Beloved musical theatre classic Fiddler On The Roof smashed records when its first 1964 run on Broadway surpassed over 3000 performances, garnering a total of nine Tony Awards for its humour, warmth, honesty, and celebration of the proud Jewish tradition. Now, a new production of the beloved show, with all new staging from director Jordan Fein, has opened as part of Regent's Park Open Air Theatre 2024 summer season. Check out the reviews below!
Whats The Plot?
The Fiddler on the Roof chronicles the struggles of the poor Jewish milkman in the rapidly changing world of the early 1900s, against the backdrop of the pogroms and forced expulsions of Jewish shtetls in Russia. Three of his five headstrong daughters are determined to marry for love, but Tevye is as equally determined to make them stable matches that align with their traditions, aware that the balance of their lives is as precarious as a fiddler perched on a roof.
The Reviews
Broadway World: Adam Dannheisser forgoes the showmanship that's usually associated with the benevolent patriarch for a line-up of dad jokes and winks thrown at the audience. He towers over everybody, acutely sardonic yet suitably sombre. Dannheisser introduces a devoted, profound man who loves his family and secretly always seeks his wife's approval. It's Lara Pulver's rebuttals as Golde that make his outdated worldviews and backhanded misogyny sting a little less than they would otherwise. She is a force of nature, revealing a powerful voice and an arresting presence.
WhatsOnStage: The quality of Jordan Fein's wonderful, emotional production is that it perfectly holds the balance of Fiddler on the Roof, neither tilting towards saccharine nor bitterness, towards schmaltz or politics. It honours the care with which book writer Joseph Stein, lyricist Sheldon Harnick and composer Jerry Bock first created the show in 1964, under the passionate ferocity of their director Jerome Robbins.
The Stage: Fein's winning approach is to strip away anything remotely sentimental in the storytelling, which can sometimes curdle into kitsch. Far from robbing the show of emotion, it allows audiences to feel the vivid sentiment coursing throughout Joseph Stein's book and Bock and Harnick's beloved score.
Timeout: Fein, who co-directed sexy Oklahoma!' when it came to London last year and helped strip it of any hokey old associations, eradicates the kitsch here, too. Yes it's funny Adam Dannheisser's Tevye still cracks jokes and talks to the audience, though he's more dad-funny than the kind of showman-comedian that Tevye often becomes and yes it's faithful, but this is a serious production.
The Telegraph: Choreographer Julia Cheng keeps the best of Jerome Robbins's work (like the famous bottle dance) while adding grit: one drunken reveler does a split jump off a table while spitting vodka. Mark Aspinall's superb orchestrations find new details in the kletzmer-esque score, while onstage violinist Raphael Papo and Bristow, who supplies plaintive clarinet-playing, add to the spine-tingling atmosphere.
The Times: The paterfamilias of this story can be stoic, wry, fierce, anguished, uproarious, pious. The appealing Adam Dannheisser goes for something between all these things not entirely convincingly. His strongest suit is a sitcom frazzlement this is Reb Tevye meets Ross Geller from Friends. Lara Pulver brings quiet dignity rather than shrewishness to Tevye's wife, Golde, and Dan Wolff is a triumphantly nerdy Motel. The actresses playing Tevye's three eldest daughters grow in stature as the night goes on, and Liv Andrusier's Tzeitel gets to show her musical-theatre chops in a brilliantly grand guignol staging of Tevye's Dream.