Anthea Gerrie Relives Her Roots In A Brilliant Revival Of Fiddler On The Roof At London’s Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre
The best thing about an outdoor stage is what it brings to the story, as in this beloved tale of soon-to-be-displaced villagers with only a straw roof to protect them from the elements. Just like the players at the open-air theatre in the middle of London’s Regent’s Park, in fact. Anatevka, the stetl in which they are living out an impoverished, precarious existence stabilised only by sticking to centuries-old rules, has its name carved into a canopy of straw which does double duty as a perch for the see-all fiddler for whom the hit show is named.
Then there is a trick of nature itself – the evening sunshine which lends its golden glow to the Russian village, culminating in a showstopper before giving way to the moon and stars. Jordan Fein, the American director of this latest production of the 60-year-old hit, was thrilled to realise that the show’s most moving and memorable song, Sunrise Sunset would on some dates be performed at actual sunset, a natural phenomenon beyond the scope of any indoor theatre.
As it happened, cloud obscured the sunset on press night, but could not dim the wave of emotion evoked by bewildered parents wondering in song how at least three of their five daughters could suddenly have grown up to be of marriageable age. In that sense there’s a touch of Pride and Prejudice to this tale which mimics Jane Austen in its concerns with the limited choices available to unmarried girls in poor families without a dowry to offer.
Sholem Aleichem, the Yiddish author on whose stories the book for Fiddler on the Roof is based, probably had no knowledge of Austen; he was motor concerned with the preoccupations of his community, their archaic traditions as much under threat of change as the stetl itself in the face of anti-semitism and pogroms. Those concerns also currently preoccupying Londoners make this musical even more apposite now than when it was written in the early 1960s.
Topol, whose memorable Tevye in both the London stage production and subsequent movie is a hard act to follow, would approve of Adam Dannheisser, a virile and commanding lead in fine voice who has played in a Broadway revival of the play, albeit in a lesser role, and won an Obie award for his performance in Oslo. The brittle British beauty Lara Culver makes for a slightly younger and more glamorous Golde than most actresses who have played Tevye’s wife in the past, but her sharp tongue and expressive eyes make her thoroughly believable as the milkman’s wife doomed – and resigned – to a life of hard work and poverty.
It is the daughters’ role to most vigorously tug the audience’s heartstrings with their serial fight against settling for a marriage arranged by the matchmaker and approved by their parents in order to follow their own, very independent hearts. Hannah Bristow, playing Chava, particularly dear to her father’s heart because she always has her nose in a book, gets to tug the hardest, and has an unexpected prop to help her unique to this production, which is to be commended for the quality of the dancing and the musical solos in particular.
Special kudos must go to virtuoso violinist Raphael Papo, whose fiddle becomes a character in itself, as it mockingly follows the action – not always from the roof, but quite often right in Tevye’s face as he grapples with the most serious decisions of his life. Here art imitates life; Fiddler On The Roof is a true story for many, like me, in the audience whose ancestors were dispersed across Europe and the USA when pogroms in turn-of-the-century Russia forced them to flee.
No doubt they mourned their homeland as deeply as the residents pouring out of Anatevka, despite acknowledging that all they ever had in the stetl was “a little bit of this, a little bit of that”. Watch these brave villagers celebrate, commiserate, fight their battles and ultimately come together on the eve of their exile and weep.
Tell Me More About Seeing Fiddler On The Roof
Fiddler On the Roof runs until September 21 at Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre.in London.
