Featuring Topol! Apparently there’s more than one Fiddler movie (one of which Topol was the star of). Sorry!
The most interesting aspect of seeing this show again after so many years (not since before I was in the show my sophmore year at OCHSA – as Avhram and a bottle dancer!), and especially now that I’ve thoroughly absorbed Jane Austen’s Pride & Prejudice (the 2005 movie, the Marvel comic adaptation), is the parallels between the two stories. Obviously research was required, and the following was thusly learned: Fiddler on the Roof is based on Tevye and his Daughters (or Tevye the Milkman) and other tales by Sholem Aleichem, originally written in Yiddish and first published in 1894 [placing them about a century behind Ms. Austen’s tale].
Tevye the Dairyman ([ˈtɛvjə], Yiddish: טבֿיה דער מילכיקער Tevye der milkhiker) is the protagonist of several of Sholem Aleichem’s stories. The character became best known from the fictional memoir Tevye and his Daughters (also called Tevye the Milkman or Tevye the Dairyman), about a pious Jewish milkman in Tsarist Russia, and the troubles he has with his six daughters: Tzeitel, Hodel, Chava, Shprintze, Bielke, and Teibel.
Yay Wikipedia!
So they shortchanged one daughter and wrote lots of fun songs. But regards Pride and Prejudice, there are a lot of plot parallels that I suspect helped frame Sholem Aleichem’s stories:
Spoiler Alert! (place and hold your mouse over the bar to see)
five daughters, pushy mother, pushover father who loves his daughters, third daughter runs away to get married.
Very fun production, great show, lots of fun. To life, to life, l’chaim!