Review by Alissa Norby

As consistent as the hum of a sewing machine and the E-string pluck of a fiddle, Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick’s heralded book musical Fiddler on the Roof has followed the wake of its own self-devised traditions. The piece and its subsequent productions have waivered inconsiderably in its near half-centennial history. The staples of Hal Prince’s original directorial concept, replete with an omnisciently perched fiddler, lavish Russian dance, and Jewish schtick humor were forever synonymous with the musical’s later incarnations.

David H. Bell has thrown most of that familiar praxis out with the horse’s leg. The Marriott Theatre’s latest rendering of the Broadway behemoth dexterously- and mirthfully- scraps some of the authors’ most celebrated gimmicks in exchange for a more conversationalist tonality.

The point of tautest intensity in Joseph Stein’s book, the anti-Semitic pogrom at Tevye’s family wedding, receives a heftier buoying with Bell’s more somber conceit. At the climax of the scene, a Russian guard grasps the vulnerable fiddle, nary waiting a second before breaking the fragile instrument in two.

It is this weighted symbolism, an overarching and unbridled willingness to expose the unhappy truths that have long been swimming in this text, which turns the tide of this Anatevka.

The remaining signature numbers evolve in a similar, albeit understated, manner. The trapeze-like brooms often integral to “Matchmaker” have been replaced by a simple scrub basin and laundry line. The multi-leveled stage landscape that once defined “Sabbath Prayer” is now threaded with hushed candlesticks.

Music director Doug Peck echoes Bell’s sobriety in every cadence of Fiddler’s famed score. “Now I Have Everything” and “Miracle of Miracles” receive refreshingly new arrangements and stagings, proffering a quiet introspection in the place of their traditionally jovial rhythms.

Cogitation, it would seem, is the driving force behind both the show’s directorial and performance approaches. Perhaps the most significant developments with regard to the cemented plot arc arrive in Tevye and his daughters. Recurrently portrayed with the husky bravura of Zero Mostel and Chaim Topol, the latest interpretation of the cantankerous dairy farmer is imbued with a gentle, everyman quality by the venerable Ross Lehman. Allowing original author Sholem Aleichem’s narrator to breathe new life into his morally vacillating monologues, Lehman grants his audience more immediate access to the musical’s universal themes. The original concept of this mammoth-sized orator encountering a faith challenge from his God has largely been unfastened. Instead, Lehman presents Tevye as a common man, in both thought and circumstance, who must grapple with impending change.

Jessie Mueller, Dara Cameron, and Laura Scheinbaum reverberate this pensiveness as the three matchless daughters. Although all of the comedic stunts are hit, “Matchmaker” is ultimately portrayed with a sobering foreboding by the three increasingly nuanced Chicago actors. Mueller tenders eldest daughter Tzeitel with harrowing clarity of the consequences of both cultural and religious constraints. During one particularly incisive moment, Mueller delivers such uncurbed despair at the thought of a betrothal to butcher Lazar Wolf, it seems as if the entire shtetl may burst at the ridges with her indocile declaration.

Bell has used the musical’s notion of metamorphosis as a tool to revise Fiddler in almost all stagnated mores of its original production. Embedding both direction and score with a contemporarily honest sensibility, Bell approaches this Anatevka within a more human framework than his predecessors. It is this earthly approach to the established text that ultimately reminds us of the impending and unconquerable nature of change. It is a change that, like the reappraisal present in this new production, will ultimately form its own tradition.

Highly Recommended

“Fiddler on the Roof” runs through April 25, 2010 at the Marriott Theatre Lincolnshire. For tickets or more information, please visit www.MarriottTheatre.com.

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