Joanna Merlin, 92, a hit onstage and off
Joanna Merlin, who, after originating the role of Tzeitel, the eldest daughter, in the hit Broadway musical “Fiddler on the Roof,” became a renowned casting director, notably for Stephen Sondheim musicals including “Into the Woods” and “Follies,” died Oct. 15 at her younger daughter’s home in Los Angeles. She was 92.
Her older daughter, Rachel Dretzin, said the cause was complications of myelodysplastic syndrome, a bone marrow disease.
The idea of becoming a casting director came from Hal Prince, the powerful producer of “Fiddler,” after she had left “Fiddler” to raise her two young daughters. He had interviewed several candidates and told Ms. Merlin that most of them “just didn’t like actors,” she told Backstage magazine.
“He felt that since I was an actor and a mother, that I might be a good choice,” she added. “He understood that I was raising children and told me that he didn’t care what hours I put in, just as long as I got the work done.”
She set to work in 1970, casting replacement actors in “Fiddler” during its last two years on Broadway. For the next two decades, she cast six musicals that were composed by Sondheim and produced (and usually directed) by Prince on Broadway: “Company,” “Follies,” “A Little Night Music,” “Pacific Overtures,” “Side by Side by Sondheim,” and “Merrily We Roll Along.”
Her casting credits also include two other Sondheim musicals, “Sweeney Todd” and “Into the Woods”; Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s “Evita”; and “On the Twentieth Century,” by Betty Comden, Adolph Green and Cy Coleman. All but “Into the Woods” were directed by Prince.
“What I found so interesting with Joanna,” said James Lapine, who directed “Into the Woods” and wrote its book, based on the Grimm brothers’ fairy tales, in a phone interview, “was her determination to pursue nontraditional casting in the theater, which for me, at a young age, was something I hadn’t thought much about.”
Ms. Merlin’s pursuit of diverse casting led Lapine to choose a Black actress, Terry Burrell, to replace the white one who had played one of Cinderella’s evil stepsisters, and Phylicia Rashad, who is Black, as a replacement for Bernadette Peters in the leading role of the Witch.
In 1986, Ms. Merlin was a founder of the Non-Traditional Casting Project (now the Alliance for Inclusion in the Arts), which seeks more opportunities for actors of color and actors with disabilities.
Ms. Merlin, noting that there were many talented, nonwhite actors, told The Record of Hackensack, N.J., in 1990. “The reason they should be cast is because they’re good,”
Ms. Merlin also cast six films, including Bernardo Bertolucci’s “The Last Emperor” (1987), for which she won the Casting Society of America’s Artios Award. She. also won an Artios for “Into the Woods.”
Jo Ann Dolores Ratner was born July 15, 1931, in Chicago. Her parents were Russian immigrants: Her father, Harry, owned a grocery store, and her mother, Toni (Merlin) Ratner, helped in the store and became a sculptor in her 60s.
She moved to Los Angeles with her parents and her sister when she was 15.
She attended UCLA for a year in the early 1950s and, after acting in plays in the Los Angeles area in the early and mid-1950s, appeared in her first movie role, a small part in Cecil B. DeMille’s “The Ten Commandments” (1956).
After some more screen work and roles in off- and off-off-Broadway plays, Ms. Merlin made her Broadway debut in 1961 in Jean Anouilh’s “Becket,” as Gwendolen, the mistress of Thomas Becket, one of Britain’s most powerful figures in the 12th century, who was played by Laurence Olivier. Later that year, she returned to Broadway to portray Sigmund Freud’s wife in Henry Denker’s “A Far Country.”
After four unsuccessful auditions for a role in Bertolt Brecht’s “Mother Courage and Her Children,” which was staged by Jerome Robbins, she auditioned eight times for Robbins when he was casting “Fiddler on the Roof,” which opened in 1964. Although she lacked a strong singing voice, she was cast as Tzeitel, the oldest daughter of Tevye the milkman, the show’s principal character.