Fiddler on the Roof at Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre – review

London is currently experiencing a bonanza of brilliant revivals of classic American musicals. Now, to join Hello Dolly!, Guys and Dolls, and A Chorus Line, along comes another glory of Broadway’s late golden age.

The quality of Jordan Fein’s wonderful, emotional production is that it perfectly holds the balance of Fiddler on the Roof, neither tilting towards saccharine nor bitterness, towards schmaltz or politics. It honours the care with which book writer Joseph Stein, lyricist Sheldon Harnick and composer Jerry Bock first created the show in 1964, under the passionate ferocity of their director Jerome Robbins.

This version led by the American actor Adam Dannheisser as Tevye, milkman in the impoverished village of Anatevka, turns the story of a man struggling to maintain his Jewish traditions and his faith in the face of societal change and cruel political upheaval, into a nuanced study of community and love. And it does all this while giving full force and energy to songs such as “If I Were a Rich Man” and “Tradition”.

Coming as it does at a time when the Israeli government’s war on Gaza after Hamas’ 7 October attacks made the cancellation of the show a possibility, it’s a sensitive assertion of humanity that turns the story of one community under threat into a plea for greater empathy for all. It’s impossible to watch the scene where Russian thugs attack a Jewish wedding celebration, for example, without thinking of the racist riots happening in Britain today.

Yet it does this very gently, its tone and impact conditioned by Tom Scutt’s beautiful set, at once abstract and specific: a wheatfield emerging from the trees at the back of the stage, and a ramp also covered in wheat, flicking back like a hair-lick, curving over the action. It both shelters the magnificent band of musicians and gives Raphael Papo’s fiddler a roof on which to walk.

In fact, the use of the fiddler, who sits with Tevye as he indulges in his famous monologues with God, and then plays along with the keening clarinet of Tevye’s daughter Chava (a lovely performance from Hannah Bristow) as she is turned from the family home when she elopes with her non-Jewish lover, creates some of the most resonant moments in the piece. The music seems to speak even when characters do not and every song is sung with full emphasis on the narrative impact of the words, as if they are being forged afresh.

Fein also stresses the humour and bubbling life in the piece. The villagers sit around the action, reacting as events unfold. Tevye’s three daughters and their suitors all have unusual exuberance and vitality; all create character from the smallest details. When the tailor Motel (Dan Wolff), all gawky arms and legs, imagines telling Tevye about his love for his daughter Tzeitel (dignified Liv Andrusier), he literally slips under a table in fear. Passionate Perchik and his love Hodel (Daniel Krikler and Georgia Bruce) whirr about the stage as they dream of changing the world.

Tevye’s dream is staged with the help of the entire village and a lot of lace bedsheets, a communicative comic masterclass. Here, as elsewhere, Julia Cheng’s propulsive choreography is rich and detailed, full of naturalistic movement that creates powerful dramatic effects; her staging of Robbins’ famous bottle dance cleverly builds the possibility that the bottles might fall before reaching its stirring conclusion.

At the heart of all this is the quiet underplaying and resonant voice of Dannheisser, who turns Tevye not into a Topol-style caricature but into a wry, ironic man, buffeted by events he cannot control, yet always finding it possible to assert love. He is matched by Laura Pulver’s Golde, full of emotion she doesn’t often express, but finding tenderness in gesture and stillness.

The show seems made for its open-air setting. Candles light a wedding procession in the falling twilight; the villagers leave their homes walking through the wheat into the dark, as the fiddle music slowly dies in the air. Absolutely terrific.