An Unrecorded Performance
As a child in the late 1960s, the first live professional performance I was taken to was a concert with Theodore Bikel. The concert was my birthday present from my mother. Other children got parties; I was exposed to great performances. The evening with Bikel set the template for birthdays to come. My mother was enthralled by Bikel’s concert. On that black, damp night in early winter, I didn’t think much of the dark-haired teddy bear of a man who sat along on the stage telling stories, strumming a guitar and singing in half-a-dozen different languages. After all, my father could do it too, except that he didn’t play a guitar.
On a warm evening in July of 2012 I was finally able to reciprocate the gift my mother gave me so long ago. I took my now elderly mother to the Segal Center in Montreal to see Bikel in a one-man show he had co-created with his wife, entitled Sholom Aleichem, Laughter Through Tears. I had secured a seat for my mother close to the stage, while I sat in the last row of the theatre, watching over her.
At the age of eighty-eight, Bikel’s singing voice has lost its power though, as an actor, he has not. There were moments when Bikel’s singing voice seemed in danger of breaking, as his heart must be breaking. Tamara Brooks, Bikel’s longtime companion and wife of the past four years, died of a sudden heart attack in late May, at the age of seventy. She had been a musical conductor for thirty-five years until she met and began working with Bikel. She was supposed to have accompanied him at the piano.
That this legend honoured his commitment to the theatre and opened the show without her added poignancy to an already poignant performance resonating with ghosts. When Bikel came on stage and announced, “I don’t pretend to be characters; I become them,” his statement was backed up by my recollection of the film characters into whom this actor had submerged his personality. Then Bikel kept his promise and became the author of the character he is most associated with; Tevye the Milkman. In a ninety-minute solo performance that would’ve taxed an actor a fraction of his age, Bikel populated the stage with the vanished phantoms of Aleichem’s literary landscape, as though they were flowing directly from the author’s pen. The images of Bikel’s film characters lurked in the shadows, bearing silent witness to a life highlighted by professional triumph, as well as seared by recent personal tragedy.
The average age of the audience that attended this performance was eighty, and their faces were etched with lines testifying to their own triumphs and pain. From my vantage point in the last row I looked out over a sea of snowy-haired heads bobbing like whitecaps on breaking waves. I felt one with them.
Bikel emerged from behind his characters and stepped forward. Behind him was a backdrop of an enlarged photograph of the actor as a young man, consulting over a script with the producer of Fiddler on the Roof, a photograph of Sholom Aleicheim superimposed in the lower right corner of the screen, and another photograph superimposed in the upper left corner; that of Bikel as Tevye. Spectators gripping canes, spectators who had shuffled into the theatre on walkers struggled to their feet in a collective roar of applause and appreciation. If Bikel could stand and perform for them, then they could stand in homage. Bikel brought forward the musicians who had accompanied him. A young male pianist had replaced Bikel’s wife. The actor simultaneously acknowledged and dismissed the audience. Brusquely he bowed and then turned away, a theatrical giant suddenly shrinking into an lonely old widower as he trudged off the stage and entered the darkness of the wings, the love of his life no longer waiting there to accompany him home.
I descended the stairs to join my mother, who sat stiffly in her seat, waiting for me like a child waits to be collected by a parent. My octogenarian, widowed mother is chronically ill now, and had been having a particularly difficult day. She had dragged herself out of bed and dressed elegantly in order to honour the ticket I had arranged for her. Before the performance began my mother appeared dangerously pale. As I came down to her at the end Mum beamed at me, her face glowing. “Thank you! Oh thank you for bringing me!”
In the face of old age, illness and of irretrievable loss and sorrow, for resilient survivors, the show goes on.
