Theatre in Review: Fiddler on the Roof (Broadway Theatre)

	Danny Burstein. Photo: Joan Marcus

Even as auteur directors like Ivo van Hove earn acclaim for radically reconfiguring classic texts, let's consider Bartlett Sher, who, with a few small tweaks, has given us a new production of that oft-revived classic, Fiddler on the Roof, that is original, vibrant, and, at times, surprisingly disturbing. As newspaper reports have noted, the production appears on a bare stage -- really four portals and an upstage wall, rendered in a white brick motif by the set designer Michael Yeargan -- over which hangs a sign bearing the name Anatevka. Danny Burstein, the evening's commanding, complex star, enters in modern dress, sporting an orange windbreaker and carrying a book, from which he reads the first few sentences of Joseph Stein's book. We are seeing a man of today, a tourist perhaps, visiting the land of his ancestors.

Even as he reads, the title character is lowered in, fiddle in hand, while a turn-of-the-century farmhouse appears from below the stage and rises into the flies. This is a cunning act of diversion; when we turn our attention back to Burstein, he is dressed as Tevye, the milkman, inhabitant of a shtetl in the Russian Pale of Settlement, circa 1905. Almost before we have time to take in his transformation, the entire company appears -- far upstage, via a set of concealed stairs -- and marches downstage, seizing the space, ready to pull us back into a lost world. A rip in time has occurred, past and present have been conjoined, startlingly. We are on notice: This is very much a Fiddler on the Roof for the 21st century.

Indeed, just about everything in Sher's production feels freshly imagined; everyone involved seems determined to scrub away any excessive nostalgia that may have accrued to a beloved work over the years. (This is Broadway's sixth Fiddler in 31 years, and only the second not to employ Jerome Robbins' original staging.) Yeargan's set design consists of period elements -- a farmhouse, a barn, a row of houses that float in the air -- with an occasional old-fashioned painted backdrop added, obviously contained in the contemporary environment of a Broadway stage. Hofesh Shechter's choreography, which is sometimes very much like Robbins' work and at other times markedly different, has a kind of ferocity to it -- feet stamped in defiance of prejudice and poverty, and upper body movements suggestive of religious frenzy or believers locked in a furious argument with God. What emerges -- despite the salty humors of Stein's book and songs by Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick that have permanently ironed themselves into our memories -- is probably rougher and rawer than you may remember, not so much a sentimental look back at the old days and what was, but a show with something to say about the sorrowful state of the contemporary world.

The original production of Fiddler on the Roof evoked, for an audience only a couple of generations removed from it, a lost way of life, finding laughter in its pious details and more than a few tears in its dissolution. The characters' struggles with disruptive modern ideas -- romantic love, political revolution, intermarriage -- signal the assimilations to come in the New World, as Jewish immigrants moved from Ellis Island to the suburbs of Long Island. Without changing the text, Sher's production reframes the show's central theme: This Fiddler is about a Jewish village surrounded by the larger Russian community, both of which are headed for crackups, thanks to pogroms, exile, and revolution. It's highly possible that -- at least at first -- you may miss some of the charm and warmth associated with earlier productions. But if you stay with it, chances are that you will be captured by its sheer vitality, its insistence that this show has something to say for today.

Sher's intentions are especially made clear in his casting choices. As Tevye, the poor milkman with five marriageable daughters and no money for dowries, Burstein isn't an outsized star presence, like his predecessors Zero Mostel and Topol; instead, he is a fine actor who builds his character by amassing dozens of telling details. He takes us into his confidence, introducing the members of the village, chatting comfortably with God, and sparring, often hilariously, with his wife, Golde (Jessica Hecht). There's a youthful -- almost boyish -- glee to his rendition of "If I Were a Rich Man," showing how indulging in a brief fantasy of wealth helps dull the pain of his daily existence. Confronted by rebellious daughters who want to choose their own husbands, he charmingly handles Tevye's on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand logic. But as Tevye's life grows more complicated, he ages before our eyes, his mounting troubles lending him an undeniable gravitas. Turning away from the sight of his daughter's wedding reception, wrecked by Cossacks, he looks up, shaking his head ever so slightly, as if warning God not to push him too far. Entering at the top of Act II, he all but reprimands the Deity, saying sharply, "That was quite a dowry you gave my daughter Tzeitel at her wedding." And, when his middle daughter, Chava, runs off with a Christian and Tevye finds he can bend no further, his howl of rage is positively Lear-like.

Hecht's Golde is sharp, sarcastic, and just this side of shrewish, but also vitally concerned for the welfare of her family. Her verbal counterpunching with Burstein is a constant source of amusement ("I'm very frightened; after we finish dinner, I'll faint"), as are the moments when, pushed to the breaking point, she stares at him in sheer dumb disbelief. But she brings a real stature to the number "Sabbath Prayer," and, with Burstein, steps carefully and touchingly through the negotiated endearments of "Do You Love Me?" She also has a stunning moment when, confronted with the irreparable loss of a daughter, she falls to the floor in anguish. Alexandra Silber's Tzeitel is a tense, unhappy creature, fearful of being married off to a man she doesn't love, who blossoms when allowed to marry the man of her choice. (Sher stages "Matchmaker, Matchmaker" as a kind of one-act play, as Tevye's three eldest daughters gradually work out that marriage could spell disaster for each of them.) As Motel, the poor tailor who is the man of Tzeitel's dreams, Adam Kantor is an adorable, gangly bundle of nerves, his gait that of a baby goat struggling to walk on all fours; he delivers the joyous "Miracle of Miracles" with a whirlwind intensity. Samantha Massell's Hodel is both sharp-tongued and flirtatious, a fine sparring partner for Ben Rappaport as the fiery, freethinking revolutionary, Perchik, who comes courting. Alix Korey supplies much of the evening's laughter as Yente, the matchmaker -- at first an irrepressible chatterbox who pauses during her extensive critiques of her late husband only to assure the world that she never complains, and later a baleful prophetess of doom as she sees her career slipping away.

Yeargan's spare, often stark, scenery, which self-consciously places period elements in the context of a modern theatre, is likely to be the show's most controversial element, especially if one misses the fanciful pastel, Chagall-inspired world created by Boris Aronson. Still, it fits perfectly inside Sher's vision. Donald Holder's lighting casts a gorgeous sunset glow across many scenes, as if to suggest that night is closing in on the entirety of this little world. Catherine Zuber's costumes meticulously layer the women's dresses with a variety of homey patterns, and the clothes feel suitably lived in; she turns the number "Tevye's Dream" into a comically grotesque carnival, with everyone sporting masks and distended, arthritic-looking fingers. Several men stride on stilts placed in their pants' legs, and the central figure of the ghost of Fruma-Sarah is a fearsome apparition who rolls on stage looking more than ten feet tall. (Tom Watson's hair and wig designs go a long way toward guaranteeing a sense of period authenticity.) Scott Lehrer's sound design, aided by Ted Sperling's new orchestrations, has a thoroughly pleasing transparency. He also provides a number of effects, including the sound of an approaching train and a windstorm.

There is plenty here to entice the most ardent fan of Fiddler on the Roof, including that evergreen score and the bottle dance, performed at Tzeitel and Motel's wedding, which, as staged by Shechter, remains one of Broadway's great showstoppers. But never before has the sense been so strongly articulated that time is running out on Tevye, Golde, their daughters, and their neighbors. Robbins always insisted that the show is about the breakup of a way of life; here, the clock seems to start running with the first downbeat. Sher, in a gesture not to be revealed here, returns to his initial conceit, to once again bind the present to the past. The traditional final image, a procession of displaced persons headed for new lives in Warsaw, Israel, or America, suddenly looks like something from this morning's broadcast on CNN. -- David Barbour