Joseph Stein, Tony-Winning Fiddler on the Roof Librettist, Dies at Age 98

Joseph Stein, the Tony Award-winning librettist of Fiddler on the Roof and a dozen other musicals, passed away on October 24. He was 98 years old and lived in New York City.

“Vibrant and working right up until the end, Joe was one of the funniest, dearest, most supportive people anyone ever...met,” Harvey Feirstein, who starred in the most recent Broadway revival of Fiddler, wrote of Stein. “He was a joy to be around and I'll miss him terribly.”

Born in New York on May 30, 1912, to Polish émigrés, Stein earned a masters degree in social work from Columbia University and spent six years a psychiatric social worker before breaking into comedy writing, contributing sketches to various radio programs and later becoming a TV comedy writer for Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows. Stein made his Broadway debut as a sketch writer for the 1948 revue Lend an Ear, and his debut as a musical book writer in 1955 with Plain and Fancy, a show conceived as Pennsylvania’s answer to Oklahoma! He received his first Tony nomination in 1960 for the book of Take Me Along.

Stein’s biggest success came in 1964 with Fiddler on the Roof, which featured music by Jerry Bock, lyrics by Sheldon Harnick and direction and choreography by Jerome Robbins. The musical story of the baker Tevye (Zero Mostel) and his family in pre-Revolutionary Russia, Fiddler opened on September 22, 1964, and ran until July 2, 1972. The beloved musical was revived on Broadway in 1976 (again starring Mostel), 1981 (Herschel Bernardi), 1990 (Topol) and 2004 (Alfred Molina, and later Feirstein). He co-wrote the screenplay for the 1971 movie version, which starred Topol.

Stein’s other Broadway shows include Mr. Wonderful (1956), The Body Beautiful (1958), Juno (1959), the play Enter Laughing (1963, which was adapted into the musical So Long, 174th Street and presented  in revised form under its original title by York Theatre in 2007), Zorba (1968), Irene (1973), King of Hearts (1978), Carmelina (1979) and Rags (1986).

After working together on Rags, Stein and Stephen Schwartz collaborated on the 1989 musical The Baker’s Wife, which premiered in London but was never produced on Broadway. The York Theatre presented a staged concert of the show in 2007. Stein also collaborated with Kander & Ebb on All About Us, a musical retelling of The Skin of Our Teeth, which debuted in 1999 at Signature Theatre of Virginia and produced at Westport Country Playhouse in 2007.

Stein was inducted into the Theatre Hall of Fame in 2008. He is survived by his second wife, Elisa; their daughter and three sons from his marriage to Sadie Singer Stein, who died in 1974.