NY Public Library for the Performing Arts Curator Doug Reside on FIDDLER and IN THE HEIGHTS

BroadwayWorld.com continues our exclusive content series, in collaboration with The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, which delves into the library's unparalleled archives, and resources. Below, check out a piece by Doug Reside (Lewis and Dorothy Cullman Curator for the Billy Rose Theatre Division) on FIDDLER ON THE ROOF and IN THE HEIGHTS:

Lin-Manuel Miranda hasn't been shy about his love for Fiddler on the Roof, or how the show influenced his own In The Heights. I've been thinking both shows quite a bit recently as The Library for the Performing Arts gears up for celebrations of Fiddler's 50th anniversary as well as an exhibition about Sesame Street (a show for which Miranda has penned more than a few songs). The influence of Fiddler on In The Heights is clear.

In both Fiddler and In The Heights, the first act begins with a guide introducing his audience to the community and ends with a community celebration and dance that is cut short by forces outside of the communities' control (a pogrom or a power outage followed by a riot). By the end of the second act both communities are forced to leave their homes, displaced by the impersonal forces of the more privileged members of a dominant culture.

"You Don't Have to Be Jewish to Love Tevye" wrote Norman Nadel in his famous, oft-quoted review of the original production of Fiddler on the Roof, and, indeed, Fiddler's leading man, Tevye, goes out of its way to accommodate non-Jewish audiences and introduce them the "traditions" of his community of Anatevka. His unassuming manner and good humour ("You may ask how did this tradition start...I don't know...") make him easy to like. Although, as a Jewish man living in Czarist Russia, the distance between the character and the audience might have seemed very great at the opening of the curtain, the creative team work very hard to find ways to connect him to experiences and values of the 1960s Americans who bought tickets to the show. Tevye speaks freely with God, and references Biblical stories many of the Christians in the audience would remember from Sunday School. He works hard to provide for his family and is loving towards his wife and daughters. He provides a kind of prototype of a likeable, orthodox Jewish man to challenge the anti-semitic stereotypes that some in the audience may have held.

Just over forty years later, Lin-Manuel Miranda created a very similar character to

introduce the commonly white, upper-middle class Broadway audiences to the predominantly Latino working-class immigrant communities of the Washington Heights neighborhood in upper Manhattan. If "you don't have to be Jewish to love Tevye," you certainly don't need to be Dominican to love Usnavi. Like Tevye he is an unassuming, good-natured guide who acculturates his audience to his world by establishing a shared tradition through allusions to Cole Porter ("It's too darn hot") and Duke Ellington ("You Must Take the A Train").

While Fiddler does not develop many of the characters outside of Tevye's family in great detail, Usnavi's Washington Heights is populated with fully realized individuals who, perhaps not coincidentally, all share characteristics of Tevye. Although Usnavi serves as the audience's guide to the community, he is, at other points, more like one of Tevye's daughter's suitors. Nina's father, Kevin, like Tevye, is tormented by his desire to see his daughter happy and his discomfort with her pursuing a relationship with a man outside of their community. The Barrio's much loved matriarch, Aubella, like Tevye, has the sort of easy but questioning relationship with a God whose ways she cannot understand but only accept with "patience y fe." Even the long-suffering Piragua guy, who is always seen pushing a cart through the town, recalls the image of Tevye pulling the cart his mule is too lame to manage.

In The Heights is no mere updating or geographical resetting of Fiddler, of course. The specifics of the two plots differ almost entirely and the musical worlds are as distant from each other as Czarist Russia and 21st century Manhattan. Nevertheless, both participate in a shared tradition of musicals that provides ways to bridge ethnic and religious boundaries by through the use of music and shared values.