What would it be like to have Theodore Bikel's résumé? His first London stage role was in A Streetcar Named Desire, directed by Laurence Olivier in 1949. His first movie was The African Queen, with Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn. His first Broadway musical was The Sound of Music, playing Captain Georg von Trapp to Mary Martin's Maria. It ran 1,443 performances. Later, he was asked to succeed Zero Mostel as Tevye, the lead role in the musical Fiddler on the Roof; he eventually played it more than 2,000 times in half a dozen countries. On his most recent tour of the show, 64 cities in two years, eight shows a week, Bikel was 77. He was the only one who never missed a performance.
In show business for six fecund decades, Bikel has recorded more than 30 albums, speaks five languages fluently, sings in myriad more, has made 35 other films (including The Defiant Ones and The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming), was president of U.S. Actors Equity, lectures widely on acting and arts policies, co-founded the Newport Folk Festival, is a serious peace activist, has written and translated poetry and, at 83, blessed with a vigorous constitution, still maintains a schedule that would exhaust most men and women half his age.
One night last summer, attending the annual KlezCanada music festival north of Montreal, he serenaded an audience into the early hours. If they had let him, he probably would have sung all night. On another occasion, Bikel performed for 170 passengers on a plane that had been hijacked on a flight from Los Angeles to New York, singing for 6½ hours.
"That wasn't entertainment," he said afterward. "It was therapy."
That, of course, is only a small fraction of Bikel's remarkable résumé. For the first time in 20 years, this global troubadour will be bringing his guitar and his distinctive baritone voice to Toronto, performing tomorrow night at the Toronto Arts Centre with pianist and conductor Tamara Brooks. The show is a fundraiser for the Ashkenaz Foundation, a non-profit group dedicated to celebrating Yiddish culture. Then he goes to Vassar College near New York and on to Mexico City for a series of concerts.
Born in Vienna in 1924 (the family name was originally Cohen but was changed into an acronym of a biblical phrase), Bikel was 12 when he watched Adolf Hitler and his minions parade down a street in front of his parents' apartment. More prescient than most, Bikel's father scrambled to find the family exit visas.
"We left everything," Bikel recalls in a recent telephone interview. "We left with three suitcases. But my father was clever. The Austrians were playing games, confiscating visas. So instead of taking the direct route to Italy, we went the long route, via Strasbourg."
From there, they made their way to Palestine. One day, living on a kibbutz, Bikel found an old guitar and soon taught himself to play. By 17, he began to realize that he was not really cut out for the kibbutz's farming life. "I would stand on heaps of manure and sing songs about the beauty of work, and they realized my talents lay elsewhere. So they let me organize festivals, direct plays, do the cultural thing, and sent me to a seminar in Tel Aviv. And having tasted theatre for about six weeks, I couldn't leave."
At 19, he started an apprenticeship with the Habimah Theatre in Tel Aviv and, a few years later, went to London to study acting at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. He came to Olivier's attention and won a part in Streetcar. The experience "was wonderful," Bikel recalls, "but when he directed you, he not only told you how he wanted you to read the part, he showed you how he wanted you to read the part. It was a little intimidating."
Eventually, he was invited to the United States, where he fell in with Pete Seeger and other folkies. Until then, he recalls, he was simply an actor; he hadn't thought of making music part of his career.
He wrote his autobiography in the early nineties and updated it a few years ago, after the events of Sept. 11. Recent world events have left him increasingly pessimistic about the state of the world. "I wish I could tell you the outlook is rosy, but it's not. It's rather bleak. Our bad traits have intensified and overshadowed the good traits. The world is divisive."
But Bikel, who has campaigned for civil rights in the American South and been arrested in the United States for protesting against the treatment of Soviet Jews in the 1970s, clings tenaciously to the dream of peace. It's not enough, he says simply, not to participate in evil, as his nice gentile neighbours did in Vienna in 1938 while Jews were being rounded up and "disappeared." To turn a blind eye is to be complicit.
"But I still believe that love is stronger than hate and peace is better than war and the absence of war is not peace. So I keep on slugging and singing. ... We all have to use the tools we have to express ourselves."