L’CHAIM ! THE VERY STUFF OF LIFE
Of course it helps to be under a real sky: a lone fiddler high above the cornfield scratches out the first lonely notes against the evening clouds, the great “Sunrise, Sunset” wedding number falls just as the last light fades, making the brutal burning of the cornfield a vivid shock minutes later; and a single star appeared behind the trees as the villagers of the Anatevka were at last driven from home on the Ukrainian plains to scatter across the world.
But Jordan Fein’s perfectly judged production does not rest only on this glorious setting under the trees; its vigour and tenderness and humour and dazzling pace would stand out anywhere. Nor, with a wonderful ensemble, does it even need to rest only on Adam Dannheisser’s Tevye, though it almost could have: here’s a great wild booming bull of a man, huge-hearted and choleric , emotional and ruefully self-aware, turning in bafflement to his God or to the audience with sudden impish wit. He’s irresistible, fully human, idiosyncratic.
One can forget sometimes that ,as Fein himself observed, this show is the very definition of musical theatre. It moves from one great number to another at speed but never lets them stop the impetus of the story, rolling it on, as Bock and Harnick’s songs define characters’ doubts and longings. It builds up to great set-pieces like Tevye’s nightmare (you need to see it, I defy description, a lot of sheets are involved) or the marriage scene, where the moment of profound emotion in “Sunrise Sunset” merges rapidly into a classic Jewish-wedding breakfast taking trouble to develop abruptly up into rows about chickens and dead grandmothers before some forbidden dancing.
On which subject let’s say that all the choreography – by Julia Cheng – is wild and Russian and stampingly, clappingly brilliant. Bravura moments like the bottles-on-heads quartet are memorable of course, but even more so is the way Raphael Papo, the fiddler who roams and haunts the set high and low, will sometimes move sinuously with and around Tevye in his moments of vexation, playing, his notes a dramatic living expression of inner conflict.
There is not one detail that does not touch the heart or make you reflect – in this of all years – about the ancient character , tenacity and evolution of the diaspora. Even the black-bundle busybody matchmaker Yente (Beverly Klein) has her broad comedy suddenly and late shading into poignancy as she resolves, quixotically, somehow to move to the Holy Land. The daughters are all wonderful, Liv Andrusier’s Tzeizel, Georgia Bruce’s pleading Hodel and Hannah Bristow’s magnificent defiant Chava each distinctive in their confrontations with the furious but adoring father as they marry for love even – in Chava’s case – breaking with race and faith. Mark Aspinall’s musical direction and new orchestrations chart these emotional lines almost uncannily: the parents’ lament “Chavaleh” dissolves into a harsh wild instrumental duet which makes your hair stand on end: when the milk-cart, which so often fed the comedy, crashes over, Tevye’s back turned to his daughter expresses a vast deep primitive grief that takes your breath away. A quite wonderful production on every level.
openairtheatre.com. to 21 September.
rating five
theatreCat 