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

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. 

The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

It's a "hugely moving" production, agreed Nick Curtis in the Evening Standard: a "liberating, exuberant and humane" revival that "feels sadly contemporary without even trying". 

Choreographer Julia Cheng keeps the best of Jerome Robbins's work, including the famous bottle dance, while adding grit and "authenticity", said Marianka Swain in The Telegraph. Mark Aspinall's orchestration is superb, while onstage violin and clarinet "add to the spine-tingling atmosphere". This is an "exquisitely crafted production", which "gets to the very soul of the work".

Regent's Park Open Air Theatre, London NW1.