Fiddler on the Roof: Barbican review
This beautifully staged revival delivers an emotional gut punch, says our reviewer.
Image credit: Marc Brenner
This beautifully staged revival delivers an emotional gut punch, says our reviewer.
Composer Jerry Bock, lyricist Sheldon Harnick and writer Joseph Stein only delivered one bona fide musical theatre hit. But what a hit! Sixty-one years after its Broadway premiere, Fiddler on the Roof is an oft-revived classic that features one of the greatest scores of all time and a story and characters that stir the soul.
Moving indoors to the Barbican after a sold-out run last summer, the Regent's Park Open Air Theatre production does it proud.
Directed with reverence by Jordan Fein, it's a beautifully judged restaging that – through a tale about displacement, antisemitism, and the determination to uphold tradition in a scarily changing world – delivers an emotional gut-punch.
Tradition is the theme of the opening number, which Julia Cheng has choreographed with such aplomb that I turned to my friend during the deafening applause that greeted it and declared "We're in safe hands". There's no pesky revisionism here, as happened with recent-ish revivals of Oklahoma! and Carousel, for example. And there's no need for it, since the themes of a narrative set in the early 1900s brought to the stage in the mid-1960s remain relevant today.
Adam Dannheisser is brilliant as Jewish dairyman Tevye, who talks to God and the audience as he guides us around the Russian shtetl of Anatevka, where he's working tirelessly to put food on the table for his wife Golde (Lara Pulver) and the five daughters he's seeking to marry off.
Anatevka is a poor enclave where a tailor finally saving up enough money to buy a sewing machine is the talk of the town and a visiting teacher accepts food as payment. It's a clever idea to have the townsfolk hovering around the edges of scenes they're not in, since this is a place where eavesdropping and gossip thrive. And the roof upon which the fiddler fiddles hovers above their heads as a metaphor for the weight of the world that Tevye is struggling under.
Dannheisser wears his grumpiness lightly for the most part and he's delightfully funny as he sings If I Were A Rich Man, but there's an air of melancholy to his Tevye that's often missed by larkier performers in the role.
He and Pulver have a touching duet on Do You Love Me? in which Pulver's lovely voice shines. But then everyone shines in this show, never more so than in a wedding sequence that is danced with such exuberance that it's hard not to jump up onto the stage and join in. Mazel tov!
Fiddler on the Roof is at the Barbican Theatre, London, until 19 July.
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