The fiddler is back. Not that he has been away for very long. Unlike the s and of this world whose original productions became semi-permanent features on the musical theatre landscape, the original has been regularly reborn since it premiered in 1964, with the latest version opening this week at the Regents Park Open Air Theatre.
For there is nothing semi-permanent about audience appetite for Tevye, the milkman whose five daughters must be married but without diluting the tradition in which they were raised. There is no tiring of the father who embodies the uniquely Jewish relationship with God to whom he not only prays but with whom he argues. Nor can there be any doubt about the eternal appeal of Jerry Bock’s bittersweet music, Sheldon Harnick’s lyrics and Joseph Stein’s book which so seamlessly sews together the stories written by Shalom Aleichem in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
The Yiddish writer could have had no idea that he was laying the foundation for one of the most successful musicals ever created. Nor that its depiction of shtetl life would serve as a memorial to the culture and communities lost to the Holocaust. It is a show in which the constant threat of a pogrom reflects 21st century anxieties about antisemitism.
When the Menier Chocolate Factory staged Trevor Nunn’s revival of in 2018 starring Andy Nyman as Tevye, antisemitism was on the rise. This week Britain’s streets are stalked by swastika-bearing men on the lookout for anyone who is .