I am on the last train of the night to Boston. I have been functionally awake for something like a day and a half. The National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene's Fiddler on the Roof—af yidish, פֿידלער אויפֿן דאַך, Fidler afn dakh—was worth it.
If you can get tickets to this show, get them. There is something in it that I have never seen in a production of Fiddler before. It's not that it's more authentic, a word around which I feel there should be some quotation marks anyway; it can't be. Translating the book and lyrics back into the language in which Sholem Aleichem originally wrote his stories of Tevye of Anatevke and his five daughters, as Shraga Friedman did for the original Israeli production in 1965, a year after the musical's Broadway debut, permits the characters of Fidler to quote more directly from their creator—the program notes point out that Friedman rendered "If I Were a Rich Man" as "Ven ikh bin a Rotshild (If I were a Rothschild)," evoking both a popular Yiddish expression and a Kasrilevke story of nearly the same name, and I suspect there are other such Easter eggs scattered throughout the score—but at its bones it's still a Broadway musical written in the early 1960's by a trio of American Jews, not a folk artifact of the Pale of Settlement in 1905. An-sky didn't collect it. But for the first time in my life I thought that the musical might be double-featured with The Dybbuk, because it is the same kind of raising of a vanished world, a world that is fragmenting and falling away from its characters even as we watch them move through it. It's not safely ethnographic, nostalgic. It's a story of change, upheaval, and uncertainty. Each of Tevye's three grown daughters moves further away from the familiar formality of marriages arranged between parents and shadkhns into the unknown country of matches made for love, with a father's blessing if possible but without his knowledge at need, and his eternally flexible ability to argue both sides of a question with himself—when Steven Skybell's Tevye sings of wanting to spend seven hours a day talking Toyre with the scholars in the beys-medrish, it is a poignantly sincere desire and he would probably be good at it, constant misattributions of his own opinion to Rashi etc. notwithstanding—stretches further with each stranger match until it breaks with a terrifying recoil. Other forms of modernization are arriving like the treasured sewing machine (a Singer!) of der shnayder Motl Kamzoyl, for which the shtetl's rabbi is required to improvise a blessing, or the gathering political storms that send the radical drifter Pertshik to prison in Siberia. Then again, nothing about the curt, final lekh-l'kha that gives the Jews of Anatevke three days to vacate their homes or answer to the Russian army has dated at all. The youngest daughters of Tevye and Golde sing with excitement of going on a train and a ship, but their elders are watching a world end. And yet here it is onstage in front of us, in a language that some of the cast learned especially for this production, which means it cannot be counted as dead: just hearing the Yiddish, even without the reintroduction of casually, integrally Jewish references that re-specify a text generalized for the broadest possible original audience (the surtitles translate "that hero of yours," Tevye says "שמשון דײַנער," Shimshin dayner, "your Samson"), is not a sheydim-tants of ghosts but a live thing in its surprisingly natural habitat. A lot of really good art is for me a kind of touching through time. That goes double for this Fidler.
It is also just a very good version of Fiddler on the Roof. Directed by Joel Grey with musical direction by Zalmen Mlotek and choreography by Staś Kmieć, it is a comparatively modest production of a show often performed with the stylized color of the Chagall paintings that inspired the original Broadway production design; the sets are a couple of tables, chairs, and benches, whatever props the cast can carry—or, in the case of Tevye and his milkman's cart in the absence of a horse, wheel—on with them, and a crinkled background of long, paper-brown panels that hang like banners at the back of the stage. It is possible to see the small orchestra behind them. On the central one is printed one all-important word: תורה. Toyre. Torah. It is almost indistinguishable in this production from טראדיציע, tradition; they are one and the same. ("How do we keep our balance?" Zero Mostel asks on the original cast album I grew up listening to. "That I can tell you in one word—tradition!" In Friedman's retranslation, it's a few more words than that: "God is a father and holy is his Torah. Traditsye!") When the word is torn across, it is as violent as the woman's scream we hear offstage in the first-act-ending mini-pogrom. It reappears for the second act poignantly mended as if by hand and stays that way, the broken glass of the world we live in. The characters don't have to keep looking it to feel it there, any more than we need to see the mezuzah that exists at every door in the absent mime of touch and kiss. The low-budget naturalism breaks only when it should, when Tevye's "Der kholem (The dream)" invents the apparition of Bobe Tsaytl as a benevolently nodding shadow behind a scrim circled by dancing guests and klezmorim and smashed down a verse later by the vengeful Frume-Sore who is two people in one very angry wedding dress. The last Frume-Sore I saw was an enormous puppet. It makes me happy that there is a textual excuse in this musical for a production designer to run wild. But the rest of the stripping-down means the actors really have to hold the stage because there is nothing between you and them except the half-defamiliarized novelty of the language and all of them can do it. Skybell's Tevye has funny, rough edges and the crucial gift of shifting registers without ever going out of character, so that he can literally hold on to his hat while knocking back shots with Bruce Sabath's Leyzer-Volf during "Lekhayim (L'chaim)," but whenever the time-freezing spotlight catches him under the perhaps not quite human eye of Lauren Jeanne Thomas' Fidler, there's poignancy as well as sophistry in his twisting and turning through the hard questions; his duet of "Libst mikh, sertse? (Do you love me, dear?)" with Jennifer Babiak's self-possessed, not henpecking Golde is played absolutely straight, clear-eyed, a little embarrassed, and tender. Rachel Zatcoff's Tsaytl, Stephanie Lynne Mason's Hodl, and Rosie Jo Neddy's Khave could never be confused for one another even without their differing plots, all strong-willed and believably sisters in their scenes together from the day-dreaming laundry-folding of "Shadkhnte, shadkhnte (Matchmaker, matchmaker)" through the breakup of Anatevka; Ben Liebert makes a sweet, courage-gathering Motl, a head shorter than his bride and radiant with it, Drew Seigla a matter-of-factly scandalous Pertshik (neither![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
skygiants nor I had ever heard the song in which he uses the story of Jacob and Laban to teach the younger girls, Raquel Nobile's Shprintse and Maya Jacobson's Beylke, an important lesson about the exploitation of the worker; it was genius and left us both wanting to see the further adventures of Tevye's socialist daughters in 1910's America), and Cameron Johnson's Fyedke has a lovely tenor voice and really should have known when he handed Khave a new book that she would ignore him for the rest of the conversation. I suspect most of the audience, myself included, has been trapped in a conversation with Jackie Hoffman's Yente at some point in their past. Bobby Underwood as der Gradavoy—the Russian constable—is chilling in the way of a man who thinks he is giving his zhid friend a fair shake by talking to him like an equal, doing the damage all the same. I wish I had a text of Friedman's translation. I would like to be able to talk more about changes I liked in the libretto, like the way that the last line of Motl's "Nisimlekh-veniflo'oys (Miracles and wonders)" is not "God has given you to me" but "I am yours and you are mine," or the way that all of Hodl's "Vayt fun mayn liber heym (Far from my beloved home)" gives a much stronger sense of her desire, not obligation, traveling to be with her exiled and imprisoned basherter. The surtitles in English and Russian accurately reflected the differences between Harnick/Stein and Friedman, but did not necessarily capture all the acute and pungent choices of Yiddish idiom, small untranslatable nuances. For whatever reason, Pertshik denouncing superstitious custom as "bobe-mayses" sticks with me. I put my name down for a mailing list in hopes of supporting a cast recording. Also I figure I'll get to hear about Yiddish plays, which is not the worst thing.
And then we left the theater and got an eyeful of the Statue of Liberty, which would have been on the nose except that the Museum of Jewish Heritage which houses the NYTF is in Battery Park; what was I going to do, not look out at the water? We took the J train to the Lower East Side and met a friend of Skygiants' at the pickle festival they had discovered where we got kimchi pancakes and pickles on a stick (not fried, just on a stick so that you can eat them while walking around a pickle-based street fair on the corner of Orchard and Rivington). We had dinner at Veselka and I managed not to get my standard sandwich, the Baczynski; I got a Reuben instead. We visited the Strand and I had a surprising haul, including an omnibus of noir novels by David Goodis I've been wanting since 2016 and a recent biography of Michael Redgrave. I did not fall asleep while waiting for my train and I have not fallen asleep on it. I am looking forward to falling asleep when I get home.
Very much worth it.
If you can get tickets to this show, get them. There is something in it that I have never seen in a production of Fiddler before. It's not that it's more authentic, a word around which I feel there should be some quotation marks anyway; it can't be. Translating the book and lyrics back into the language in which Sholem Aleichem originally wrote his stories of Tevye of Anatevke and his five daughters, as Shraga Friedman did for the original Israeli production in 1965, a year after the musical's Broadway debut, permits the characters of Fidler to quote more directly from their creator—the program notes point out that Friedman rendered "If I Were a Rich Man" as "Ven ikh bin a Rotshild (If I were a Rothschild)," evoking both a popular Yiddish expression and a Kasrilevke story of nearly the same name, and I suspect there are other such Easter eggs scattered throughout the score—but at its bones it's still a Broadway musical written in the early 1960's by a trio of American Jews, not a folk artifact of the Pale of Settlement in 1905. An-sky didn't collect it. But for the first time in my life I thought that the musical might be double-featured with The Dybbuk, because it is the same kind of raising of a vanished world, a world that is fragmenting and falling away from its characters even as we watch them move through it. It's not safely ethnographic, nostalgic. It's a story of change, upheaval, and uncertainty. Each of Tevye's three grown daughters moves further away from the familiar formality of marriages arranged between parents and shadkhns into the unknown country of matches made for love, with a father's blessing if possible but without his knowledge at need, and his eternally flexible ability to argue both sides of a question with himself—when Steven Skybell's Tevye sings of wanting to spend seven hours a day talking Toyre with the scholars in the beys-medrish, it is a poignantly sincere desire and he would probably be good at it, constant misattributions of his own opinion to Rashi etc. notwithstanding—stretches further with each stranger match until it breaks with a terrifying recoil. Other forms of modernization are arriving like the treasured sewing machine (a Singer!) of der shnayder Motl Kamzoyl, for which the shtetl's rabbi is required to improvise a blessing, or the gathering political storms that send the radical drifter Pertshik to prison in Siberia. Then again, nothing about the curt, final lekh-l'kha that gives the Jews of Anatevke three days to vacate their homes or answer to the Russian army has dated at all. The youngest daughters of Tevye and Golde sing with excitement of going on a train and a ship, but their elders are watching a world end. And yet here it is onstage in front of us, in a language that some of the cast learned especially for this production, which means it cannot be counted as dead: just hearing the Yiddish, even without the reintroduction of casually, integrally Jewish references that re-specify a text generalized for the broadest possible original audience (the surtitles translate "that hero of yours," Tevye says "שמשון דײַנער," Shimshin dayner, "your Samson"), is not a sheydim-tants of ghosts but a live thing in its surprisingly natural habitat. A lot of really good art is for me a kind of touching through time. That goes double for this Fidler.
It is also just a very good version of Fiddler on the Roof. Directed by Joel Grey with musical direction by Zalmen Mlotek and choreography by Staś Kmieć, it is a comparatively modest production of a show often performed with the stylized color of the Chagall paintings that inspired the original Broadway production design; the sets are a couple of tables, chairs, and benches, whatever props the cast can carry—or, in the case of Tevye and his milkman's cart in the absence of a horse, wheel—on with them, and a crinkled background of long, paper-brown panels that hang like banners at the back of the stage. It is possible to see the small orchestra behind them. On the central one is printed one all-important word: תורה. Toyre. Torah. It is almost indistinguishable in this production from טראדיציע, tradition; they are one and the same. ("How do we keep our balance?" Zero Mostel asks on the original cast album I grew up listening to. "That I can tell you in one word—tradition!" In Friedman's retranslation, it's a few more words than that: "God is a father and holy is his Torah. Traditsye!") When the word is torn across, it is as violent as the woman's scream we hear offstage in the first-act-ending mini-pogrom. It reappears for the second act poignantly mended as if by hand and stays that way, the broken glass of the world we live in. The characters don't have to keep looking it to feel it there, any more than we need to see the mezuzah that exists at every door in the absent mime of touch and kiss. The low-budget naturalism breaks only when it should, when Tevye's "Der kholem (The dream)" invents the apparition of Bobe Tsaytl as a benevolently nodding shadow behind a scrim circled by dancing guests and klezmorim and smashed down a verse later by the vengeful Frume-Sore who is two people in one very angry wedding dress. The last Frume-Sore I saw was an enormous puppet. It makes me happy that there is a textual excuse in this musical for a production designer to run wild. But the rest of the stripping-down means the actors really have to hold the stage because there is nothing between you and them except the half-defamiliarized novelty of the language and all of them can do it. Skybell's Tevye has funny, rough edges and the crucial gift of shifting registers without ever going out of character, so that he can literally hold on to his hat while knocking back shots with Bruce Sabath's Leyzer-Volf during "Lekhayim (L'chaim)," but whenever the time-freezing spotlight catches him under the perhaps not quite human eye of Lauren Jeanne Thomas' Fidler, there's poignancy as well as sophistry in his twisting and turning through the hard questions; his duet of "Libst mikh, sertse? (Do you love me, dear?)" with Jennifer Babiak's self-possessed, not henpecking Golde is played absolutely straight, clear-eyed, a little embarrassed, and tender. Rachel Zatcoff's Tsaytl, Stephanie Lynne Mason's Hodl, and Rosie Jo Neddy's Khave could never be confused for one another even without their differing plots, all strong-willed and believably sisters in their scenes together from the day-dreaming laundry-folding of "Shadkhnte, shadkhnte (Matchmaker, matchmaker)" through the breakup of Anatevka; Ben Liebert makes a sweet, courage-gathering Motl, a head shorter than his bride and radiant with it, Drew Seigla a matter-of-factly scandalous Pertshik (neither
skygiants nor I had ever heard the song in which he uses the story of Jacob and Laban to teach the younger girls, Raquel Nobile's Shprintse and Maya Jacobson's Beylke, an important lesson about the exploitation of the worker; it was genius and left us both wanting to see the further adventures of Tevye's socialist daughters in 1910's America), and Cameron Johnson's Fyedke has a lovely tenor voice and really should have known when he handed Khave a new book that she would ignore him for the rest of the conversation. I suspect most of the audience, myself included, has been trapped in a conversation with Jackie Hoffman's Yente at some point in their past. Bobby Underwood as der Gradavoy—the Russian constable—is chilling in the way of a man who thinks he is giving his zhid friend a fair shake by talking to him like an equal, doing the damage all the same. I wish I had a text of Friedman's translation. I would like to be able to talk more about changes I liked in the libretto, like the way that the last line of Motl's "Nisimlekh-veniflo'oys (Miracles and wonders)" is not "God has given you to me" but "I am yours and you are mine," or the way that all of Hodl's "Vayt fun mayn liber heym (Far from my beloved home)" gives a much stronger sense of her desire, not obligation, traveling to be with her exiled and imprisoned basherter. The surtitles in English and Russian accurately reflected the differences between Harnick/Stein and Friedman, but did not necessarily capture all the acute and pungent choices of Yiddish idiom, small untranslatable nuances. For whatever reason, Pertshik denouncing superstitious custom as "bobe-mayses" sticks with me. I put my name down for a mailing list in hopes of supporting a cast recording. Also I figure I'll get to hear about Yiddish plays, which is not the worst thing.And then we left the theater and got an eyeful of the Statue of Liberty, which would have been on the nose except that the Museum of Jewish Heritage which houses the NYTF is in Battery Park; what was I going to do, not look out at the water? We took the J train to the Lower East Side and met a friend of Skygiants' at the pickle festival they had discovered where we got kimchi pancakes and pickles on a stick (not fried, just on a stick so that you can eat them while walking around a pickle-based street fair on the corner of Orchard and Rivington). We had dinner at Veselka and I managed not to get my standard sandwich, the Baczynski; I got a Reuben instead. We visited the Strand and I had a surprising haul, including an omnibus of noir novels by David Goodis I've been wanting since 2016 and a recent biography of Michael Redgrave. I did not fall asleep while waiting for my train and I have not fallen asleep on it. I am looking forward to falling asleep when I get home.
Very much worth it.
