Jason Alexander – From Tevye to George and Back Again
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When Jason Alexander — best known as the prickly George Costanza on the hit sitcom “Seinfeld” — applied to college theater programs, his mother worried he might end up miserable or impoverished. Both his parents urged him to switch to a more practical major. “But I of course had no other aptitudes, so I could not do that,” he said with a hearty laugh during a Zoom interview.
Eventually, the performer made his mother a promise. “This was a crazy thing to say because I was 19 or 20,” he recalled, “but I said, ‘Mom, I promise you, within the next 10 years, I will play Tevye on Broadway.’” Alexander beat his own prediction when, nine years later, he portrayed Tevye in a segment of “Jerome Robbins’ Broadway,” for which he won a Tony Award in 1989.
At 5, Alexander had watched with rapt attention and delight when he first saw “Fiddler on the Roof” in the original Broadway production with Zero Mostel in 1964. Now he’ll finally get to play the epic Jewish character in a full new production at the La Mirada Theatre for the Performing Arts from Nov. 8 to Dec 1. It’s a childhood dream come true.
Alexander, 64, is now regaled as an actor, writer, composer, director, producer and acting teacher — and he’s also an award-winning magician and a notorious poker player.
He was both hilarious and thoughtful during the recent interview, wearing a black-and-white paisley shirt, a beard he’s growing out to play Tevye and an affable demeanor. He laughed easily, and he effortlessly slipped in and out of his “Fiddler” and “Seinfeld” characters.
Alexander said the new “Fiddler” project began as he and Lonny Price, who will direct the show, aimed to stage it with the greatest of respect. “‘Fiddler’ is a really weird creature, primarily because of when it was written,” he said. “Had it been written 20 years later, I think some of the musical comedy tropes threaded through it would have been far less. But because it was written sort of in the heyday of that young musical theater genre and with the talents of a natural vaudevillian like Zero Mostel, there are a lot of musical comedy elements in it, and some productions play that up. They make Tevye into a tummler, a clown and entertainer, and I said, ‘That doesn’t interest me.’ I think he does have a great sense of humor, and I think the play has a great sense of humor … but I think it could be played realistically — we don’t have to schmaltz it up.”
Tevye is a character in crisis. “What it comes down to is you’re given a man who steps forward and says, ‘My life, my understanding of who I am and how I fit into the world has been given to me by this beautiful structure of Jewish traditions,’” Alexander said. “In these traditions, I know who I am, I know my place in this world, I know how I serve my community, and I know how to serve my God. And with that I am whole, and I am done, and life is good.”
Except that it doesn’t work for his children, who seek husbands who are initially unacceptable to the observant Jew.
“The three big moments in ‘Fiddler’ are when, one-by-one, his three oldest daughters come to him and say, ‘If you make me adhere to what you believe, I will be unhappy.’ And in every case, he chooses his children over himself.”
As for Alexander’s own Jewish background, he said, “Basically, my parents had grown up in certainly Conservative homes, where it was very normal to attend synagogue every Shabbis. All the holidays were celebrated, and houses were kept kosher. I know my parents were moved by the religion themselves, but I can tell you that my experience of our Judaism seemed to be something we did intermittently to make my grandparents comfortable.”
Thus, Alexander’s childhood home was kosher. “But you know, I always make the joke that I broke the kashrut in my house when I was 13 or 14 years old, because the first Burger King opened in our town, and I like a fool brought a cheeseburger home and put it on a plate,” he said. “And my mother saw this and flipped out that I had destroyed the kashrut of the house.”
Alexander (born Jay Scott Greenspan) became a bar mitzvah at a Conservative temple that leaned towards Orthodoxy because that was the shul nearest to his Livingston, New Jersey, home. “They spent six years teaching me to read Hebrew, which I can still do beautifully … but of course, they didn’t bother to teach me one word of what it meant. And that is an apt metaphor for how I felt about my entire Hebrew school and religious training — it was all form and no content. And in that vacuum, I then sought my own content, which was filled with a spirituality, but not a religious spirituality.”
Years later, Alexander chose to have his own two sons bar mitzvahed because, as he told them, “Look, your last name is Greenspan. There are people in this world who would wish you dead merely because you were born a Jew. You might as well know what you’re dying for.
“So I sent them to Wilshire Boulevard Temple… and they did an excellent job of giving them a real overview of the Jewish people, Jewish culture, Jewish history.”
Around the time of his own bar mitzvah, Alexander — who had previously hoped to become a magician — discovered the drama department at his junior high school and decided to pursue acting.
“By the time I was 12 years old, I was laser-focused on being in the theater,” he said. “By the time I was 14, I was working as a semi-professional, and I had union cards.”
Despite his parents’ concerns, he continued, “I could not have achieved my career had they not been so supportive. They had to drive me to auditions before I was old enough to drive. They were at every performance I ever did until I started performing on Broadway when they couldn’t come to all eight performances a week.”
His parents’ efforts on Alexander’s behalf paid off. While still studying theater at Boston University, he landed his debut in the original Broadway cast of the Hal Prince/Stephen Sondheim musical, “Merrily We Roll Along.” He continued starring on Broadway in the original cast of Kander and Ebb’s “The Rink,” Neil Simon’s “Broadway Bound” — as well as a hit West Coast production of Mel Brooks’ “The Producers,” in which he played producer Max Bialystock opposite Martin Short.
His many films include “Pretty Woman,” “Love! Valour! Compassion!” and “Shallow Hal.” On TV, he has starred and guested in series such as “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” and Larry David’s HBO smash, “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” Along the way, his performance on “Seinfeld” earned him six Emmy Award nominations, four Golden Globe nominations and other awards.
He landed the role of George after a videotaped audition, multiple meetings and more.
Jerry Seinfeld has called the show’s four main characters “despicable,” but Alexander has a somewhat different view of Costanza. “It’s not that George is amoral, he kind of knows right from wrong,” he said. “But sometimes that doesn’t seem to work for him, and he gets a little further along on the wrong side of things than not. He’s constantly weighing, ‘Can I? Should I? Is this OK?’ So it’s that thing that is very human. It’s George going, ‘Well if no one saw me steal the candy bar in the store, is it so bad?’ You know, that’s the kind of thing that George is doing all the time. It’s, ‘I can’t afford the candy bar, but I really want the candy bar. It’s wrong, but who am I hurting?’ I don’t think that George is despicable, but he does some despicable things.”
He added that George “is aware and somewhat disturbed by the fact that he thinks he has no talents that are important; that he has no value, no importance, is not in any kind of meaningful relationship, is not thought well of, is under-ambitious, is a little bit duplicitous, is a little amoral — in every way a sort of subpar person.
“But at the same time, he’s thinking, ‘I don’t know why the world isn’t treating me better. I should be doing far better — I mean, I’m not as bad as this guy and that guy.’ And so he’s thinking that he should have an easier or more successful go at it while being fully aware of his foibles … People are constantly trying to figure out, are we worthy of receiving better? Inside we fear the answer is no, but on the outside, we pray the answer is yes. And that is George.”
Alexander’s character was, in his mind, a member of the tribe, given that the Jewish actress Estelle Harris plays George’s mother on the series. “So in my head, I went, ‘OK, he’s Jewish, his father is not … she doesn’t give a darn, so that George was raised without any sense of a religion. He had a connection to nothing. He didn’t go to church, he didn’t go to temple, he didn’t do anything. And I actually kind of thought that sometimes, as part of why his morality is so unanchored, it’s because it isn’t tied to any specific religious principle or doctrine.”
But when the “Seinfeld” creators came up with an episode titled, “The Bris,” Alexander put his foot down. “My particular objection was that in the initial draft, the mohel seemed to not like children and was more of a vicious, caustic kind of character,” he said. “And what I said to Larry is, ‘I’m not Jason Alexander, the defender of the Jewish image on television,’ but I said the mohel, for an anti-Semite, is one of the easiest figures to focus on … I’m uncomfortable with that, and I need you to look at that or I’m not going to be comfortable performing in this episode.”
David revised the script, but not quite enough to satisfy Alexander. “I’ve made life very hard for Larry,” he quipped.
Fast forward to a year-and-a-half ago, when Alexander was chatting with director Lonny Price about the dearth of interesting roles then offered to him. “I was talking about how I tend to direct more these days because there aren’t many roles that would come my way that actually excite me. And Lonny said, ‘Well, are there any that you want to do that you haven’t done?’ I said, ‘Yeah, there are two.’ But I’ve aged out of ‘Sweeney Todd’ — I don’t think that anyone would buy that anymore. Arguably, I’ve aged out of Tevye. And Lonny immediately said that ‘Fiddler’ was a show he had always wanted to direct … Lonny’s done a lot of glorious musicals, but he had never done ‘Fiddler,’ and he wanted to do it. So we talked about, ‘Well, how do we want to do it?’”
Price hoped to honor Jerome Robbins’ creation, “so we’re more or less recreating Robbins’ choreography using his original staging of the play as a baseline model,” Alexander said.
He added that “Tevye and the community will be given their due without diminishing the Jewish humor. There have been productions, for instance, where the rabbi is played as a little bit of a silly figure, a foolish character. But our rabbi will come off as a very wise but very simple man.”
So what would George Costanza have thought of “Fiddler on the Roof?” “Of course, he would love ‘Fiddler,’” Alexander said. “Here’s what we know: George loved ‘Les Misérables.’ He likes big, epic shows.” Alexander laughed. “I’m sure George thinks he’d be a very good Tevye.
There will be a preview of “Fiddler” on November 8; the show will open on November 9 and run through December 1. For tickets and information, call (562) 944-9801.
