Fiddler on the Roof

Another one of those movies that I have heard about forever but never watched. My wife loves musicals of all types and remembered singing the songs in her Show Choir days in high school.

The movie, like the Broadway hit tells of a Jewish village in the Ukraine in Tsarist Russia in 1905. Songs from the play and then the movie are some of the most known from any movie. When my 16 year old son, who watched the movie with me, is singing " If I Were a Rich Man and Tradition, as he zips around the house, you know you have songs that will last forever.

Based on the book Tevye and His Daughters Fiddler introduces us to Tevya a Jewish milkman, a poor man, blessed with five daughters as he acknowledges with a shrug. His three oldest daughters anxious to be married are complicating his life. When the Matchmaker ( Matchmaker, Matchmaker is another stellar song ) makes a match for his oldest with the widowed butcher his daughter rebels. She wishes to marry a childhood friend who is a tailor. A young politically minded man ( a young Paul Micheal Glaser) visits the town, tutors Tevya's daughters and falls in love with another daughter. The father allows her to choose her husband too.

The hardest daughter is one who marries outside the faith and this brings one of the most emotonal scenes in the movie's climax.

Told against the backdrop of pogrom's and forced evacuations this is a movie for the whole family, a movie that makes me want to see the play. Simply wonderful.