Fiddler on the Roof review: 'hugely moving' and 'exquisitely crafted' musical

Adam Dannheisser stars as Tevye in an 'exquisitely crafted production'

(Image credit: Marc Brenner)

London already boasts several "brilliant revivals of classic American musicals", said Sarah Crompton on What's On Stage. Now, joining "Hello Dolly!", "Guys & Dolls", and "A Chorus Line", comes "another glory of Broadway's late golden age" in an outstanding production at Regent's Park.

Director Jordan Fein's "wonderful, emotional" production of "Fiddler on the Roof" is perfectly balanced, tilting towards neither "saccharine nor bitterness". The songs, including classics such as "Tradition" and "If I Were a Rich Man", feel as "if they are being forged afresh". The cast are superb, led by Broadway regular Adam Dannheisser as Tevye, and Lara Pulver as his wife, Golde. And the show "seems made for its open-air setting": the Sun actually sets during "Sunrise, Sunset", and candles lit a wedding procession in the twilight. It's all "absolutely terrific".

For such a successful musical, this tale – of a milkman's family in a pogrom-threatened shtetl in Tsarist Russia – has an odd structural problem, said David Benedict in The Stage. It has a "magnificently vivid" first act whose energy dwindles early in the second. In this production, though, Fein's "intelligent" directorial decisions in the second act "deepen and darken the action and make the show richer and stronger". The director strips away all sentimentality and kitsch in the storytelling, allowing us to feel the full dramatic weight, and emotion, of Joseph Stein's book, and Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick's much-loved songs.