I grew up with the song "If I Were A Rich Man" being sung endlessly in our home, and I have a feeling so did the rest of the audience. There wasn't a spare seat in the house as the curtain rose to sunrise-soaked wheat fields and a rising stage where a fiddler played on the roof.
Bringing Jordan Fein's production to the Barbican kicks off a major tour, after the sell-out, multi-award-winning revival last summer at the Regent's Park Open Air Theatre.
Fiddler on the Roof is of distinctly Jewish character, but there's a core universal message about relationships between tradition (symbolised by the milkman Tevye and the fictional town of Anatevka in Ukraine) and rapid change of the present (symbolised by Tevye's daughters) who want to break from tradition and marry for love. The daughter who marries outside the faith does the most damage to Tevye, who declares her "dead to him", but when she leaves Ukraine, he sends her his blessing.
Tevye, played by Adam Dannheisser, holds us captivated with his deep, bass voice as soft but strong as the lame carthorse he is replacing. His performance is so effortlessly believable, you can't imagine him playing another part. I loved how the fiddler (Raphael Papo) was on stage with him most of the time, providing an agile, ghost-like presence.
The scenery (Tom Scutt) metaphors are blatant. Rows of chest-height crops that surround the village, are both threatening (smoke / fire) and holding (Ukraine, the bread-basket of Europe). Given so much of this show centres around a village persecuted for their faith by the tsar's antisemitic followers, this conflict feels inescapable.
Lighting designer Aideen Malone deftly creates cold nights, warm sunrises, ghostly dream-scenes and outdoor vistas. She takes us into smaller, more intimate love scenes with a careful spotlight and then throws us back into a public space.
Julia Cheng's choreography is sensational. A small band of people give the illusion of a far greater crowd. A scene that stands out is a comical dream-scene sequence in which Tevye persuades his wife their eldest daughter should marry her impoverished childhood sweetheart rather than the elderly butcher.
I loved the scene / song "Do You Love Me?", where Tevye's wife, Golda (Lara Pulver), of 25 years is asked this. She cites everything she has done for him as an answer, but he presses and presses until she admits "I suppose so", and Tevye is chuffed to bits by his assumption she does. Tevye is a big man and his wife is tiny. Them perched on his milk-cart, under a spotlight with him leaning his large, gentle head on her tiny shoulder, is exquisite directing. It is a fleeting moment of enduring intimacy despite the chaos around them.
The ending, a low-lit line of people behind the wheatfields, flushed out of their village, is particularly poignant because of the huge displacements going on in Sudan, Ukraine and Gaza. This small community forced out of their homes, resigned to their fate, not knowing if and when they will ever return.
The situation in Gaza and Ukraine caused me discomfort, something I didn't feel when I last saw this musical in the '90s. Whether this was on the mind of other people sitting next to me, I really don't know, but the Barbican is fully aware; every bag was searched on the way in and again after the interval. I noticed that the Barbican hosts the Palestinian Film Festival, and I suspect there were intense discussions about taking in this play, given that in August 2024, the audiences at Regent's Park Open Air Theatre were met with pro-Palestinian protests.
How to think about this, I took advice from the main character. Tevye, when faced with something uncomfortable, talks to God, battling "on the one hand, but on the other hand". His innate love and kindness always wins. On the one hand, the Ukraine Invasion and Gaza War, and on the other hand, one of my favourite musicals of all time and a staging so superb, it merited the standing ovation it received.