Review: Drury Lane has an essential ‘Fiddler on the Roof,’ both timeless and brand new
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Neither the famed fiddler nor the titular roof make an appearance in the truly remarkable new Drury Lane Theatre staging of the beloved musical masterpiece by Jerry Bock, Sheldon Harnick and Joseph Stein, inarguably among the greatest Broadway musicals ever penned and a timeless show about tradition, parenting, change and the last days of an oppressed Jewish community in Anatevka, Russia.
Motel’s sewing machine has gone AWOL too, although there is still a blessing from the Rabbi. You won’t see dancers dance with bottles on their heads. Most striking of all? We don’t even see Tevye pushing a cart.
What, you wonder? Unheard of, absurd? (As Tevye famously sings when his longstanding beliefs run smack up against his boundless love for his daughters.)
I’m here to tell you that you will miss none of those things, because director Elizabeth Margolius’s production pays such beautiful attention to the emotional trajectory of this show and offers so moving and powerful a manifestation of its humanity, beauty and resilience.
Frankly, I remember leaving Barrie Kosky’s similarly atypical 2022 production at Lyric Opera of Chicago and thinking it was what I like to term a “category killer,” a definitive production that makes you think you never want to see another version, lest it fail to compare. (For the record, the current Broadway revival of “Merrily We Roll Along” is another one of those.)
I adored Kosky’s “FIddler” but I loved Margolius’ staging, which obviously does not operate with comparable resources, especially in the pit, even more. This title can be a bit of a Catch-22 for a critic who wants his readers to experience an exceptional show: On the one hand, “Fiddler” is known as the musical that always finds an audience. On the other, people tend to roll their eyes and think, been there and seen that.
No you haven’t. Not like this. Just in case I’ve not made my point clearly enough.
What’s so great? As ever with musical theater, any “Fiddler” is rooted not just in its individual moments, achingly emotional as so many of them are, but in how a director sweeps from one to another. Here, it’s as if Margolius went through the show and noted out everything she deemed nonessential to the core themes of how you bend without breaking, how you change without denying yourself, how you know when to go along to get along, and how you know when you must stand your ground lest you lose yourself and all you love.
As far as I can tell (and I’ve seen ‘Fiddler” more than 20 times), every lyric is there and so is every word of the book. And yet it often feels like we’ve left the world of Jerome Robbins, brooms and bottle dancers for what is inside the character’s heads. The best way I can explain all this is to say that Margolius, a Chicago-based director surely doing the best work of her career in collaboration with the designers Jack Magaw, Mike Tutaj, Jason Lynch and Linda Roethke, among others, has done to the traditional “Fiddler” what the musical “Once” did to the sourcing movie. How’s your heart, indeed.
The other key here? Stakes. They feel enormous, whether they are flowing from Mark David Kaplan’s wounded Tevye (a masterfully moving performance utterly shorn of the typical avunicularity), or Abby Goldberg’s Chava or Emma Rosenthal’s Tzeitel, or Yael Eden Chanukov’s Hodel. For better or worse, this is a show fundamentally about a father and his three daughters and that quartet of performers creates a bond that flows forwards and backwards with restlessness of spirit and deep familial love.
These are not the only strong performances in a cast that includes Janna Cardia as Golde, Janet Ulrich Brooks as Yenta and Jeff Parker as a Constable who takes what’s usually a rote role and shows you a man at once horrified by and inured to his own actions.
This is not a huge dance show and the orchestra is relatively small. But it still sounds and moves beautifully; the essence of this highly sophisticated staging is the way the live actors interact with their environment, often including Tutaj’s textured projections, many of which focus on the faces of the actors themselves. Remarkably, the result isn’t anachronistic in any way; it just deepens the original setting as it explores the tensions between individuality and collective responsibility.
As one producer once said to me, all the great American musicals feature communities under stress. Few compare to this one.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen so superbly acted and directed a “Fiddler.” Don’t even think about not bothering to go.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
Review: “Fiddler on the Roof” (4 stars)
When: Through March 24
Where: Drury Lane Theatre, 100 Drury Lane, Oakbrook Terrace
Running time: 2 hours, 40 minutes
Tickets: $85.75-$96.25 at 630-530-0111 and drurylanetheatre.com
