action. “With Your help, I’m starving to death,” Tevye says to
the Lord in scene 2. “You made many, many poor people. I re-
alize, of course, that it’s no shame to be poor, but it’s no great
honor either.”^5 He is the narrator who cannot control his cir-
cumstances, and this allows him to sing. The quotation I have
given leads into “If I Were a Rich Man,” for example. Fiddler
on the Roofactually has a fiddler on the roof, a bit of humor that
pretends to bring one musician to the area of fallibility, the
stage. Tevye’s first lines spell out the issue of fallibility: “A fid-
dler on the roof. Sounds crazy, no? But in our little village of
Anatevka, you might say every one of us is a fiddler on the
roof, trying to scratch out a pleasant, simple tune without break-
ing his neck. It isn’t easy.”
Some characters preserve a note of ambiguity between mu-
sical projection and all-knowingness. The leading example is
the Master of Ceremonies, the Emcee, in Cabaret, who hovers
between being one thing and another in his every appearance
(between male and female, tolerant and anti-Semitic, amus-
ing and cruel). On the narrative question, he seems wise to
everything that happens in the plot involving Cliff and Sally,
Fraulein Schneider and Schultz, but his way of expressing his
knowledge is to summon a performance from the Kit Kat en-
tertainers, himself included, so that the possibility of omnis-
cience is always deflected into the performance of a cabaret
number, and one cannot be sure where anyone stands, cer-
tainly not of where the Emcee stands. When Cliff and Sally
find themselves living together and end their scene with an
embrace, the Emcee has two chorus girls ready to perform a
number about three-way sex. When Cliff accepts the assign-
ment of bringing in money for Ernest’s Nazi cause, the Emcee
and his girls are ready with their “Sitting Pretty” or “Money”
song. Always the Emcee knows what has just happened in the
love stories and always he has a cabaret number ready that will
give a sardonic turn to the latest events. When Herr Schultz
and Fräulein Schneider are first attacked by the Nazis (a brick
NARRATION AND TECHNOLOGY 153
(^5) Quoted from the libretto in Richards, Ten Great Musicals of the American
Theatre, p. 500.