ANAHEIM, Calif. — Jason Alexander laughs when asked how he landed the role of Tevye in a new production of the musical “Fiddler on the Roof” at the La Mirada Theatre for the Performing Arts.
It’s a laugh that suggests there’s a story there, and as the actor known best for his nine seasons as George Costanza on “Seinfeld” starts to talk, a tale takes shape.
“You know the truth is, all points connect to Tom McCoy,” Alexander says of the executive producer of the La Mirada Theatre. “But how he exactly heard this — I must have had some sort of documented public conversation where somebody asked, ‘Was there a role that got away from you that you always wanted to do?’
“And I said, ‘Well, I’ve aged out of Sweeney Todd, and I’m not even sure that I qualify as a Tevye,” he says, noting that at 65 he’s older than the character in the play.
“I tasted it a little bit in ‘Jerome Robbins’ Broadway,’ but that was the end of it,” Alexander says of the 1989 Broadway musical anthology for which he won a Tony Award portraying characters including Tevye from musicals Robbins directed or choreographed.
Somehow McCoy knew of his dream, Alexander says, and reached out to say La Mirada Theatre would love to do “Fiddler” with him.
“I immediately thought, ‘Well, that’s very nice, but I don’t think you can,’” Alexander says. “Not that I don’t admire the work of La Mirada — I’ve seen some great things there but I also know kind of where their budgets live. And if I was going to do ‘Fiddler,’ I wanted to do it with a full orchestra and orchestration. I wanted a real set. I wanted a solid representation of people up on the stage — I think we have 30 in our production on stage.
“I just thought those things would be beyond the means of La Mirada,” he continues. “And he said yes to all of it. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.”
Alexander talked to his old friend and theater director Lonny Price, who was interested in doing a traditional production of “Fiddler” that paid homage to the intent of its original director Jerome Robbins.
“He wanted to celebrate all its innate values and do it in a kind of full and beautifully realized but traditional way,” Alexander says of Price. “We were very much in accord on that, and we went back to Tom and he said, ‘Let’s go.’ And son of gun, if he hasn’t come through on every bit of it.”
“Fiddler on the Roof” opens at the La Mirada Theatre on Friday, Nov. 8, and runs through Dec. 1.
In an interview edited for length and clarity, Alexander talked about his long history with “Fiddler,” how he made his Broadway debut at the start of the ‘80s and worked there throughout that decade, how “Seinfeld” kept his theater chops in shape, and more.
Q: So your Tevye beard is coming in nicely.
A: Yeah, it’s my new pet [laughs].
Q: I saw a tabloid headline a month or so ago — ‘Jason Alexander looking scruffy outside a grocery store’ — but I knew the truth.
A: I’m a homeless guy [laughs]. My wife pointed out the headline is ‘Jason Alexander unrecognizable,’ and said, ‘So how do they recognize you?’
Q: I read online that ‘Fiddler on the Roof’ was the first Broadway musical you saw as a young child. Is that accurate?
A: That is the family history, whether or not that’s true; certainly I don’t remember it, and my parents’ memory was spotty at best. But supposedly they took me in late 1964, early 1965. I would have been four or five years old. That would have been the original production. Zero Mostel would still have been in it.
And as unwise as it might be to take a 5-year-old to a Broadway show, the story is — of course my mother reinvented it over the years — that she knew I would be a theater lover, because at 5 I sat in rapt attention and wonder and awe at what was happening on stage. So if that’s true, yes, that was the first show I ever saw.
Q: You grew up in New Jersey, not far from Manhattan. I’m assuming you saw shows on Broadway. Do remember any or how they influenced your future career?
A: Oh yeah. Many, many, many, many. Because we lived so close, and at the time, in the early ‘70s, if you were a student you could stand at any Broadway show that had standing room for $1. So we would often go in and see two shows on Saturday and sometimes come back and see a matinee on Sunday. You could go into the city, see two shows, have a reasonable dinner, and get home for under $10. It was pretty amazing.
I’ve talked about it before, the show that sort of spun my head around. The only thing I was truly focused on at that age was magic. I thought if anything, if I had any kind of a future in performing, it was going to be as a magician. Problem was, I was already savvy enough to know that I wasn’t a great magician.
We went to a very early preview of ‘Pippin,’ original cast of ‘Pippin,’ and that was the first time I saw magic incorporated into storytelling on stage. I had an epiphany where I realized that the whole thing was an illusion. Nothing there is real. The people aren’t who they say there are, but that illusion, done well, transports an audience willingly to wherever you want to take them. And can affect them in ways that certainly no magic trick is going to do.
It was really watching Ben Vereen do the Leading Player (in ‘Pippin’) where I went, ‘I would like to be him.’ Not realizing there were some challenges to becoming the next short, White, Jewish Ben Vereen.
Q: What others were you drawn to as a teenager?
A: I loved ‘La Mancha.’ ‘Sweeney Todd,’ ‘Evita.’ The stuff Hal Prince was doing, the stuff Sondheim was writing about. Those were the things where I went, you can tell hugely sophisticated and engaging stories with music in this format, and I guess, because of the scores, musicals tend to stay with people even more than plays or good writing, novels, anything like that.
So I was pretty convinced I would like to be a musical theater actor in New York. When I was in my bathroom at age 13 and 14, accepting my Tony Award, that was all it was.
Q: And then you were cast in the original Broadway production of ‘Merrily We Roll Along,’ a Sondheim musical, when you were just 21. What do you remember about stepping onto that stage for the first time?
A: It wasn’t the stepping onto the stage. The thing that was beyond imagining for 20-year-old Jason was that it was that it was happening when I was 20. I thought I had very realistic expectations of a career. I didn’t think I would work in New York until I was well into my 30s. I thought you had to pay dues on the road, you have to do summer stock, you have to do all these things to earn the right to get to New York.
And I certainly was not hubristic enough to go, ‘And I’ll work with Hal Prince and Steve Sondheim.’ That’s, you know, Christ and Moses. So at that tender age, to be actually doing a Broadway show in New York with those guys, that was the ‘pinch-me’ part, and it always was.
Q: You continued in theater through the ‘80s, culminating with the Tony for best leading actor in a musical in 1989. And then you landed ‘Seinfeld,’ which ran through most of the ‘90s. What was that shift from stage to TV studio like for you?’
A: The happy coincidence was that the television show I happened to be snared by was a four-camera live-audience show. So to me, I was never not in the theater. The cameras were inconsequential to us, and I think they are to anyone on a multi-camera show. Nobody is hitting marks for the camera, you’re playing to a live audience. So really that transition to me was a non-transition.
The experience of doing ‘Seinfeld’ was really very theatrical. And I was lucky enough between live benefits and an occasional two- or three-week string of something (on stage), I was doing enough live performing that the muscles never atrophied for that.
Q: Let’s shift back to ‘Fiddler.’ How do you understand the reasons for its lasting appeal over the years?
A: It’s hard to know why this particular show is so universally enduring. What we’ve noticed in rehearsals is that even though it is certainly a product of the styles of musical theater that were prevalent in the ‘60s, many of which have gone out of vogue, there is something very pure and simple and honest about a lot of the execution of this show.
It’s not overwritten, if anything, it’s a little underwritten, and it trusts the actors and the audience to fill in what isn’t specifically written. It is a beautiful, simple accessible score. It’s theater writing at its very best.
Q: And people still connect to its story of Tevye, a traditional patriarch, and his three daughters who want something more than traditions.
A: For me, the play is essentially about what we’re all living in, certainly right now, but maybe constantly. This pull between what we know, what we’ve built our lives on, our traditions, our cultural things that make us secure, and this pull that the next generation always brings to get us to progress into something new.
The play is about many things for many people. What it’s about for me is that three times in this play, Tevye, his children come to him and say, ‘Please don’t make me live by your rules; please don’t limit me to do only what you know.’ And all three times, at some cost to himself, he loves his children more than anything else, and he gives them permission.
Q: You have children, and were a child to your parents. Does that inform or connect with you and the role?
A: Unimaginably so, and in ways that I probably could have anticipated yet didn’t. We went into rehearsal the other day and we were doing the ‘Sabbath Prayer,’ where the parents are saying the famous lyrics, ‘May the Lord protect and defend you, may he always shield you from shame, may he preserve you from pain.’
I’m staring at these five young women who are still relative strangers to me, and I am losing it. Because they are young, they are real, and the parental position of praying for your child is something that I only know because I’ve been down that path. Had I not had my family, my children, I would have understood it intellectually, but my heart would not know what the hell it was singing about.
So being a parent even more than being a son, it just calls on everything you have known and experienced in that role.
Q: You ‘ve got ‘Fiddler,’ you’ve got your podcast, ‘Really? No, Really?’ with Peter Tilden. Some plays you might direct. Life is pretty busy.
A: Six years ago, just before the pandemic, I went, ‘OK, I’m done with this. I had a good ride.’ I was going to put up a shingle and teach, which I love doing. And then all of a sudden, the phone started ringing, and it’s just lovely stuff. At this age, for me, it’s just, ‘OK, who am I working with? What’s it about? Why are we doing it? Does it have value?
I don’t have to worry about, ‘Will it pay the rent?’ Thank you, Jerry Seinfeld. So it’s just a very sweet position to be in all of a sudden, to be able to look at things for their value, and who would I be learning with and from. So it’s pretty constant. I’m not doing the next Marvel film, but it’s all quite nice.
