Note: Due to a mistake on Broadway Across America's website, the performance times listed below were originally incorrect. They are correct now.
Here's a story that's running in Sunday's Sentinel:
By Elizabeth Maupin
Sentinel Theater Critic
Topol: I have the years to play Tevye
To those who think Chaim Topol is too old to be playing the dairyman Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof, Topol has a ready answer.
He’s not too old now. He was too young then.
Topol, the Israeli actor nominated for an Oscar as Tevye in the 1971 movie version of Fiddler, actually began playing the iconic role onstage when he was only 31, first in Israel and then in London.
Now, while he’s touring with Fiddler,, he has turned 74, and the experience of being a long-married husband, a father and a grandfather, he says, has served him well.
“Experience is always better and more accurate than what you might imagine,” he says, his voice impossibly deep on the phone. “Having been married 25 years, learning what it means to give your daughter to a stranger ... Now I don’t have to imagine: I’ve given two of them and my son away.”
And now, he says, he doesn’t have to pretend to be older than he is.
“Mainly I’m released now from the inhibition of being too young. I don’t have that inhibition anymore.”
Topol was a young actor in Tel Aviv when the opportunity arose to take on the part of Tevye. He had started a satirical cabaret with a friend, co-founded a theater in Haifa and made his movie debut in an Israeli comedy called I Like Mike. In 1964 he produced and starred in a movie called Sallah, which was nominated for the foreign-language Oscar, and it drew the attention of the producers of the London stage version of Fiddler,.
His father had told him Sholom Aleichem’s stories about the Jewish milkman at bedtime. And he already had stepped into the role in Tel Aviv, when his acting teacher, Mulka Rodensky, got sick.
“I knew [Aleichem’s] humor, and I knew his work. I really began to enjoy it. Then luck played its role. When they were casting for the London production, they saw the film Sallah. I played an elderly character, and they thought I was an elderly guy from Tel Aviv. When I came in they were very disappointed to see a guy 30 years old.”
Still, Topol won the part, and he has gone on to play Tevye more than 2,500 times — in the film, again in London, in 1990 in a Broadway revival, touring across the U.S., Canada, Japan, Australia, New Zealand and again in Tel Aviv.
Being an Israeli, he says, shapes the way he plays the character.
“My grandfather was a Tevye. His grandfather was a Tevye. It’s definitely in the genes.”
More than that, being a Jew in Israel meant facing — or not facing — the past.
“In the early ‘60s we still knew very little of what happened in the war. Survivors didn’t talk. Then of course my parents ... they were the only survivors of their families. They went to Israel in the ‘30s. We were all mute about that. We were ashamed — we should have done more. So it has an effect on my interpretation.”
Now Topol spends much of his free time raising money for an Israel charity, Jordan River Village (jordanrivervillage.org), modeled on Paul Newman’s camps for seriously ill children.
“Six years ago, Paul Newman, bless his soul, called me and said, ‘Topole, I want you to see what we’re doing in Connecticut.’ I was very impressed. I said, I’ll go home and see what the needs are.’”
With Newman as his mentor, Topol pitched in. Jordan River Village, being built on 61 acres above the Sea of Galilee, will serve 4,500 children of all creeds. every year. It’s expected to open in 2010.
In the meantime, he has a show to do.
“Now I can jump as much as I can, I can dance as much as I can,” he says. “Now I can really enjoy it. I do things I wouldn’t dare to do 30 years ago.”
Elizabeth Maupin can be reached at emaupin@orlandosentinel.com or 407-420-5426. Read her Arts & Letters blog at OrlandoSentinel.com/ArtsandLetters.
Check it out
‘Fiddler on the Roof’
What: Touring production of Sheldon Harnick-Jerry Bock-Joseph Stein musical.
Where: Carr Performing Arts Centre, 401 W. Livingston St., Orlando.
When: 8 p.m. Tuesday-Friday, 2 and 8 p.m. Saturday, 2 and 7:30 p.m. next Sunday.
Cost: $38-$73.
Call: 1-800-982-2787.
Online: BroadwayAcrossAmerica.com.
What else: Look for the review in Friday’s Calendar section and online by noon Wednesday at OrlandoSentinel.com/Attention.