Speakupwny.com
Buffalo News, Forums and Opinions
Live Forums and Blogs | Onlinebuffalo.com | Erie County | City of Buffalo 

Last Updated: Jan 14th, 2024 - 09:26:32 

Speakupwny.com 
Development
Editorials
Education
WNY News
Government Waste
Labor & Management
Letters to the Editor
Local Opinions
Local WNY Websites
New Government Structure
Politics
Preservation
Press Releases
Taxes and Fees
WNY Health
WNY Business
Reviews
Insiders Corner



Reviews

FIDDLER ON THE ROOF Festival Theatre/Stratford Festival
By
Jun 26, 2013, 11:30
Email this article
 Printer friendly page
Stratford Festival
Through October 27
FIDDLER ON THE ROOF Festival Theatre/Stratford Festival

By Augustine Warner

When the lights shut off, the audience rose in applause.
That's not the applause of a Buffalo audience which fades rapidly but the continuing applause of a packed crowd in the Stratford Festival's Festival Theatre for a dynamite production of “Fiddler on the Roof.”
It's an amazing mix of singing and dancing and some fine acting.
Director and choreographer Donna Feore started at Stratford as a chorus dancer and understands how to use every square inch of the Festival Theatre's thrust stage for some really wonderful dancing.
She also has Scott Wentworth's Tevye to make it all work.
Besides a uniformly strong cast, the singers and dancers had the benefit of extended rehearsals before 20 previews.
Any bugs were worked out of this production before the conductor's baton dropped Opening Night.
While the show is about a small Jewish community in a small village in a rural area of the Ukraine, it's about the experience of other communities in other places who see America as a better place for themselves and their children.
Joseph Stein, Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick based their show on Sholem Aleichem's stories of Pale life, with the ever-present threat of the Czar and his pogroms sweeping away a centuries-old way of life, long before the Holocaust swept it all away.
My first ancestor in America didn't leave early 17the century France because he wanted to but almost certainly left because of the religious wars making life difficult for anyone of the other religion in a particular town.
On my father's side, my great-grandfather came to Canada and then to the US from the worst years of the potato famine and the Irish Holocaust.
Tevye would understand because the final image of the show is Anatevka's milk man dragging his cart with the luggage toward the train station and the start of the long rail and boat passage to America.
He and wife Golde (Kate Hennig) are also leaving three of their five daughters behind, Tzeitel (Jennifer Stewart) is moving to Kiev with husband Motel the tailor (André Morin) and the baby and his sewing machine; Hodel (Jacquelyn French) and Perchik the revolutionary (Mike Nadajewski) are in Siberia; and, Chava (Keely Hutton) and Fyedka (Paul Nolan) are moving to Krakow because he can't stand what the police he belongs to have been doing to the Jews of the village.
“Fiddler” has long been that Broadway mix of telling a story and attracting ticket buyers and this production will do that.
The authors set the stage with that rousing look at an unchanging life, “Tradition.”
The show is the change in all of that, from Tzeitel marrying the man she wants not the one her father has chosen for her, the flashback to the old ways with the “Wedding Dance” and Perchik removing the rope between the men and the women for dancing and the farewell to the generations with “Anatevka.”
The original production of this show on Broadway was directed by Jerome Robbins, a master of dance and good productions continue that and great productions like this one show why.
While there are great songs, especially “Tradition,” “To Life,: “Sunrise, Sunset,” “Far From the Home I Love” and “Anatevka,” they don't work well without the dancing.
Here, Feore is working with strong dancers whether they are the Jews of the village or the soldiers in “To Life,” “Wedding Dance 1” and “Wedding Dance 2” or even the “Music for Bows.”
There are also the more intimate numbers, Tevye and Golde his wife (Kate Hennig) with “Do You Love Me?” Hodel with “Far From the Home I Love” and the classic “If I Were a Rich Man” from Tevye.
This is a uniformly strong cast, an effective set from Allen Moyer, good orchestra...oh, and fine work from the fiddler (Anna Atkinson).
“Fiddler on the Roof” is one of the classics of the Broadway stage, but this production isn't one of those shows to bring a: Remember when....
Instead this show stands on its own as what happens when the stars align over a small village in the Ukraine and a vast stage in Southern Ontario.
Go.

© Copyright 2023 - Speakupwny.com
hosted by Online Media, Inc
Buffalo Web Design and Web Hosting

Top of Page

Buffalo Theatre District
Reviews
Latest Headlines




PRELUDE TO A KISS Allendale Theatre/Bellissima Productions
BUFFALO QUICKIES Alleyway Theatre Cabaret
HAMLET Compass Performing Arts Center/Brazen-Faced Varlets
THE POLISH CLEANING LADY'S DAUGHTER African American Cultural Center/Paul Robeson Theatre
NEIGHBORHOOD 3: Requisition of Doom Kavinoky Theatre
FAUCI AND KRAMER Canterbury Woods Performing Arts Center/First Look Buffalo Theatre Company
GRUMPY OLD MEN: The Musical 4410 Bailey Ave, Amherst/O'Connell & Company
THE BOWLING PLAY Shea's Smith Theatre/Second Generation Theatre
BETRAYAL Andrews Theatre/Irish Classical Theatre Company
THE LIGHT FANTASTIC Road Less Traveled Productions
BEAUTIFUL: The Carole King Musical Medaille College/MusicalFare Theatre
THE FOLKS AT HOME Alleyway Theatre
FUNNY GIRL Shea's Buffalo
KINDERTRANSPORT Maxine & Robert Seller Theatre/Jewish Repertory Theatre
REEFER MADNESS THE MUSICAL Shea's Smith Theatre/O'Connell & Company



Buffalo Web hosting and Buffalo Web Design By OnLineMedia, Inc
www.olm1.com

Part of
www.onlinebuffalo.com