Neva Small

Neva Small is an American theatrical, film, and television actress and singer. She made her singing debut at the age of 10 at the New York City Opera, and her Broadway debut the following year. She has numerous acting credits on and Off-Broadway. She is best known for her portrayal of Chava, Tevye's third daughter and the one who marries a gentile, in the 1971 film Fiddler on the Roof. Neva Small was born in New York City to Seldan and Berma Small. She grew up on Central Park West. Her mother graduated in the first class of harpists at Juilliard in 1938, and played in an all-female orchestra at the Waldorf Astoria. Small began singing in an extracurricular after-school program, and acted in Hebrew school and in the Jewish Theater for Children, where she was an understudy for Don Scardino. At age 10, she played Beverly Sills's daughter in The Ballad of Baby Doe (1963) at the New York City Opera. She studied at the LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts. She was accepted at the Juilliard drama school, but deferred her admission for a year in order to act in the 1971 film Fiddler on the Roof. She then studied at New York University's Gallatin School. Small made her Broadway debut in the 1964 musical Something More! Other early Broadway stage credits include The Impossible Years (1965–1967), Henry, Sweet Henry (1967), Frank Merriwell (1971), and Something's Afoot (1976). Her early Off-Broadway performances include Ballad for a Firing Squad (1968) and Show Me Where the Good Times Are (1970). She turned down a part in Godspell to play the title character in F. Jasmine Addams, the first musical staged at Circle in the Square Theatre, in 1971. Based on the novel The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers, the one-act play was cancelled after six performances. She also appeared in Leonard Bernstein's Mass (1971), Yentl the Yeshiva Boy (1974), Styne After Styne (1980), and a revised edition of Blues in the Night that toured the East Coast in the mid-1980s.