Student Blog: If I Were an Assistant Director

After five months of work, we have closed “Fiddler on the Roof” here at Kutztown University. It is crazy to write those words, as since the creative team was announced in September and I was officially named an assistant director, Fiddler has been one of the biggest parts of my life. I wanted to share a couple of fragmented thoughts on closing this chapter of my theatrical journey and the process of bringing our Anatevka to life. 

I’ve loved “Fiddler on the Roof” since my parents got me the DVD in middle school, it quickly became one of my favorites. I was absolutely taken off guard by it being picked as my final mainstage musical at Kutztown University. My first reaction to it being even an option was that it was unlike anything we’d ever done before, but the more I thought about it the more I thought it could be a really good fit for us. In my time at KU we’ve done “Heathers,” “Rock of Ages” and “Grease” as our mainstage shows, which are all pretty much tonal opposites from “Fiddler on the Roof.”

I was particularly excited to do Fiddler because I am Jewish in a primarily non-Jewish area. I am not the most active Jew, but I celebrate the holidays as best I can and have a deep love for Jewish history and culture. I felt the call to be an AD on this show because of my background in that realm as well as the fact that I have been part of stage management and costumes in the past, and mostly know how to communicate well with departments and be helpful from a director’s side. 

Assistant directing is not easy, but as a senior with other classes and obligations, as things got more intense, some days everything felt almost impossible. I had to rely on my village a lot more than usual. My parents received countless phone calls talking through decisions, and most of what my friends both in and out of the show heard me talk about since I was named an assistant director was Fiddler. And of course my fellow directors quickly became one of my most frequent contacts. 

When you direct, it involves so much more than placing actors onstage and giving notes. It involves balancing 30 people’s conflicts and creating a schedule out of it. It can involve creating t-shirts and proofreading playbills. It can involve sewing prayer shawls and buying bedding the week of the show. It can involve sitting with your friends as they paint signs and rig bottle dance hats. It involves adding in bits of choreography and trying to tech a 20 second transition four days before opening. 

We blocked some scenes together, but ultimately we ended up splitting most of the show up between the three directors. The one scene I really wanted was “Do You Love Me?” In my eyes it’s the singular song that makes all of the romance in the show work. It puts the three younger love stories in context and firmly establishes Tevye and Golde as a bonded pair before they face their greatest hardships over the end of the show. I based a lot of their dynamic off of my own parents, and the actors understood just how important this number was and hit every moment with ease. 

The hardest number to block was “The Rumor.” I’d never directed for a cast of more than 16 before this, and I’d never done a scene with that many people onstage before. I choreographed the number on paper kind of like a dance number, but as we put it onstage things changed quickly, and the groups that seemed so neat on paper quickly became a jumbled mess onstage and this was probably the singular number we had to reblock the most before and after winter break. But after a lot of notes to keep making this number bigger, it finally came together during tech and every time they got this number right my heart was so happy. 

I experienced burnout on Fiddler as early as October. Trying to maintain my sense of self while also being the assistant director that everyone needed was one of the toughest battles I faced as an AD on this show. At times I felt like a fiddler machine that occasionally went to class and saw friends. It really wasn’t until Winter break that I felt truly like I was just me again. I performed in a cabaret and stage managed a madcap original musical, spent some quality time with friends and family,and worked on writing a new play, and all of this brought me back to myself and refueled me for the home stretch of the show. 

When we returned in January, it was time to hit the ground running and head towards the finish line. Crew was in full swing, we finally moved up to the mainstage, and the show was really starting to click for our cast. Our crew and pit were also deep in rehearsals and finishing building the set and learning the music. One of our biggest challenges was losing the mainstage the entire week before tech week. We had made so much progress reblocking and locking in the show upstairs, and we were hoping to integrate crew before we got the lighting done, so getting kicked out was a major setback. In the end it worked out, we got to spend time running things with pit and do some character work and give people a much needed couple days off. 

During the last three weeks of the run I think I achieved the most flow state I’ve ever had on a show before. I was going to rehearsal, giving notes, trying to answer everyone’s questions on a cast and crew side, sewing every friday during my free day, and doing countless runs to both the thrift store in town and four facebook marketplace runs in about a week for two tables (one of which broke immediately but at least it was free) a bench and 24 beer mugs (one of which now lives in my home). 

On our move in day I spent 9 hours in the theater between crew and lighting. The cyclorama went up, and projected onto it were three gobo lights of a barn, a sunset and a windmill that remained up the whole show. We raised an Anatevka sign to the rafters and our technical director gave it its own light. The set came upstairs and suddenly our empty stage became its own entire little world. It is the most magical thing. I stayed to help light act one, our director was doing the main lighting design, but getting to contribute a couple extra light cues and help make some decisions in regards to colors and placements was really cool and made me appreciate just how important lighting is to storytelling. 

Our first two shows were both incredible. We had such a fun time opening the show, my parents and grandmother were there as well as one of my best friends from high school. I could not have been prouder of my cast and the show they put on that night. Saturday’s show was also one for the ages. Everything just went so right, the jokes hit, the emotional moments stayed with the audience, and it was probably the most packed I had ever seen the auditorium for a mainstage show. My whole extended family came up to Kutztown from New York to see it which truly meant a lot. 

Our closing night was Sunday February 22nd, which most people will remember as the day most of the east coast was set to get buried by a huge blizzard. All day Saturday there was a hum in the air about us possibly having the cancel our final show. Our area in Pa wasn’t going to be hit that bad until later in the night, but other areas were going to get way more snow. My parents had to leave Sunday morning to avoid driving our minivan through 2 feet of snow, and my friends decided not to come because of the blizzard. Luckily we were able to have a closing performance, our audience in the theater wasn’t super full, but we were able to have a livestream which worked out wonderfully for those who couldn’t make it. 

We had finished our senior circle the night before so most of the tears were out of the way. That being said my fellow assistant director and I were out in the audience and we were both absolutely sobbing through “Anatevka,” and I know most of the cast was too, especially my fellow seniors. 

I’ve never worked on any show for five months before. There are so many more stories I can tell from putting this show together. But I want to leave off with this, despite everything we went through to get this production running, I would never trade my time in Anatevka for a second. I couldn’t imagine a better senior year musical to close out my time with ACT. I will always remember my time in that “dear Little Village, little town of mine.”