Miracle of Miracles

It’s an old idea, but it’s been out of fashion for so long that this possibly qualifies as innovation. For this season, instead of casting each show individually, Liverpool’s Everyman Theatre has hired a resident company of actors. All five shows in their season will be cast from the same pool of actors, and in the summer all five will play in rep for a month. Once upon a time, not all that long ago, it was relatively common for a regional theatre to hire actors on this basis; these days, it’s almost unknown. It’s a bold step – and if this revival of Fiddler on the Roof, the season’s first production, is anything to go by, the gamble is likely to pay off in spades.

Inevitably there are going to be compromises. Since everybody has been cast for their suitability for several productions, the company includes relatively few musical theatre performers. This isn’t going to be the best-sung Fiddler you’ve ever seen. It also isn’t the starriest, the biggest, or the most musically lush – this is regional theatre, budgets are tight, and we can at least be grateful the cast aren’t forced to play the musical instruments themselves. The compensation? These actors tell their story simply and beautifully, working together as an ensemble in a way that finds a great deal of resonance in a musical that is essentially about a community. In the 1994 Topol revival at the London Palladium (I saw, I suffered, and Topol played the role so s l o w l y that by the time intermission rolled around it was 1995) you were basically watching The Tevye Show. While this production has a (very) fine Tevye, that isn’t the case here.

What you also get, partly because this is a relatively small theatre and the production is played in the round, which means you’re seeing the show in close-up, is a stronger sense than usual of the material’s contemporary relevance. Joseph Stein’s book, based on the stories of Sholem Aleichem, isn’t simply the story of a family dealing with the gradual erosion of their traditional (religious) way of life. It’s an examination, as well, of a community of people who are forced to leave their homes. Over the past several years, we’ve seen pictures on the news of migrants leaving war zones that are closer than we think to where we live, and undertaking shockingly arduous or risky journeys in order to find safety for themselves and their families. We’ve all seen the pictures of migrant boats in the Mediterranean, bodies washed up on beaches, exhausted people walking for weeks through southern Europe in search of a home where their children won’t be bombed. We also, shamefully, have a government whose response to the migrant crisis in the Mediterranean was to cancel funding for patrol boats on the grounds that a few hundred drownings might serve as a deterrent – they put it a little more nicely, but that was the general idea – and who have recently (disgustingly) reneged on their pledge to allow unaccompanied child migrants into the country under the Dubs Amendment. Across the Atlantic, there is now a peculiarly orange President whose understanding of international relations would be unbecoming in a moderately well-read four-year-old, and whose central campaign pledge was to Build A Wall right across the USA’s southern border in order to keep Mexicans out (Q: How do Mexicans feel about Trump’s wall? A: They’ll get over it.) Fiddler on the Roof is set in Russia in 1905, but similar stories play out on every continent, every day, and they are not specific to any particular culture. Change a few names and a few details, and you could set the plot in Syria or South Sudan last year. Watching this revival, you can’t help but be aware of how toxic the word ‘migrant’ has become in certain circles in Europe and the US. Now, just as it was 112 years ago, people who are forced to flee their homes by no means always meet with kindness when they arrive somewhere safe. Fiddler on the Roof tells the beginning of the story; we already know how it ends, and the ending doesn’t do us any credit.

None of which should be taken to imply that this production is an endless misery-fest. Under Gemma Bodinetz’s direction, the company offers a tremendously humane reading of the show. Save for one very clever, very simple flourish in the last minute or so of stage time, Ms. Bodinetz’s staging is absolutely straightforward: she and her cast tell the story simply and clearly, mining the joy and the humour in the material as well as the sadness in the show’s ending. The big set-pieces are all present and correct: the dream sequence is hilarious, the bottle dance is tremendous fun, and Sunrise, Sunset has possibly never been lovelier, even if it’s been more prettily sung. The small space helps: Philip Roth famously dismissed the show as “shtetl kitsch”, and that’s a fair-enough description of that faintly ghastly 1994 production at the Palladium, but this revival offers a quietly moving portrayal of a loving, cohesive community that has been, by the end of the second act, dispersed but not broken. There’s a strong sense of hope at the end of this production (at the Palladium, I lost the will to live fifteen minutes into If I Were A Rich Man, and by the end of the show, six months later, I no longer had any sensation in my buttocks and needed jump-leads to restart my brain), even though – as I said – we know perfectly well how the wider world treats refugees. The (minimal) violence, too, benefits from being seen in close-up. This is still, as written, the politest pogrom in history, but there’s a far greater sense of menace when the fight scene is happening right in front of you than you’d get from the fifteenth row with the action behind a proscenium arch.

As for the cast, they function so well as an ensemble that it’s almost unfair to single out individual performances. Patrick Brennan manages to play Tevye without invoking either Topol or Zero Mostel; his performance is simultaneously absolutely traditional and absolutely fresh, and he sets the tone for the rest of the production. Melanie La Barrie’s Golde is the perfect combination of warmth and steel, and Emily Hughes, in a very, very strong professional debut performance, is a lovely, moving Hodel. There’s tremendously detailed work, though, even from the actors in the smallest roles; what the production lacks in scale and slickness is more than made up in sheer heart. The physical production may be simple to the point of austerity – the ‘company season design’ is credited to Molly Elizabeth Lacey Davies, Jocelyn Meall & Michael Vale, and for this production it consists of lighbulbs hanging over the stage to suggest a starry sky, Tevye’s milk cart, a trestle table and a few chairs – but that simplicity simply pushes the focus onto the actors, and the actors really deliver. In an ideal world, it would be nice to have more than four musicians (keyboard, double bass, clarinet, guitar), but musical director/arranger George Francis does the score proud: this is a tiny production, but the smallness of the band works with the poverty of the setting, and the musicianship is impeccable.

As for that directorial flourish I mentioned: this isn’t a revisal. Nobody changes a word, nobody acts around the lines, and it’s performed absolutely in period – until the last minute or so of stage time. As Tevye and what’s left of his family start their long march out of Anatevka, the rest of the company fall in behind them, wearing contemporary clothing and carrying improvised contemporary luggage (plastic laundry bags etc). As I said, Fiddler on the Roof marks the beginning of a story we’ve been watching play out on the news right across Europe for a few years now (and in different forms, in different places, more or less since the beginning of recorded history); without being strident about it, and without messing with the text, this final tableau drives the point home to devastating effect. It’s a simple but breathtaking conclusion to a more or less perfect revival; I suppose I should admit that my favourite Bock and Harnick show is actually She Loves Me, but Fiddler is still a glorious piece of writing (albeit, as that revival at the Palladium loudly demonstrated, not bulletproof), and Bodinetz and her superb cast are well worth the trip to Liverpool.

Will wonders never cease?

 

I’ll say it up front: I love She Loves Me. I’ve loved She Loves Me since I discovered Barbara Cook (God help me, after seeing a matinee of Carrie at the RSC) at the age of 15. I saw the Roundabout Theatre Company’s first Broadway revival, I saw that production’s subsequent London iteration three times, and over the going-on-thirty years since I discovered the show I doubt I’ve gone more than a fortnight at a time without listening to one or other of the various cast recordings. I more or less know the score by heart, it’s on the short, select list of golden-age musicals I think are just about perfect, and I’d booked for this production within an hour of tickets going on sale.

It’s safe to say, then, that my expectations going in to this revival were relatively high; Matthew White’s tiny jewel of a production, playing at the Menier Chocolate Factory until March next year, exceeds pretty much all of them. Based on Miklós László’s play ‘Parfumerie’ (other adaptations include the James Stewart film The Shop Around The Corner, and the Meg Ryan/Tom Hanks AOL commercial rom-com You’ve Got Mail), She Loves Me centres on two bickering clerks in a Budapest parfumerie who do not realise they are writing to each other via a lonely hearts column. The bold brassiness you’d commonly associate with golden-age American musical comedy is more or less entirely absent here; instead, Joe Masteroff’s beautifully-constructed, literate book and especially Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick’s glorious score give these characters a surprising emotional depth (all the more surprising when you consider the same source material begat the entirely plastic You’ve Got Mail). White resists the temptation – to which previous revivals have sometimes succumbed – to punch up the comedy, and instead goes right to the show’s heart; the result, save for the tiny eight-piece band (forgivable in a 180-seat theatre), is just about as ideal a production of this material as you could imagine.

It helps that the two unwitting pen-pals are so perfectly cast. Scarlett Strallen’s shyly hesitant Amalia is simply lovely. She finds exactly the right balance between sweetness and sadness, and her singing is glorious. She gets the best of the score’s solo numbers, and gives each of them full value; her “Dear Friend”, in particular, is a masterclass in understatement, and all the more moving for it, and she revels in the coloratura at the end of her radiant “Vanilla Ice Cream” in act two. Opposite her, Mark Umbers is possibly the most Daniel Massey-like Georg since Daniel Massey; quiet, bookish, and thoroughly decent, he and Ms. Strallen are the perfect foils for each other, and their long-awaited embrace at the very end of the show is far more moving than you’d expect given the relative slightness of the plot. He’s also, unlike some of his predecessors in the role (*cough* John Gordon Sinclair *cough*) a superb singer, and his firing-on-all-cylinders rendition of the title song in the second act is thoroughly splendid.

They’re matched by a similarly perfect set of ensemble performances. Bock and Harnick’s score spreads the wealth around, as does Masteroff’s book, and each major supporting character gets at least one (wonderful) song and one big scene. If Katherine Kingsley’s flighty Cockney shopgirl is the most memorable, thanks to her slyly humorous account of “A Trip to the Library”, the score’s funniest song, that’s not to take anything away from anyone else. There’s stellar work from Dominic Tighe (Kingsley’s real-life husband) as the snakeskin-smooth Kodaly, the closest thing the piece has to a villain, from Alastair Brookshaw as the pragmatic clerk Ladislav Sipos, and from Callum Howells as delivery-boy Arpad. They’re all warmly funny, they all sing beautifully, and they play beautifully off each other. Most surprising of all, there’s Les Dennis as the shop owner Mr. Maraczek. Dennis has been a fixture on British television since the 1980s, more often as a comedian and game-show host than as an actor, and his brand of “comedy” usually has me reaching for the remote (and possibly the painkillers). Here, he drops the TV mannerisms completely and reveals himself to be a character actor of some skill (which, to be fair, is evident from his programme credits, which encompass a diverse set of plays including works by Goldoni, Priestley, and David Hare). He gets the show’s most dramatic storyline (it involves a suicide attempt), and plays it with exactly the right light touch, so that he never overshadows the show’s central romance. He doesn’t have much of a singing voice, but his “Days Gone By” is appropriately wistful and quite moving. It’s a very fine performance.

There’s a lovely, clever set too – the best I’ve seen at the Menier – from Paul Farnsworth, who also supplies the perfectly-elegant costumes. The Menier is a tricky space – tiny stage, no flyspace, almost no wingspace, low ceiling – and Farnsworth’s solution involves not one but four small turntables, each of which carries a section of wall that can revolve and unfold to form part of the shop’s interior or exterior. Beautifully lit by Paul Pyant, this is a very handsome production indeed; the venue’s technical constraints are still occasionally evident – Umbers has to sing the first part of the title song from the aisle, in front of the curtain, because the stage is so shallow that there’s no room to do a set-change behind a drop with an actor still on the apron – but the production values are far higher than we’ve any right to expect from such a small theatre. Rebecca Howell’s choreography resists the temptation to turn the two big (in relative terms) production numbers – a pompous headwaiter’s attempt to preserve “A Romantic Atmosphere” for his diners despite the clumsiness of his staff, and the increasingly manic parade of Christmas shoppers in “Twelve Days to Christmas” – into big, overblown comic extravaganzas; her work is perfectly in scale with the rest of the show, and she understands, thank God, that less is sometimes more. And while, to be slightly contradictory, more musicians might be nice, Jason Carr’s new orchestrations get full value from the eight players at his disposal, and you’re never conscious of the unpleasantly metallic synthesised string pad sound that characterises the 1993 and 1994 cast recordings.

For once, then, there is more or less nothing to criticise, apart from the usual issues that go with the Menier itself (claustrophobic lobby, not enough toilets, awkward entrance through the restaurant, hideous view of the Shard as you walk up Southwark Street). The material is sublime, the actors – all of them – are just about perfect, and Matthew White’s production is absolutely beguiling. This is as good as anything the Menier has ever done, and as good a revival as I’ve seen all year. Don’t miss it.