Obituary: Joseph Stein, writer

Published on Wednesday 27 October 2010 19:35

Joseph Stein, writer. Born: 30 May, 1912, in the Bronx, New York. Died: 24 October, 2010, in Manhattan, aged 98.

Joseph Stein was the award-winning author of Fiddler on the Roof and more than a dozen other musicals. He died after fracturing his skull in a fall, his son Harry said, adding that his father, an inveterate joker, had suffered numerous ailments in recent years, including prostate cancer, and used all of them as fodder for humour.

"He said he got some of his best material on the way to the grave," Harry Stein said.

Fiddler on the Roof, which was based on Sholem Aleichem's short stories about a Jewish milkman and his family who face terrifying change in a small Russian village in 1905, opened on Broadway in 1964. Sheldon Harnick's lyrics and Jerry Bock's score captured the high notes of the praise, but Stein's book hardly went unnoticed.

Between memorable songs such as If I Were a Rich Man and Sunrise, Sunset, Stein's dialogue had its own kind of poetry.

In 1965, the show won nine Tony Awards, including the one for best musical and Stein's for best author of a musical.

By 1971, when the production became Broadway's longest- running musical (that record has since been broken several times), it had already been produced in 32 countries in 16 languages.

Stein was already an old Broadway pro when Fiddler came along. Just the year before, he had won glowing reviews for his adaptation of Enter Laughing, a comedy based on a book by Carl Reiner, about a Jewish boy who wants to become an actor.

He was also a co-writer of two successful shows. Take Me Along, written with Robert Russell, was a 1959 musical based on Eugene O'Neill's Ah, Wilderness! and starred Jackie Gleason, Robert Morse and others. The 1955 musical Plain and Fancy, which he wrote with Will Glickman, was a lighthearted story of romance and culture clashes between New Yorkers and the Amish.

Joseph Stein was born in the Bronx, the son of Charles Stein, a handbag maker, and the former Emma Rosenblum. After university he worked as a social worker for several years before meeting the comedian Zero Mostel, who mentioned that he was looking for comedy material for a radio show.

Stein threw out an idea and Mostel paid him $15 (9.50) for it; his writing career had begun.

In 1948, Stein made his Broadway writing debut, creating a single sketch with Glickman for Lend an Ear, a musical revue that starred the comedienne Carol Channing. Stein went on to become part of the writing staff of Sid Caesar's classic 1950s US comedy-variety series Your Show of Shows.

He also wrote the screenplays for three of his shows - Fiddler, Enter Laughing and the 1949 Broadway flop Mrs Gibbons' Boys - when they were made into films and did a handful of other writing projects for television, but the overwhelming portion of his career was the stage.Stein wrote the book for the 1968 musical Zorba, based on the book Zorba the Greek, which starred Herschel Bernardi as the passionate, moment-seizing, philosophising title character, a man.

As the years passed, several of his shows were revived on Broadway, but he also wrote the books for four more new shows, three of them musicals.

Although he was certainly best known for Fiddler, he contended that another show had affected him more deeply.

"I do believe in the philosophy of Zorba," Stein said recently, "that life is what you do until the day that you die, so you better make use of all of it so you're proud of what you're doing."

Stein's first marriage, to Sadie Singer, ended with her death in 1974. He married Elisa Loti, an actress, in 1975; she survives him, as do three sons from his first marriage, Daniel, Harry and Joshua Stein; a stepson, John Bader; a stepdaughter, Jenny Lyn Bader, a playwright with whom he was working on a new musical, Heaven Can Wait, at the time of his death; and six grandchildren.