11:28] David Armstrong: This absolutely put them on the map.

[11:31] David Armstrong: In partnership with Lee Adams and other collaborators, Charles Strouse would go on to create 13 more Broadway musicals, including two more Best Musical Tony winners, Applause and Annie.

[11:43] David Armstrong: The book writer for the show was Michael Stewart.

[11:45] David Armstrong: He was both gay and Jewish.

[11:47] David Armstrong: He was born in New York City in 1924.

[11:50] David Armstrong: He told friends that he had decided to write for the theater at the age of 10 when he was taken by his family to see the Cole Porter musical Anything Goes.

[11:58] David Armstrong: After attending Queens College and the Yale School of Drama, he began contributing comedy sketches to several off-Broadway reviews during the early 1950s.

[12:08] David Armstrong: Following the success of Bye Birdie, he would go on to write the book and sometimes the lyrics for 15 more Broadway musicals, including the long-running hits Carnival, Hello Dolly, I Love My Wife, Barnum, and 42nd Street.

[12:22] David Armstrong: Michael Stewart often complained that musical book writers were not accorded the same kind of appreciation as were composers and lyricists.

[12:29] David Armstrong: I don't know why any bright person would want to be a musical book writer, he told the New York Times in 1979.

[12:35] David Armstrong: You're scorned by critics, you get no recognition from the public, and the money isn't that good either.

[12:41] David Armstrong: I feel that I've written two classic American musicals, Bye Birdie and Hello Dolly, but both of those books got terrible reviews.

[12:49] David Armstrong: Michael Stewart died of AIDS in 1986 at the age of 63.

[12:54] David Armstrong: Bye Birdie and the two musicals that came just before it, West Side Story and Gypsy, heralded the rise of the director choreographer.

[13:02] David Armstrong: With these two jobs now combined into one, a single person would now often be in control of nearly every aspect of a musical.

[13:10] David Armstrong: Although he was born in Illinois, Gower Champion grew up in Los Angeles, and he attended Hollywood's Fairfax High School, known as the High School of the Stars, because so many future movie stars had attended.

[13:22] David Armstrong: And this is where he became an avid theater performer.

[13:25] David Armstrong: By the age of 15, he and his first dance partner Gene Tyler were dancing professionally in Los Angeles area nightclubs.

[13:32] David Armstrong: They landed on Broadway in 1939 as featured performers in the review Streets of Paris, starring Brazilian singer Carmen Miranda.

[13:40] David Armstrong: Then, after appearing in two flops, service in the Coast Guard during World War II put a hold on Champion's Broadway career.

[13:47] David Armstrong: He returned to show business in the star-studded 1946 film Till the Clouds Roll By, which was about the life of Jerome Kern, and that's where he met Marjorie Belcher.

[13:56] David Armstrong: They formed a new dance team and got married in 1947.

[14:00] David Armstrong: Champion made his stage directing debut in 1948 with the musical Lendon Ear, for which he won the first of his Tony Awards.

[14:08] David Armstrong: But despite this early Broadway success, Marge and Gower spent most of the 1950s back in Hollywood appearing as a dance team in a string of movie musicals, including the 1951 version of Showboat, and they became one of the most popular attractions on television variety shows.

[14:25] David Armstrong: They even had their own series for a while, the Margin Gower Champion Show in 1957.

[14:30] David Armstrong: Gower Champion then came back to Broadway to direct and choreograph Bye Birdie, which brought him two more Tony Awards.

[14:37] David Armstrong: He followed this success with Carnival and then the mega hit Hello Dolly, which brought him another two Tonies.

[14:44] David Armstrong: And although they weren't blockbusters on the level of Dolly, his next two shows brought honors as well.

[14:49] David Armstrong: I Do I Do in 1966, which found him nominated for Best Director, and then The Happy Time in 1968, for which he was awarded two more Tony Awards.

[14:59] David Armstrong: Throughout this all, Marge Champion was his unacknowledged collaborator who worked closely with him on the choreography for every one of those shows.

[15:08] David Armstrong: The next decade was very difficult for Gower Champion, with several flops and missteps in both his professional and personal life.

[15:15] David Armstrong: Then in 1979, Champion learned that he had a very rare form of blood cancer.

[15:20] David Armstrong: But going against his doctor's advice, he undertook the direction and choreography of 42nd Street, a show based on the classic film from the 1930s.

[15:30] David Armstrong: The show's opening night is legendary.

[15:33] David Armstrong: During the curtain call that followed the show's triumphant opening night performance on August 25th, 1980, producer David Merrick appeared on the stage and tried to quiet the tumultuous applause.

[15:44] David Armstrong: Finally, the crowd calmed down, and he grimly informed the audience, the cast, and the opening night press and TV cameras that Gower Champion had died earlier that day.

[15:55] David Armstrong: Pandemonium broke out.

[15:57] David Armstrong: Cast members began to scream and cry.

[16:00] David Armstrong: The audience was stunned and the curtain was brought quickly down.

[16:03] David Armstrong: David Merrick had actually known this all day, but withheld the information from everyone, cast crew, and reporters, until after the opening night performance was completed, which is probably what Gower Champion would have wanted.

[16:16] David Armstrong: The high drama of this incredible mix of triumph, tragedy, and showmanship created front-page news and an unforgettable Broadway legend.

[16:25] David Armstrong: 42nd Street would go on to run for 3,486 performances and win a posthumous Eighth Tony Award for Gower Champion's choreography, as well as the Tony Award for Best Musical.

[16:37] David Armstrong: Don't go away, Broadway Nation will be right back.

[16:47] David Armstrong: There's a world outside of Yonkers.

[16:51] David Armstrong: Way out there beyond this hick town, Barnaby.

[16:56] David Armstrong: There's a select town, Barnaby, full of shine and full of sparkle.

[17:07] David Armstrong: Close your eyes and see it glisten, Barnaby.

[17:13] David Armstrong: Listen, Barnaby!

[17:19] David Armstrong: But let's go back to 1964 when Gower Champion, Michael Stewart, and David Merrick collaborated on one of the defining musical comedies of the Golden Age, Hello Dolly.

[17:30] David Armstrong: The original production of Hello Dolly was a triumph that would surpass My Fair Lady as the longest-running musical and tie South Pacific in winning a record 10 Tony Awards.

[17:40] David Armstrong: A record that Dolly would hold for 37 years until the producers won 12 Tonies in 2001.

[17:47] David Armstrong: The history behind Hello Dolly is long, involved, and very queer.

[17:51] David Armstrong: In 1838, playwright John Oxenford wrote a short farce called A Day Well Spent that was adapted into a full-length play by Austrian playwright Johann Nestroy in 1842.

[18:03] David Armstrong: Both of these writers were queer.

[18:05] David Armstrong: In 1938, queer playwright Thornton Wilder Americanized the Nestroy version and titled it The Merchant of Yonkers, but it was a dismal failure on Broadway, running just 39 performances.

[18:16] David Armstrong: But 17 years later, Wilder extensively rewrote the piece, transforming the minor character of Dolly Gallagher Levi into the leading role.

[18:25] David Armstrong: Wilder renamed his play The Matchmaker, and it became a smashing success as well as a popular film.

[18:32] David Armstrong: And it was David Merrick who came up with the idea of turning the matchmaker into a musical.

[18:36] David Armstrong: The leading role of Dolly Levi was originally written for Ethel Merman, but she turned it down, as did Mary Martin.

[18:43] David Armstrong: Eventually, the role would go to the star of the 1949 hit Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Carol Channing.

[18:55] David Armstrong: Strut down the street and have your picture took.

[19:12] David Armstrong: When Channing left the show, David Merrick took the unusual tactic of engaging even bigger stars to replace her.

[19:18] David Armstrong: And because it was a role written for a middle-aged woman, there were a number of major movie stars from the 1930s and 40s that wanted to play it.

[19:26] David Armstrong: The parade of dollies that followed Carol Channing included Ginger Rogers, Martha Ray, Betty Grable, Pearl Bailey in an all-black version, and stand-up comedian Phyllis Diller, who was not a movie star but incredibly popular on television during that time.

[19:41] David Armstrong: Finally, Ethel Merman was persuaded to come out of semi-retirement to be the final dolly of the original run.

[19:47] David Armstrong: Mary Martin took on the role as well in the London production.

[19:51] David Armstrong: The Hello Dolly original cast recording was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2002.

[19:57] David Armstrong: Ermin God, stop sniveling.

[19:59] David Armstrong: Don't cry on the valises.

[20:01] David Armstrong: Ambrose, let me hear that Tony Cord.

[20:04] David Armstrong: Lovely you're improving.

[20:05] David Armstrong: Now get all 11 pieces.

[20:07] David Armstrong: We're seven minutes late.

[20:09] David Armstrong: Oh boy!

[20:23] David Armstrong: That album had reached number one on the Billboard album chart in early June of 1964, but it was bumped out of that spot the following week by Louis Armstrong's album called Hello Dolly.

[20:35] David Armstrong: The cast album A Funny Girl was in the number three spot, followed by the Beatles second album and Meet the Beatles.

[20:41] David Armstrong: The show has become one of the most enduring musical theater hits with four Broadway revivals, international success, and a miscast overblown 1969 film.

[21:01] David Armstrong: 2017's Tony Winning Broadway revival of Hello Dolly starred Bette Midler and had the biggest advanced ticket sale in Broadway history.

[21:14] David Armstrong: Only two months after the opening of Hello Dolly, Funny Girl opened as well.

[21:19] David Armstrong: With music by Julie Stein and lyrics by Bob Merrill, Funny Girl had had big problems during its pre-Broadway engagements until Jerome Robbins was persuaded to come in and fix it.

[21:30] David Armstrong: By this time, he had inherited the mantle of Show Doctor from Mr. Abbott, and he soon whipped Funny Girl into a crowd pleasing hit that led to super stardom for Barbara Streisand.

[21:40] David Armstrong: Hello Dolly and Funny Girl, along with Gypsy established another hallmark of the Golden Age.

[21:45] David Armstrong: Musicals that historian Ethan Morden has dubbed big lady shows.

[21:50] David Armstrong: And building on that, I call them the Big Transgressive Lady Show.

[21:54] David Armstrong: These are musicals that feature dynamic, larger than life leading female characters that entirely dominate their shows in every way.

[22:02] David Armstrong: And most importantly, these women refused to do what mid-century American society thinks women should be doing.

[22:08] David Armstrong: And strangely, mid-century American audiences worshipped and adored them for refusing to do it.

[22:14] David Armstrong: Other shows in this series include Sweet Charity, which was conceived and written specifically for its star Gwen Verdon and directed and choreographed by her husband Bob Fossey.

[22:24] David Armstrong: Another in the series is MAME.

[22:26] David Armstrong: This Jerry Herman Smash hit had a book by Lawrence and Lee, the prolific and very successful gay straight writing team of many hit plays and musicals.

[22:36] David Armstrong: Mame was based on their play Anti Mame, which had itself been adapted from the comic novel by Patrick Dennis.

[22:43] David Armstrong: The character of Maim Dennis would become one of the signature icons for gay men who came of age in the 1950s and 60s.

[22:50] David Armstrong: Open a new window, open a new door, travel a new highway that's never been tried before.

[22:59] David Armstrong: Before you find your adult fellow, punching the same clock, walking the same tightrope as everyone on the block.

[23:09] David Armstrong: The fella you wanna be three-dimensional, soaking up life, down to your toes.

[23:17] David Armstrong: Whenever they say a slightly unconventional, just put your thumb up to your nose and show them how to dance to a new rhythm, whistle a new song, toast with a new vintage.

[23:32] David Armstrong: The fist doesn't fist too long.

[23:34] David Armstrong: There's only one way to make the bubble stay.

[23:38] David Armstrong: Simply travel a new highway, dance to a new rhythm, open a new window every day.

[23:50] David Armstrong: As I just mentioned, the composer and lyricist of both Mame and Hello Dolly was Jerry Herman.

[23:56] David Armstrong: He was born in New York in 1931 and raised in New Jersey.

[24:00] David Armstrong: His middle class Jewish parents loved music, art, and theater, and the family frequently attended Broadway musicals.

[24:07] David Armstrong: Seeing Ethel Merman in Annie Get Your Gun was a seminal event for Herman, and years later he would write the score of Hello Dolly with Merman's distinctive voice in his head.

[24:17] David Armstrong: Young Jerry had learned to play piano at an early age. His parents both worked in Catskill Mountain Hotels and Jewish summer camps, much like in the movie Dirty Dancing. And eventually, they took over the management of one of those camps. Herman spent all of his summers there from age six to twenty-three, and it was there that he first became heavily involved in putting on theatrical productions. He studied theater at the University of Miami, where he produced, wrote, and directed his first musical. After graduation, Herman moved to New York, where he produced several reviews of his songs, each more successful than the one before, and this is where his work began to get noticed by Broadway producers. This led to his first Broadway show, Milk and Honey in 1961.

[25:00] ♪ Musical number: "Shalom" ♪

[25:35] David Armstrong: This was a musical about a group of lonely American widows who were hoping to find husbands while on a trip to Israel, and it was set against that country's struggles to establish itself as an independent nation. The show was well received and ran for more than 500 performances. Then producer David Merrick decided to team Jerry Herman with bookwriter Michael Stewart to work on what would become Hello Dolly. The unprecedented success of this show, which was quickly followed two years later by MAME, turned Herman into one of the most acclaimed songwriters of the Golden Age. But as would happen with many Golden Age songwriters, Herman struggled in the 1970s and had three very high-profile flop shows in a row.

However, in 1983, he had a giant comeback with La Cage aux Folles, the first musical to feature a gay male couple as the leading characters. The show received a Tony for Best Musical, and Herman won for Best Score. Then in 1985, he was diagnosed with AIDS, which put his career on hold for many years. However, he was fortunate to be one of the few of those infected early on to survive until new drug therapies could be developed that could manage the disease. Herman died just this past year at the age of 88.

[26:50] David Armstrong: The Fantasticks was not the only show to bring downtown avant-garde staging and experimental theater techniques to the musical during the 1960s. Three of these were hit shows that were imported from London. First and foremost, the crowd-pleasing Oliver, which featured a groundbreaking revolving unit set that would inspire the scenic designs of dozens of future musicals, including Les Miserables. The other two were Stop the World I Want to Get Off and The Roar of the Greasepaint and the Smell of the Crowd, both shows written by Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley, and Newley also was the director and star of both productions. Both shows were high concept allegories that were so specific to their time that it's nearly impossible to revive them today and really understand what they were about. But their use of vaudeville and circus techniques would influence musicals such as Godspell and Pippin, and despite their quirkiness, both shows produced a string of chart-topping hit songs.

[28:23] David Armstrong: Perhaps most significant was the American-grown Man of La Mancha, another 1960s blockbuster that became a truly international sensation. La Mancha's revolutionary design, staging, and overall concept would probably not surprise us at all today, but that's only because its unique innovations have been so thoroughly absorbed into the DNA of contemporary musical theater.

[29:10] David Armstrong: Fiddler on the Roof was created by Jerry Bock, who wrote the music, Sheldon Harnick, who wrote the lyrics, and Joseph Stein wrote the book. And Jerome Robbins was the director and choreographer, all of whom were the children or grandchildren of Russian or Polish Jewish immigrants. The show became a blockbuster success when it opened in 1964, a banner year for Broadway, and it smashed all box office records of the day. The initial Broadway production played 3,242 performances and overtook Hello Dolly as the longest-running show in Broadway history. Based on short stories written originally in Yiddish by the writer Sholem Aleichem between 1894 and 1914, Fiddler was the first major work of American popular culture that would depict Eastern European Jewish shtetl life with pride and affection.

A 2015 article in the New Yorker magazine described the cultural impact of this show. Anticipating and helping to sow the roots movement that burgeoned in the following decade, Fiddler helped audiences to respond to the turbulent changes that were gathering force in the early 1960s.

[31:33] David Armstrong: One after another turned down the script, worrying that a story about a Jewish family set in Tsarist Russia in 1905 would only appeal to Jewish theatergoers. But as soon as it opened, it was clear that Fiddler resonated with audiences of all kinds. Within a decade after its debut, Fiddler had played in two dozen countries around the world, finding universal appeal in its themes of generational conflict and the dynamic struggle between tradition and change. The show has been especially popular in Japan, where since its debut there in 1967, it has been produced hundreds of times. Bookwriter Joe Stein loved to tell a story about a Japanese producer who asked him how American audiences could understand a story that, as he said, was so Japanese.

The show has received five Broadway revivals, countless national tours, and 200 schools across the country produce it every year. In a recent year, Fiddler on the Roof was produced everywhere from Smyrna, Tennessee, to Salt Lake City to Mexico City, to Timișoara, Romania.

[32:37] David Armstrong: Here's what Lin-Manuel Miranda has to say about Fiddler on the Roof. I think what makes musicals so special is that it's actually not unlike a great meal because it takes a lot of ingredients, and they have to be prepared exactly the right way or it doesn't go. The souffle will not rise. It's a lot of art forms smashed together. It's music, it's dance, it's lighting, it's costumes, it's performances, and they all have to coalesce in just the right way. It's the closest sensation you can have to an out-of-body experience. And there's countless moments like that in Fiddler. In moments of great upheaval, Fiddler is always going to seem relevant because the world is always changing faster than we can understand.

And we look to our traditions to guide us, but sometimes they fail us. You know, sometimes they don't prepare us for the world that's happening around us. And in Anatevka, things have been done the same way for thousands of years. But what happens when the outside world is saying you can't live here anymore? When even a wedding cannot go by without being destroyed or messed with. And that's what the show's about, and it's intensely accessible because we are going through times of great change and great upheaval. Just like today, the late 1960s was a time of great change and upheaval. And in the next episode of Broadway Nation, we will see how, in the wake of a shifting culture and ever-changing world, the established creators of the Broadway musical will struggle to uphold its traditions and conventions as the golden age of Broadway gives way to the modern era.