Tradition!: The Highly Improbable, Ultimately Triumphant Broadway-to-Hollywood Story of Fiddler on the Roof, the World's Most Beloved Musical

by Barbara Isenberg

Since it first opened on Broadway in September, 1964, Fiddler on the Roof has constantly been onstage somewhere, including five Broadway revivals, four productions on London's West End and thousands of schools, army bases and countries from Argentina to Japan. Barbara Isenberg interviewed the men and women behind the original production, the film and significant revivals-- Harold Prince, Sheldon Harnick, Joseph Stein, Austin Pendleton, Joanna Merlin, Norman Jewison, Topol, Harvey Fierstein and more-- to produce a lively, popular chronicle of the making of Fiddler. Published in celebration of Fiddler's 50th anniversary, Tradition! is the book for everyone who loves Fiddler and can sing along with the original cast album.

Audio CD

Published March 15, 2016

About the author

BARBARA ISENBERG,is an award winning journalist and author who has been writing about theater, art, music and arts personalities for over three decades. She is the author of the Los Angeles Times best-sellers Tradition! The Highly Improbable, Ultimately Triumphant Broadway-to-Hollywood Story of "Fiddler on the Roof," The World's Most Beloved Musical, and "Conversations with Frank Gehry," as well as "Making It Big: The Diary of a Broadway Musical," and "State of the Arts: California Artists Talk About Their Work ." Her writing has appeared in the LA Times, the Wall Street Journal, Time, Esquire, The Huffington Post, and London's Sunday Times. She received a Distinguished Artist Award from the Los Angeles Music Center and has been a Visiting Scholar at the Getty Research Institute. She lives in Los Angeles.

Her newest book, Tradition!: The Highly Improbable, Ultimately Triumphant Broadway-to-Hollywood Story of Fiddler on the Roof, The World's Most Beloved Musical, is now available in paperback as well as hardback. It was first published by St. Martin's Press to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the iconic musical's Broadway debut, and is also available as an audio book from LA Theatre Works and online.

Reviews

[Joyce · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a charming overview of the making of the Broadway musical and then movie of Fiddler on the Roof. I think I've only seen a high school version--not even the movie!--but the songs and story are so much a part of our popular culture that they're familiar to all of us of a certain age. And perhaps, since it's still continuously on the stage somewhere, familiar to people around the world of all ages. It's an informative tale--of how the germ of an idea from Sholem Aleichem's stories was worked into a book (that was continually re-written until the last moment), how the music came to be (with myriad songs written and discarded as the musical took shape), the image of Marc Chagall's Fiddler as the pattern for the stage sets, the casting, production issues, bad reviews, yet a blockbuster from the beginning. The writing style is breezy and informative--even the passages with facts and figures are easy listening, but that may be to the credit of narrator Adam Grupper. There are lots of interviews with actors and others involved in the creation and productions--and Grupper gamely reads those quotes in voices that conjure the actual speakers. That adds to the immersive quality of the performance. Heartwarming with bittersweet moments, nostalgic, gossipy. This is an affectionate celebration of a play with seemingly universal appeal.