In moments of great upheaval Fiddler is always going to seem relevant because the world is changing faster than we can understand…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.

The next meeting Jerry (Robbins) said, ‘Oh, by the way everybody, this is a huge job, I cannot choreograph it. Herbert Ross will choreograph it and I’ll direct it.’ And I said without pause, ‘Then we’re not producing it’ and you could feel Arthur Laurents, Lenny and Steve all just get really happy, you could feel happiness behind you in the room because Jerry backed down.

The Holocaust looms over Fiddler on the Roof, there’s no way it couldn’t. The very idealization of the shtetl and the nostalgia for that destroyed life that emerges in the 1950s is precisely in response to what was finally obliterated in the Holocaust.

I would hear kids at intermission say, “What’s a pogrom?” and these are Jewish kids. The parents are using the opportunity of Fiddler to pass on the history and that’s interesting, that’s new, that’s kind of cool that a musical can pass down that kind of tradition as well as anything else.

Bert (Convy) comes in and says, ‘Have you seen the line in front? The line goes all the way down the block.’ And we said, ‘No, what are you talking about?” and he said, ‘I think we’re in a hit!

She (Tzeitel) was a kind of feminist. She had her own will and she had her own needs and her own ambitions. She was willing to face rejection. It was interesting to be the first one that actually had to struggle. They all had to struggle, but at least they tried and I think Tzeitel was the inspiration for that.

Tevye is remarkable because the universal part of him, the human part of him, I think, stems from his relationship with his family and his love for his daughters.

I just think that it’s really cool that we’re doing this musical. It’s kind of like awareness for what’s going on in the world right now, for kids who may not know, …

It’s always nice to have a kind of a sense of mystery about creativeness. There are certain things that you cannot teach. I suppose you can say what made them write this thing? Well, it was creativeness, inspiration. You know? A gift.

Fiddler is really not just about violence that is visited on a single person but violence that is visited on an entire culture. Really it’s about what we now call ethnic cleansing, in the end, and these forces are still very much alive in the world. Bigotry, oppression, sometimes disguised as mere conservatism, it’s eerily and perhaps sadly relevant today.

The changes that are taking place are all being instigated by the daughters. It’s the daughters that are driving the action. It’s us in the audience watching Tevye react and move forward in the conflicts that are presented by the daughters.