<Li> Tony Award for Best Book </Li> <P> Fiddler on the Roof is a musical with music by Jerry Bock, lyrics by Sheldon Harnick, and book by Joseph Stein, set in the Pale of Settlement of Imperial Russia in 1905 . It is based on Tevye and his Daughters (or Tevye the Dairyman) and other tales by Sholem Aleichem . The story centers on Tevye, the father of five daughters, and his attempts to maintain his Jewish religious and cultural traditions as outside influences encroach upon the family's lives . He must cope both with the strong - willed actions of his three older daughters, who wish to marry for love--each one's choice of a husband moves further away from the customs of his faith--and with the edict of the Tsar that evicts the Jews from their village . </P> <P> The original Broadway production of the show, which opened in 1964, had the first musical theatre run in history to surpass 3,000 performances . Fiddler held the record for the longest - running Broadway musical for almost 10 years until Grease surpassed its run . It remains the sixteenth longest - running show in Broadway history . The production was extraordinarily profitable and highly acclaimed . It won nine Tony Awards, including Best Musical, score, book, direction and choreography . It spawned five Broadway revivals and a highly successful 1971 film adaptation and has enjoyed enduring international popularity . It has also been a popular choice for school and community productions . </P> <P> Fiddler on the Roof is based on Tevye and his Daughters (or Tevye the Dairyman), a series of stories by Sholem Aleichem that he wrote in Yiddish between 1894 and 1914 about Jewish life in a village in the Pale of Settlement of Imperial Russia at the turn of the 20th century . It is also influenced by Life Is with People, by Mark Zborowski and Elizabeth Herzog . Aleichem wrote a dramatic adaptation of the stories that he left unfinished at his death, but which was produced in Yiddish in 1919 by the Yiddish Art Theater and made into a film in the 1930s . In the late 1950s, a musical based on the stories, called Tevye and his Daughters, was produced Off - Broadway by Arnold Perl . Rodgers and Hammerstein and then Mike Todd briefly considered bringing this musical to Broadway but dropped the idea . </P>

Where was fiddler on the roof first performed