The newest incarnation of Fiddler on the Roof, despite being the fifth Broadway revival to date, manages to do something fresh with its classic material, writes Terry Teachout. Yet, although something is gained in this new version, something is also lost:
[In the opening scene], as everyone starts speaking in accents indistinguishable from those you might hear on a present-day New York street corner, you get [what the director is trying to accomplish]: this is an Our Town-like Fiddler on the Roof. It’s also the most American-sounding Fiddler I’ve ever seen, and that’s the point: it is as if we are watching the Americanized descendants of the Jews of Anatevka retell the tales their great-grandparents told about shtetl life in 19th-century Russia.
This directorial twist goes a long way toward neutralizing the underlying flaw of Fiddler, which is that it takes a sentimentally optimistic view of the tragic dilemma of assimilation, [a view] that is antithetical to the biting honesty of the short stories by Sholem Aleichem on which Fiddler is based. . . .
But as the evening progressed, I realized, very much to my surprise, that I wasn’t feeling the intense emotions that by all rights ought to be stirred up by Fiddler. It is, after all, a musical about deadly serious matters, starting with the bloody pogrom that breaks up the wedding of Tevye’s daughter and ending with the forced emigration of every Jew in Anatevka. Such things ought to make us weep—and in this production, they don’t.
Read more on Wall Street Journal: http://www.wsj.com/articles/fiddler-on-the-roof-review-our-shtetl-1450825560