A deep summer evening in the sylvan heart of Regent’s Park proves the idyllic way to watch this classic musical, which this year celebrates its 60 th anniversary. The Sholem Aleichem stories upon which the show is based recount simple rural living in the tiny village of Anatevka in the Jewish Pale of Settlement, and that agrarian existence is perfectly evoked in the Open Air Theatre’s amphitheatre, surrounded and overhung as it is by an abundance of trees and bushes. When Tevye the dairyman arrives pulling his cart of heavy milk churns, we half expect to encounter the cows lined up for milking just outside the theatre entrance.
Musicals have long been the jewel in the crown of the OAT’s schedule; last year, for example, saw a delightful revival of La Cage aux Folles . Fiddler marks the final show in the immensely successful programming of Tim Sheader, new artistic director of the Donmar Warehouse, and Jordan Fein’s assured production bears all the hallmarks of a venue that knows precisely what it is doing with this genre. The band, wearing costumes in the muted colour palette of the rest of the cast, sit onstage underneath a large raised platform thick with waist-high wheat.
The famous songs of Jerry Bock (music) and Sheldon Harnick (lyrics) retain all their power and we revel in their stately procession: “Matchmaker”, “If I Were a Rich Man”, “Sunrise, Sunset”, the last a powerful meditation on ageing as a marriage is celebrated under a traditional canopy..
