Dance theater: Robbins's Fiddler launched a choreographic showstopper in the bottle dance.

WHEN I learned that Fiddler on the Roof was coming back to Broadway, I was excited at the prospect of seeing Alfred Molina as the grumpy milkman with five-five!-unmarried daughters. I looked forward to hearing the score and watching a new director Jackie the book. But best of all was that the production would revive the unforgettable dances choreographed by Jerome Robbins. I would get to see the bottle dance one more time.

There are only a handful of Broadway numbers distinctive enough to go by their own names. For people who've seen Fiddler, the words "bottle dance" summon up more than steps. You remember a line of black-suited men, aims linked, knees jackknifed in deep plie, brows furrowed in concentration, slowly, deliberately thrusting their legs out and propelling themselves forward without toppling the wine bottles perched precariously on their hats. And you remember the mixture of surprise and delight and suspense, the feeling that you were being transported into the realm of the impossible.

"There was a rule about the bottle dance," says Wallace Munro, who's nowan executive with the Actors' Fund of America. He first danced in Fiddler in 1969, with the national touring company. Then he got into the Broadway company, and did the show again in 1976. "Periodically, one of the dancers had to drop his bottle. And there was stage business to cover for it. Jerry Robbins wanted it to be exciting. He felt that the audience needed to understand that those bottles weren't glued on--they were really balanced."

Sammy Dallas Bayes knows how those bottles got balanced. In 1964, he was a 20-year-old chorus kid, selected by Broadway's reigning choreographer for a new musical. The subject matter the show's creators, Bock and Harnick, had chosen, Jewish life in turn-of-the-century Russia, was hardly surefire. When the show tried out in Detroit, the critics were not impressed. "They predicted it wouldn't run more than three months on Broadway," says Bayes.

He had auditioned for the show because seeing what Robbins had done in West Side Story had persuaded him that the director-choreographer was a genius. Watching him remake Fiddler after Detroit confirmed that opinion.

Robbins had spent months researching the show. He attended prayer services in immigrant synagogues; he consulted the renowned scholar of Jewish dance, Dvora Lapson. He even went to a Hassidic wedding, where he saw a comedian do a bit of tomfoolery with an empty wine bottle, balancing it on his head as he danced.

One day, Bayes recalls, as Robbins fine-tuned Fiddler in Washington, DC, there was a buzz among the cast. "Jerry's putting in a new dance for the men," they were saying. It was for the first-act finale, in which the village of Anatekva gathers to celebrate the wedding of Tevye's eldest daughter. Robbins was turning the little comic bit he had seen at a Hassidic wedding into an out-and-out showstopper. "Everybody was head over heels when they saw it," Bayes recalls. "It's a very, simple concept that just astounds people."

"At first," he recalls, "we tried it wearing just skullcaps. But nobody could keep the bottle on their heads. So Jerry said, 'Let's wear the wedding hats, not the yarmulkes.'" All the men in the company learned the bottle dance, Bayes says. As it turned out, the bottle part wasn't that hard. "It's a matter of poise, focus, dynamics--it's not that difficult. After the bottles come off, that's when it gets hard." He's referring to the section he calls "whips and hooks," when the men burst into close, frenzied whirling, catching one another's arms high in the air.

Bayes, who now runs the Orpheus Theater in Cooperstown, New York, knows the choreography "to my fingers," he says. He's danced it, he's staged it, and he's recorded it. "Jerry was adamant about having a way to recreate the show exactly, and they came up with the concept of a director's book, with every number written down--in bars 20 to 36, this happens. Jerry asked me if I would write the book."

As it turned out, Bayes created the definitive record of the last original work Robbins ever did on Broadway. And because of it, even our children's children will set the bottle dance.

Sylviane Gold has written for Newsday, and The New York Times.