What is a Dramaturg?
A dramaturg is a theater specialist who works closely with directors, playwrights, and production teams. They research historical context, analyse scripts for clarity and structure, and help shape the overall story to ensure it connects effectively with the audience.
You can view some more of Beth's work on the Holladay Arts Instagram.
A Note from our Dramaturg, Beth Bruner
In the early 1960s a unique project started. Joseph Stein, Jerry Bock, and Sheldon Harnick began looking at the short stories of Sholem Aleichem as the basis for a new show. Although they decided the book they were originally looking at wouldn’t work, they fell in love with the first-person-narrative tales of Tevye the Milkman and his family living in a small Ukrainian town before the First World War.
For most of the nineteenth century Imperial Russia controlled a huge crescent of territory running from Latvia to Uzbekistan called the Pale of Settlement. This area was the home of millions of Ashkenazi Jews, especially in what is now Ukraine and Poland. They had their own language, their own music, their own laws, their own ways of dress, and their own traditions.
- Yiddish is a blend of Hebrew, German, and Slavic which was spoken by over 5 million in the Russian Empire in 1905. Through immigrants to New York, many words are now also part of American English.
- Klezmer is a comingling of traditional Jewish religious music, Slavic folk music, and Baroque developed in central Europe. It is usually played by a small group of string and woodwind instruments, particularly the violin.
- The Talmud is an analysis and set of opinions on Jewish law, ethics, philosophy, and customs, grounded in the Torah (which is basically the first five books of the Christian Old Testament). The main text of the Talmud was completed in the sixth century, but additional volumes of commentary have been produced since then, as technology, science, and gentile cultures changed.
- Jewish tradition has rules for dress to set Jews apart from gentiles and remind them to follow the commandments. Men wear full beards. Men over 13 always have their heads covered and wear tzitzit (a rectangle of cloth with fringe worn over your inner clothing). Married women cover all their hair when not alone with their family (this can be a wig).
The original production was a labor of love and ancestry. The title came from a painting by Marc Chagall, who grew up in the Pale of Settlement. All of the major creators were children of Jewish immigrants who had fled the pogroms in the Pale of Settlement. In addition to the authors, this included Jerome Robbins as director, Boris Aronson as set designer, and Zero Mostel and Maria Kamilova playing Tevye and Golde. Aronson based his designs on the work of Chagall.
Their distinctive clothing and close-knit communities made Jews sometimes look like outsiders. To distract people from the economic and social issues upsetting the country, by 1905 the Russian government was encouraging rumors that the Jews were responsible for the problems, and authorities were actively fermenting pogroms and expulsions. Estimates are at least 70,000 civilian Jews in Ukraine were killed between 1903 and 1920. Across eastern Europe, about 2.5 million Jews migrated west, many to the U.S.
There was concern that a sad story about poor people that ended with the lead alone on stage would never find an audience. They didn’t need to worry. By the time the original production closed on Broadway it had the then-record 3,300 performances. It has been revived five times since (only three shows have had more revivals). The original production received eight Tony Awards, the revivals have received nine.
