One of the most crowd-pleasing musical numbers in the Broadway revival of “Fiddler on the Roof” is “To Life,” a celebration of the agreement that Tevye’s daughter Tzeitel will marry the butcher Lazar Wolf. (Spoiler alert: she doesn’t.) The uptempo song famously culminates in a big dance number featuring high kicks and eye-catching leaps. A musicalization of the Jewish toast “L’chaim,” the joyfully wishful song translates across barriers of culture, language, geography and even gender. Below are some video clips that demonstrate how this tradition-embracing song has been interpreted in very non-traditional ways over the years.
1. Even superstars had to start somewhere. Just ask Josh Groban. In 1999, Mr. Groban starred as Tevye at the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts. This week Mr. Groban, who has sold over 30 million records, announced that he’ll make his Broadway debut next season in “Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812.”
2. Lin-Manuel Miranda, the star and composer of the red-hot Broadway musical “Hamilton,” had a viral hit, at least among Broadway fans, when he enlisted some friends to perform the song at his wedding to Vanessa Nadal in 2010. “What we lack in polish, we hopefully make up for in joy and love,” he wrote on YouTube.
3. English is nice. But experiencing a show about Jewish traditions and family life in Hebrew is even nicer. At least that’s what audiences thought in 2008 when the Cameri Theater, a repertory company in Tel Aviv, staged the show during Israel’s 60th anniversary. As Alisa Solomon writes in her book “Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of ‘Fiddler on the Roof,’ ”, the show extended several times, more than doubling its scheduled run of 60 performances. “Typically stingy with standing ovations,” Ms. Solomon writes, “Israeli audiences rose to their feet night after night.”
4. Last month the Los Angeles-based Jewish Women’s Repertory Company performed an all-female version of “Fiddler on the Roof.” Created in 2005, the troupe mounts musicals performed by women, many of them Orthodox Jews, for all-female audiences, in adherence with a Talmudic law that prohibits Orthodox men from listening to women sing.
5. “Fiddler” has been wildly popular in Japan, according to Ms. Solomon. The show has been produced in Japan hundreds of times since it had its premiere there in 1967 for the show’s first non-English production. Joseph Stein, the show’s book writer, offered an explanation in an essay for The Guardian: “The themes of the show are as true to the Japanese experience and Japanese culture as they are to American or English: the breakdown of tradition, the differences between generations, the eagerness to hang on to a religious background. These things are very much a part of the human experience.”
6. “To Life” doesn’t just resonate with the Japanese. In this production in Panama, Tevye and Lazar Wolf drink to the other’s health with the Spanish toast “Salud!”
7. The Russian shtetl of Anatevka couldn’t be more different from a sun-baked oil town in Texas. But that didn’t stop the Midland High School Chemic Marching Band from bridging the gap between the two worlds with this performance spotlighting a crackerjack percussion section.
8. In another instrumental performance, the jazz saxophonist Julian “Cannonball” Adderley led his sextet in a rendition of “To Life” that put a jazz swing in the song’s Tsarist Russian rhythms. The album featured arrangements of eight songs from the show, including “Do You Love Me?” and “Matchmaker, Matchmaker.” The other musicians in the band included Nat Adderley (trumpet), Joe Zawinul (piano) and Louis Hayes (drums).
9. There must have been a musical theater geek in the writers’ room for this episode of the TV comedy “The Big Bang Theory,” in which Sheldon (Jim Parsons) gets drunk and makes “To Life” his jam.
10. There was probably at least one math geek involved in the making of this video, a clever calculus-themed parody called “To Pi,” performed by a YouTube user named Zack Dunda (who has hopefully gone on to a career in movie trailer voiceover work).
11. You don’t need to have lived long at all to get tipsy on toasts “to life.” Just ask the pint-sized performers in this production at the Young People’s Theater in Ann Arbor, Mich.