It’s so rare to get to come back to a show and look at it with fresh eyes,” says director Jordan Fein, “to deepen things, to reexplore things, to question what we did, even if we end up back where we started.”
It was in the heat of last summer that a rippling field of wheat first sprang up in Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre, surrounding the actors in Fein’s earthy new take on Fiddler on the Roof. After a healthy crop of five-star reviews and 13 Olivier nominations, it became the fastest-selling show the theatre had ever seen. Now, this Jewish shtetl is being uprooted and transplanted into the cavernous Barbican Theatre before it sets off on a UK tour.
Fiddler on the Roof, based on turn-of-the-century Yiddish short stories by Sholem Aleichem, is an enduringly popular 1964 musical about life in the fictional Jewish community of Anatevka. The story revolves around Tevye, a milkman who’s trying to uphold his cultural traditions while his daughters battle to marry for love. Fein’s fluid, unsentimental staging exposes the modernity at the heart of Joseph Stein’s script, using surging movement and choreography to bring new life to Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick’s richly textured songbook.
His original production gained so much from its open-air setting, from the trees suggesting the vastness of the hostile landscape beyond, to the way that the sun dipped below the horizon, just as the melancholy strains of “Sunrise, Sunset” rang out. So, how does it feel, bringing the outdoors in? “Yesterday was our first day in the theatre, so I’m still processing that,” Fein says thoughtfully, on break from tech rehearsals. “The Barbican has an epicness to it, even though it has a roof. We did a big redesign, but I feel proud that we maintained the idea of the wheatfield. It was one of the first ideas I had for the show, because it’s set in modern-day Ukraine, and there was this conversation about the area being the breadbasket of the world, and the way the global community was suffering through not having access to it”.
Tom Scutt, the production’s designer, might have found a way to keep the original staging’s politically charged golden stubble, but other aspects of the production demanded a rethink. There’s a whole new opening scene (which Fein doesn’t want to spoil for audiences) as well as a shifted atmosphere. “Going inside, there is an intimacy,” says Fein. “The stage is smaller, so it feels like they’re exploding off it, which is appropriate for this story where the community is bursting with life and joy.”
It’s that joy, tinged with sadness, which has made generations of fans fall in love with Fiddler. “It’s one of those pieces I can’t remember not knowing,” says Fein, recalling family trips to see the show at a local community theatre in his native Philadelphia. “It’s the first show I saw, it’s the first show my father ever saw, it’s just part of my culture, my upbringing.”
Adam Dannheisser, the production’s star, also grew up in an American Jewish household soundtracked by the infectiously catchy songs of Bock and Harnick, blending klezmer with Russian folk traditions and Tin Pan Alley songwriting. “I remember my father used to have a record, and we would play it over and over again,” he tells me. “In ninth grade, I auditioned for a high school show with ‘If I Were a Rich Man’. I was convinced that Tevye must be ancient, 96 years old, so I did the audition with a bamboo cane, limping around.”
Now, still a good few decades off his centenary, he’s playing this legendary part for real: “It makes me feel my age,” he says, jokingly. “I don’t need a bamboo cane, but I certainly feel it in my knees!” – unsurprising, since he hammers home the value of the old ways in his opening number “Tradition” with bone-jolting stomp after stomp. “But the part fits me like a glove. I am the age that, to me, Tevye is, which is early to mid-50s. I’ve been married for 25 years and so has Tevye. We’re both fathers, although I have sons and not daughters.”
And the resonances don’t stop there. “Half of my family is from the exact area [the fictional village of] Anatevka would have been, so there’s certainly a corporeal and beautiful connection to my own past and to Tevye. It’s in my DNA. It’s me merging with the character from 120 years ago, I’m not putting it on and taking it off.” If that sounds overly lofty or tough to imagine, watch Dannheisser’s understated, naturalistic performance and you’ll understand.
Still, although Fiddler comes naturally to both Fein and Dannheisser, there’s a lot about this production that breaks with tradition, from its freshened choreography to its quiet feminism. Fein himself is diffident when I ask him about how his production differs from the ones he grew up with: “I have a really strong relationship with it, but I didn’t feel bogged down in any one idea of how it should be, I just trusted my gut.” But the cast are full of thoughts.
Everyone that’s working on this show is aware of what’s happening [in the world], and it would be naive of me or wrong of me to say it doesn’t affect the staging
Laura Pulver
Beverley Klein, who is 71 and plays matchmaker Yente, has acted in four separate productions of the musical, making her a living archive of all the ways that Fiddler has evolved over the decades. “It was pretty much my first job, in 1980,” she says now. “I found the cast list in a random theatre history group online, and there are about 50 people in the cast” – twice the number that star alongside Klein in Fein’s pared-back production.
The physical trappings of 1900s life have been trimmed down, too. “It’s directed very fluidly,” says Klein. “When I was playing Golde at the Savoy 17 years ago, we were wrapping up candlesticks and packing up the cart to leave the town, but there’s none of that in our production, it’s very much more suggested.”
Instead, the production’s richness and detail come from its movement. As the titular fiddler, Raphael Papo shadows and stalks Tevye, elaborating on his inner thoughts with intricate riffs. Once, the staging rights to Fiddler used to require that any production feature the original director Jerome Robbins’ legendary dance scenes. “We had people from America come over to replicate the original choreography just as it had always been since the original production,” remembers Klein. But in Fein’s staging, although famous scenes, such as the showstopping, gravity-defying bottle dance are just as fans might remember, he collaborated with choreographer Julia Cheng to inject new sequences of movement.
“Tevye’s Dream” is a standout: it scraps the horror movieesque trappings of Robbins’ original approach to create something more intimate and psychological, as the whole cast crowd into this patriarch’s lace-draped bed, limbs writhing like storm-tossed branches. “We did a three-day workshop with dancers just on the ‘Dream’,” Fein explains. “Ultimately, the idea of Tzeitel [Tevye’s defiant eldest daughter] embodying Grandma [who rises from the grave in his nightmare] really clarified the story, because you get to watch this young woman have agency within the piece: the cast were so excited by this new idea that making it was just pure joy and fun.”
For Lara Pulver, who plays Tevye’s wife, Golde, moments such as this are especially important because Fiddler is a work that’s actively in conversation with emerging feminist movements. “The piece is definitely a reflection of when it was written in 1960s New York,” she explains, “rather than necessarily [when it is set in] 1900s Ukraine. There’s this new generation of women that have a voice, have agency.”
As Golde, Pulver plays a woman struggling as her daughters slip from her grasp and leave behind their tradition-bound childhoods. Sometimes, that feels uncomfortable to embody. “It’s strange to put the blinkers on. I’m a mum of young children, and as a woman in 2025, I’d have huge pride in my daughters wanting to stand up for what they believe in, to go on these adventures. But for a woman in 1905, it’s harder to swallow.”
Still, what’s refreshing about this Fiddler is how strong Pulver’s Golde feels, projecting all the resourcefulness and steely intelligence she’d need to steer her family through poverty and struggles, while her daughters each feel like rough-edged individuals, portrayed without sentimentality. “These are personalities and real people rather than characters in a musical, which makes it much more relatable,” Pulver says. “We’ve got actors aged from 18 up to 75 on stage, giving you that sense of small-town living.”
And that’s something that ultimately makes the show’s sobering ending hit harder: “The unthreading of the community is very apparent. The reality is, without technology, they’re probably not going to see each other again.”
The central trick of Fiddler is to build a teeming, complex, interconnected Jewish community on stage – and then break it apart, as Russian pogroms scatter this village across Europe and America. It’s hard to watch the second act without thinking of more contemporary humanitarian crises, the world over.
The war in Ukraine, where Fiddler is set, of course. However, the tragic events in Gaza have a resonance, too, as Israel continues to wage its military attack in Palestine. Does that context shift things within the production? “It’s a question I ask myself constantly as we’re working,” says Fein. “Everyone that’s working on this show is aware of what’s happening, and it would be naive of me or wrong of me to say it doesn’t affect the staging. The piece itself existed before the events, but it reminds us of the dangers of breaking apart communities, and of dehumanising people.”
The Regent’s Park production had to hire extra security to ensure the safety of the cast and audiences in a time of rising antisemitism. The same measures will be in place at the Barbican; “That conversation has been had and is dealt with very seriously and thoroughly,” says Fein.
Where some other musicals of the 1960s can feel hopelessly dated, Fiddler always manages to feel as though it’s speaking to the world beyond the stage, something that Fein says is especially vital as it goes on tour. But amid its weightiness, there’s wit too. “The power of Fiddler, and the reason I love it so much, is that it’s laughing through the tears,” Dannheisser says. “Jews historically have had to develop a leathery exterior, finding humour in the darkest places. Something very heavy happens, then in the next scene we’re all laughing.”
It’s this sense of camaraderie and community that makes Fiddler so worth revisiting, again and again.
‘Fiddler on the Roof’ is on at the Barbican until 19 July 2025
