On Broadway, a ‘Fiddler’ that triumphantly sings
NEW YORK When Tevye the dairyman speaks to God in Bartlett Sher’s sublime new revival of Fiddler On the Roof, you grasp every inch of the character’s distance from heaven.
Through previous productions of Fiddler, and the 1971 film adaptation, Tevye has become an outsize figure, despite his humble circumstances as a poor Jewish man living in early-20th-century Russia.
We picture him as a solid, bearded fellow, gesticulating broadly as he tells us of tradition, fatherhood and faith, and the various challenges they’ve brought him.
Danny Burstein, the marvelous actor who stars in this production, has the beard and the bulk, but his Tevye is distinctly nuanced. As he fields his limited options, and the sharp comments of his loving wife, Golde (played here by a robustly moving Jessica Hecht), Tevye’s humanity is made fully accessible. When his trials demand expression on a larger scale, Burstein delivers mightily.
The performance anchors a production that, like Sher’s previous stagings of American classics — from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s South Pacific and The King
and I to Clifford Odets’ Golden Boy and August Wilson’s Joe
Turner’s Come and Gone — reveals both the timelessness and the contemporary pertinence of the work.
His Fiddler arguably is even more revelatory, as the material has always lent itself to certain clichés closer to Broadway audiences. The religion, culture and history of Tevye’s community is fundamental to their story; the trick is to capture that without veering into caricature.
Sher does this with the support of a seamless cast and an intuitive, inventive design team that includes several previous collaborators. Michael Yeargan’s lean, spacious sets and Donald Holder’s alternately stark and warm lighting evoke the poverty and close bonds in the village of Anatevka as compellingly as they did the majesty of Siam in King. Catherine Zuber’s costumes, sturdy and rich in earth tones, suit a group of people for whom vitality is a form of defiance.
The director has an invaluable new colleague in Israeli choreographer Hofesh Shechter, whose kinetic, exhilarating dance routines ( based on Jerome Robbins’ original work) reinforce this resolve. We see the capacity for joy that carries Tevye’s family and fellow villagers through wrenching heartache, though this production hardly plays down the latter.
As in the past, Sher explores the difficulty of change, a major theme in Fiddler; cultural and generational conflicts and the perpetuating nature of intolerance are confronted unsparingly.
The buoyant Matchmaker is restaged to more fully acknowledge the powerlessness young women such as Tevye’s daughters faced in arranged marriages. When the three eldest make their own choices — near-impossible ones for the second, Hodel (a sterling-voiced Samantha Massell) and the third, Chava (a gently gleaming Melanie Moore) — we feel the weight of their consequences.
And a framing device is used, briefly but memorably, to reinforce the topicality of the kind of struggles faced in Anatevka.
What this Fiddler shows us most powerfully, though, is the resilience of love. For all its specific insights, it delivers that simple and universal message, thrillingly.