As I’ve said in these cyber-pages
at least a few times before, any meaningful revival of a classic musical that
isn’t just a remounting of the original production, is a conversation with that original production—and this is,
curiously, true even if the later creative team never saw the original production. And that’s because, unlike a
play, where you can literally start with nothing but what’s on the printed
page, a musical casts all kinds of shadows; cast albums, archival footage, the
absorption of songs into the collective consciousness, even film adaptations,
if they’re faithful enough, seep into the cultural zeitgeist. Past-period sensibility communicated by the script, score,
orchestrations, style—all those artifacts of complex, balanced
collaboration essential to learning the material well enough to work with
it—assure that no director approaching a standard or a classic with a
presumably “fresh take” gets to be entirely a virgin. And this is why revivals
are subject to SUCH scrutiny, analysis and, frankly, rabid word of mouth. A
great musical’s stature can belie a surprising internal delicacy, and in
revival, a miscalculation of tone, focus, or emphasis can—and usually
will—resonate throughout the entire show. Subsequently, a production that
looks to do more than just recreate or approximate its antecedent is really out
to rebuild something that’s already been built. The most successful revivals
triumph by finding implicit qualities in the material that the original production
didn’t exploit, often because of its era of authorship—i.e. the recent
trend toward infusing classic Rodgers & Hammerstein shows with nuanced,
“realistic” acting to bring out the subtler psychological, humanist values that
older, broader techniques didn’t sufficiently communicate; a trend at which Bartlett
Sher has proven himself a grand master.
Fiddler
on the Roof provides a slightly
different challenge, though, for the original ’64 production was no stranger to
humanist nuance. Its director-choreographer, Jerome Robbins, was not only obsessively aware of telling a deep story
about changing traditions that would cross cultural lines (with what would
prove an astonishing universal appeal, with which the most foreign-seeming
cultures still identify), but had been the one to insist on the show having a
thematic spine in the first place. It was very far removed from the stock,
broad acting styles that informed most original cast productions (including
R&H) of decades past—except arguably some of his own. Indeed, by the
mid-60s, the synthesis of realistic and musical theatre performing was well
underway.
So
what is it, exactly, that Mr. Sher has re-investigated with his late-2015
revival, currently at the Broadway Theatre (to which the original production moved and where it
eventually closed)? If I had to give it an identity, I’d say corners of verité.
This manifests in two ways.
First,
one must note that, tacitly, a good deal of the original production’s style had
its roots in the Yiddish theatre of the first half of the 20th century. And
that in 1964, the entire creative team, and key members of the cast, were old
enough to have seen the real thing. The
conventions and styles of Yiddish theatre were part of their first hand
heritage. Robbins employed its broadest tropes selectively (“Tevye’s Dream” for
example), and in grounded scenes never in any way that broke illusion of a kind
of reality; but they were there. It’s not such a pervasive influence for Mr.
Sher, though, at least not identifiably so. If Fiddler were about Yiddish theatre players, Sher would focus on how
those Yiddish archetypes might have lived their lives off stage.
Second:
a fresh, newly minted musical number by a high octane writer, or team of
writers, tends to have a self-evident energy; the fusion of melody,
accompaniment figure, linguistic particularity, placement in the narrative, do
a great deal to dictate line reading
and interpretation, as indeed they must; numbers molded originally around a
particular actor even more so. A kind of template is thus created; subsequent
players of the roles need not dig too deeply for their human truths, because a
full set of them comes with the show’s legacy. They only need to find their own
ways of fulfilling the known endgame.
Sher
removes the known endgame from the equation, except for the obvious mapping of
structural intent. He—and I don’t have any inside track, I just believe
this is the process, based on what I see onstage—approaches each song as
a scene that has never before existed, and guides each actor through a
beat-for-beat examination. This leads to some highly surprising and highly
potent new emotional turns, because the point of the beat-for-beat examination
is to find places where the human stakes have not been fully exploited. Thus
what was once mostly a charming number for Tevye’s three eldest daughters,
“Matchmaker, Matchmaker”, as they contemplate their possible futures in a
culture where arranged marriages are the norm, becomes a number of
commiseration among three hearts, all starting to realize how vulnerable they
are to factors that have nothing to do with their dreams or desires. It’s all
there in the song, but what’s not there is the proportion to which Sher has
decided to emphasize it. That said, he’s totally unafraid of, and unopposed to,
the notion of rediscovering a classic
take, but it has to happen as an organic inevitability. This makes for a Fiddler
that is both traditional and more intimate
than we’ve ever seen it before. And not incidentally, it’s the mechanism that
allows Danny Burstein, a master of
light comedy, to imbue his Tevye—and it’s a rich, heartfelt
Tevye—with weight and consequence.
And
this of course cascades around him to all the other members of the ensemble as
well. And they’re all splendid.
New
choreography (Hofesh Schecter, Christopher
Evans), scenery (Michael Yeargan) and costumes (Catherine Zuber)—taking a certain inspiration from Robbins and his
original team, because there’s no choice, but also marking new territory in the
same way, exploiting fresh research into the era and indicia of Sholem
Aleichem’s world—are also a
reflection of this beat-for-beat re-assessment.
All
this acknowledged, does that make this Fiddler better than the original, as Sher’s R&H revivals have
unequivocally improved upon their originals?
No; the first production, at its freshest, best-maintained and most
meticulously revived is too dynamic to be eclipsed, too full-blooded to be
retroactively reframed as “oldschool.” But it does make the new Fiddler have
an equal footing, because it addresses
its new millennium era in terms that are as potent, with an approach not
previously available.
And
what more is there for a revival to do?
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