3 days ago
Fiddler on the Roof: The glorious revival moves indoors, and loses the wow factor
Fresh from winning three Olivier awards, Jordan Fein's superb Regent's Park revival of Fiddler on the Roof has been transplanted to form the big summer musical offering at the Barbican. Jerry Bock, Sheldon Harnick and Joseph Stein's instant 1964 Broadway classic about a toiling shtetl milkman contending with five daughters and a world in transition at the turn of the 20th century always does a roaring trade, but this loving iteration merits packed houses.
Even so, I was also left wishing I'd caught the production at Regent's Park Open Air theatre last August. The alfresco setting clearly augmented the portrait of a Jewish community not snugly self-contained but vulnerable to the elements as well as brutish Russians. The dominant image of Tom Scutt's design is of wheat fields; indeed the evening memorably opens not with a fiddler on a roof but a fiddler (the talented, spectral Raphael Papo) atop a rising cross-section of burgeoning wheat field that forms an ominous canopy.
That exquisite number late in Act One – Sunrise, Sunset – in which the locals gather to celebrate the marriage of Tzeitel (the milkman Tevye's eldest daughter) to the diffident tailor Motel, last year magically coincided with nightfall itself. Presented here amid candlelit gloom, the song still carries a spine-tingling charge. The pair have broken with tradition in seeking a love match (the days are hence numbered for Beverley Klein's tireless matchmaker Yente). The wistful ritualistic mood around them affirms vast cycles of nature.
So even if the earthiness for which this incarnation was celebrated is less in evidence now, that's no reason to kvetch about the experience overall. Compared with his co-directing work on the recent stripped-back Oklahoma!, Fein privileges emotional truth over experimentation, the imperishable score rendered with musical heft and folksy simplicity, the lighting beautiful without being self-advertising. Julia Cheng's choreography, particularly in the famous bottle-balancing dance sequence, replete with precise, angular, sweeping leg moves, is a joy.
Adam Dannheisser's commanding performance as Tevye is of a piece with this confident restraint. No actor can eclipse the ebullient memory of Zero Mostel or Topol and this American actor gives us instead a figure of grounded ordinariness and even surprising level-headedness. He has comic value, but he doesn't aim it at the gallery; when he sings If I Were a Rich Man, the village looks on, half amused, half sharing the dream too. He's an everyday father repeatedly tested by demands for independence by his daughters. (Natasha Jules Bernard, Hannah Bristow and Georgia Bruce are contrastingly spirited as the main three, Tzeitel, Chava and Hodel).
Of course, there is a grim frisson – and a topical one – to the vision of collective displacement in the second half, but what resonates most is Tevye's agonised attempt to reconcile his paternal care with his devotion to his people, and his stern God. At a time of cultural upheaval, of daily concerns about what we must fight for, and discard, that hits home.
