I did the reader’s theater production in Concord. My son hinted pretty strongly that I
over-acted – “hamming it up” was the tweet, I believe. That’s hardly surprising, as I played
Tevye. The character’s actual name was
Frank MacPherson, a retired English professor in early stages of dementia, but
he kept shading into Tevye.
This is because I always play Tevye. The Importance of Being Yiddish; Death of a
Milkman; and the risque Oy! Anatevka! I
don’t mean to, but I just seem to believe that all of life needs more
Tevye. I can vary it at need: depressed
in A Day In The Life of Tevye Denisovitch, reflective in The Tragical History
of Tevye, Prince of Denmark. I play
Tevye in real life a lot, too.
It is even odder because I have never been cast as
Tevye. I was in Fiddler as a young man
and played Mendel, the rabbi’s son. Now that I look like Tevye and could play
him blindfolded (one of those avant-garde Toronto Shakespeare Festival things,
I imagine) my singing voice is shot and I’m too irritable to go to rehearsals
every night.
My second son almost succumbed. The one time I subbed in for
his director in high school, he started to make Frank Gilbreth rather Tevyish
in “Cheaper by the Tuzen;” but in college he fought free, and settled down to
shameless fly-catching in Chekov instead.
I actually do have a few other characters I can play, unlike
Walter Matthau, who always plays the same guy.*
There’s an irritable, sarcastic Scot (can go Irish, Yorkshire, or
Cockney at need), Inspector Clouseau, and Eeyore. Scratch that.
My Inspector Clouseau is just Tevye with a French accent.
*And a good thing, too.
We need more of that guy in the world.
Think of how few wars there would be if 10% of the male populace in
every country did that Walter Matthau schtik.
3 comments:
That's my new tagline:
"All of life needs more Tevye."
BTW - you don't need to sing to play Tevye.
We could do worse than have 10% of the population channel Tevye, too.
Speaking of FOTR, before I die I'd like to persuade someone to stage a wedding with dancers with bottles balanced on their hats, as in the movie version. Favorite scene ever.
I was a bottle-dancer in that show. We used velcro - I don't know what others do - but all the others had their bottles fall off very quickly the first night of the performance. Somehow I got the idea that it would be stupid to have only one bottle dancer for about two minutes, so I ripped mine off and threw it fairly randomly.
The director was not happy.
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