Zero Mostel

If musical comedy is larger than life, only one performer was larger than musical comedy. The son of an itinerant rabbi, Samuel Joel Mostel was born in Brownsville, the same poor Brooklyn neighborhood Phil Silvers hailed from, in 1915. His dream was to be a painter, and he worked for the WPA as an artist and museum tour guide. During his museum tours, he would blast off into bizarre improvisations, pretending to be Picasso or a coffee percolator. This led to a successful career as a nightclub comedian and to a couple of early appearances in the 1940s on Broadway in revues and as Peachum in Duke Ellington’s “Beggar’s Holiday.” Mostel’s left-wing sympathies caused him great travails during the blacklisting of the 1950s, scotching a blossoming Hollywood career as a character actor and funnyman. He returned to Broadway in triumph in 1961, transforming into a pachyderm before the audience’s very eyes in the absurdist drama, “Rhinoceros,” for which he won his first Tony. Producer Harold Prince thought Mostel’s desperate humanity would be ideal for the freedom-craving slave in “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum,” and Mostel’s ability to push the complicated farce to the final curtain made it into a hit. He won a second Tony, making him the first performer to win in both musical and dramatic categories.

Mostel’s onstage energy was prodigious; he could bellow like a bull, sing like a choirboy, mince about with the grace of one of Disney’s dancing hippos, pummel another actor like a Teamster, fawn like a coquette, roll, bulge, or cross his “eight-ball eyes,” all the while sweating up a storm and swearing under his breath. Yet, he projected a Talmudic thoughtfulness, and that served him in great stead in his most famous part, Tevye, in “Fiddler on the Roof.” Mostel, an extremely well-read man who continued his painting career throughout his life, was an ardent fan of Sholom Aleichem and brought dignity to his exorbitant clowning. His comic elaborations drove the creative staff crazy and, to Mostel’s amazement, his nine-month contract was not renewed. He won a third Tony for his role, and revived it several times (including a 1976 national tour, for which he was paid an impressive $30,000 a week), although not in the film, a source of great disappointment to him. He did get the chance to give the world Max Bialystock, the unscrupulous producer in Mel Brooks’ 1968 film, THE PRODUCERS, the gold standard of outrageous farce. Mostel, who died suddenly in 1977 during a Philadelphia tryout of a serious play about Shakespeare’s Shylock, was constantly reviled for the ad-libbing that disrupted the context of the show. In a typically Mostellian farrago, he took exception:

There’s a kind of silliness in the theater about what one contributes to a show. The producer obviously contributes the money . . . but must the actor contribute nothing at all? I’m not a modest fellow about those things. I contribute a great deal. And they always manage to hang you for having an interpretation. Isn’t [the theater] where your imagination should flower? Why must it always be dull as shit?

When Zero Mostel was onstage, it was many things, but it was never, never that dull.

Source: Excerpted from BROADWAY: THE AMERICAN MUSICAL by Michael Kantor and Laurence Maslon. Published by Bulfinch Press.

Photo credits: Photofest