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[Theater reviews]

Tevye time
Fiddler retains its power


BY IRIS FANGER

Fiddler on the Roof
Book by Joseph Stein. Music by Jerry Bock. Lyrics by Sheldon Harnick. Jerome Robbins’s original choreography reproduced and production directed by Sammy Dallas Bayes. Set design by Steven L. Gilliam. Costumes by Bottair & Case. Lighting by Ken Billington. With Theodore Bikel, Susan Cella, John Preece, Miriam Babin, Mike O’Carroll, Daniel Cooney, Tamra Hayden, Michael Iannucci, Justin Patterson, Sara Schmidt, and Eileen Tepper. At the Colonial Theatre through June 24.

Who would have imagined back at the turn of the century — when the Jews were pouring out of the hundreds of “shetls” in the Russian Pale of Permanent Settlement (where they were, barely, allowed to live) and coming to America to inhabit New York’s Lower East side and Chicago’s Maxwell Street area — that a milkman named Tevye would become one of the most enduring literary icons of the century to come? Created by the Russian immigrant Sholem Aleichem (Solomon Rabinovitz), the Tevye stories were written in Yiddish, the language that was carried by the impoverished Jews of the old country to the new land, only to disappear from the tongues of their assimilated children.

The musical based on Sholem Aleichem’s characters, Fiddler on the Roof, opened on Broadway in September 1964, launching Tevye and his family of marriageable daughters into the larger national consciousness. When Jerome Robbins agreed to stage it, few from the Broadway crowd predicted success. In Dance with Demons, the recently published biography of Robbins, author Greg Lawrence quotes impresario David Merrick: “It’s a Jewish show . . . no one will go.”

No one? Theodore Bikel, who’s now 77, has appeared as Tevye in nearly 1700 performances, and his running arguments with God and stooped-over posture have become almost as stylized as those of a kabuki character. Sammy Dallas Bayes, a dancer in the original production, directs and choreographs this touring revival in accordance with to Robbins’s striking blueprint. Many of the viewers in the Boston opening-night audience could not only sing along but also parrot Bikel’s familiar gestures. It was nonetheless touching to see how many families had come with their children. Susan Cella, as Tevye’s wife, Golde, and Tamra Hayden, as their daughter Hodel, are standouts in the excellent cast. The male dancers of the chorus are superb, particularly the Bottle Dance quartet in its slow-motion, elegant rendition.

You have only to watch the show’s opener, “Tradition,” to appreciate how perceptively Robbins expressed the spirit of the Jewish citizens of Anatevka. Sheldon Harnick’s lyrics explain how these people, who are ruled by the customs of the religion that both binds them together and isolates them from their Russian-peasant neighbors, have survived. But it’s Robbins’s conception of them that makes the difference. As they enter, holding hands in a circular procession, the men step with pride: chests uplifted, chins pointed high, arms reaching up to Heaven. It’s as if they were performing on a stage for an audience of One, the God whom they believe is watching their everyday actions. The women who keep the families together while the men argue in the tavern and chant the ritual prayers turn to smile at the friends on either side, in total command of the life rhythms.

Fiddler hits the universals on so many levels that its portrayal of a lost form of Jewish life is almost beside the point. To be sure, there’s the age-old truism about parents attempting to hold on to children who must rebel in order to establish their own identity. The ferocious Papa, who upholds the traditions, bends only to the inevitability of change. But beyond family matters, Fiddler has captivated audiences because it is about America more than Russia. Its subject is one of the most prominent aspects of the 20th century: the mass migration of peoples from one country to another. The glue that binds all Americans is our common identity as children of “strangers who have come into a strange land,” as Harnick so poignantly puts it in the solemn anthem “Anatevka.”

The irony of the final scene, in which Tevye and his friends are forced to leave Anatevka, is that the action would be repeated less than 40 years later when the Jews who remained behind in Russia were rounded up by the Germans and sent to the death camps. The image to keep in mind is the beautiful quintet of Sabbath scenes in act one of Fiddler, when the women light the candles in hopeful prophecy of the continuity of Jewish life, despite the pogroms and later the Holocaust.

Issue Date: June 21-28, 2001