Ruth Leon Pocket review… Fiddler on the Roof – Open Air Theatre in Regents Park

Fiddler on the Roof – Open Air Theatre in Regents Park

How wonderful to have Fiddler on the Roof back and, originally playing in Regents Park until September 21st has now been extended to the 28th.  If you have never seen it – go. And if you have seen it, once or multiple times, you will go without any urging from me.

This 1964 musical with a perfect book by Joseph Stein and a perfect score by Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick is indestructible, not that anyone wants to destroy it. Every song is there for a reason whether of narrative, emotion, or character. Every single line, whether heartfelt, comic or declarative, belongs exactly where it is, said or sung by the right character, landing where the audience can appreciate the gift that is this great universal musical.

It’s about family, about how to hold to tradition in a constantly changing world, about how to withstand the buffeting of outside forces, about love. A father, Tevye, affectingly played here by Adam Dannheisser, talks to God about his troubles. He’s a milkman with five daughters, a perennially cross wife. and a lame horse, living in a village in rural Russia at the turn of the 20th century. The village, Anatevka, like many other Jewish settlements, is about to be destroyed by order of the Tsar.  In a world where marriages are always decided by the father of the family, Tevye’s girls want to marry for love. What to do, God?

As specific as stories get, about an Orthodox Jewish community deep in the Pale, Fiddler on the Roof is for everyone, everywhere, who has ever had a family.

On a beautiful set by Tim Scutt, Jordan Fein’s production sings of lovingly reimagined verities and seems to fit into the Park’s bucolic atmosphere as if it had grown there organically. When the villagers are evicted from their homes by the pogrom, they disappear quietly into the darkness of the trees and wheatfield.

I could tell you about the songs, about the Fiddler, (splendid Raphael Papo), about Tevye’s wife Golde (Lara Pulver), who holds the family together, about the individual performances which collectively make this production work.

But no, go see it for yourselves.

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