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Friday November 9, 2007

From Zero to hero

New play examines life of the original Tevye

by dan pine
staff writer

On opening night of “Fiddler on the Roof,” Jim Brochu sat in the very front row, dead center. Though only a teenager at the time, he knew he was witnessing Broadway history. And that was even before the opening song, “Tradition,” was over.

“This was something transcendent,” he recalls of that night at Manhattan’s Alvin Theater in September 1964. “It was one of the more towering performances I have ever seen.”

He is talking about Zero Mostel, the original –– and, some say, the greatest –– Tevye. Brochu was more than just a Mostel fan. His wish to emulate the larger-than-life actor/comedian was so apparent that his high school yearbook described him as “the Zero Mostel of LaSalle Academy.”

Now he’s the Zero Mostel of “Zero Hour,” a one-man play with Brochu in the title role now playing at San Francisco’s New Conservatory Theatre Center.

The play is set in Mostel’s art studio as he recounts his life to someone presumably sitting for a portrait. Mostel always thought of himself as more of a painter than an actor, a point brought out in Brochu’s play.

“He studied art at City College of New York,” Brochu notes of Mostel. “He knew Jackson Pollack. [Mostel] gave most of his paintings away. Even today they don’t sell well. They’re odd.”

Brochu knows a lot about Mostel’s life, from his research and from personal experience. He met the comedian in 1962 after seeing him star in the original run of “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.” Dressed in his military school uniform, Brochu made his way backstage, then bumped into the star. “Who are you?” Mostel boomed. “General Nuisance?”

Brochu, a non-Jew, went on to a career in musical theater in New York and Los Angeles. He enjoyed an off-Broadway hit last year with “The Big Voice: God or Merman,” a brash comedic musical about religion, AIDS and coming out of the closet. It won best musical at the L.A. Stage Alliance Ovation Awards.

“Zero Hour” had been brewing long before that. Brochu calls Mostel “a hurricane, a force of nature.”

Born to Viennese Jewish immigrants, Samuel Mostel

got his footing as an entertainer serving as the house comedian at New York’s Café Society. He became a regular in the theater scene, but ran into trouble with the House Un-American Activities Committee because of his left-leaning politics. The experience served him later on when he portrayed a blacklisted entertainer in “The Front,” a 1976 film co-starring Woody Allen.

Brochu’s play includes all of that, as well as Mostel’s Broadway triumphs and his tour-de-force performance in “The Producers.”

The heart of the drama centers on Mostel’s conflict between art and politics. When asked to work with director Jerome Robbins on “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum” –– this after Robbins had named names in the HUAC witch hunt –– Mostel notably said, “We of the left do not blacklist.”

He may have played an unwaveringly faithful Jew, but Mostel himself was not overtly religious, Brochu said. At one point, however, Mostel’s son recalled waking in middle of the night after hearing a strange noise. “He looked through the keyhole,” Brochu recounts, “and there was Zero in phylacteries and tallis, praying.”

Brochu also finds poignancy in Mostel’s portrayal of Tevye. The character banishes his daughter, Chava, after she elopes with a non-Jewish Russian. Mostel, too, was similarly shunned by his own Jewish parents after he married a Catholic woman.

Mostel died in 1977 of an aortic aneurism. He was 62.

After San Francisco, Brochu expects to take “Zero Hour” to New York for an off-Broadway run. After that, who knows? If the show’s a hit, he could be a rich man.

Meanwhile Brochu is happy to portray his hero Zero, bringing Mostel’s “childlike quality” to a San Francisco stage night after night. “The obnoxious childlike quality,” he adds.

“Zero Hour” plays 8 p.m. Wednesdays through Saturdays and 2 p.m. Sundays, through Nov. 25, at the New Conservatory Theatre Center, 25 Van Ness Ave., S.F. Tickets: $28-$40. Information: (415) 861-8972 or online at www.nctcsf.org.

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