We All Need a Fiddler to Remind Us of Our Roots ; the Revival of an Old Musical has New Lessons for a City Which Is a Modern Melting Pot

Summary

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FIDDLER on the Roof was a show I saw before I was born. Or rather, I heard it. My parents were in Her Majesty's Theatre on the night of February 24 1967 watching the now-legendary Topol production of the show and I was born the very next day. I'm sure that as he belted out If I Were a Rich Man I was tapping my foetal feet in the womb.

Maybe that's why the show, now energetically revived at the Savoy Theatre with the spirited Henry Goodman in the lead role, strikes such an instant, visceral chord with me. I only have to hear the opening strains of the Fiddler's melody to feel myself welling up. Somehow this story of Tevye, the impoverished Jewish milkman struggling to bring up five daughters in Tsarist Russia, goes straight to the Jewish gut via the heart.

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Extract

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We All Need a Fiddler to Remind Us of Our Roots ; the Revival of an Old Musical has New Lessons for a City Which Is a Modern Melting Pot

Part of it is the sheer technical skill of the show. Unlike so many of the musicals which followed it, Fiddler packs one cracking tune after another, from Tradition to Matchmaker to Sunrise, Sunset

such a contrast with the one-melodymultiply-reprised efforts of more ...

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