By Donald H. Harrison
LA JOLLA, California – In the J*Company’s current production of Fiddler on the Roof, there are 85 performers, some 50 or so more than the Broadway show or the movie had speaking parts for. An important challenge for director Joey Landwehr was to devise meaningful roles for these child actors and actresses so that they would feel themselves to be important characters in the popular musical and not simply extras.
To accomplish this, Landwehr provided little elaborations upon the familiar story. Tevye (played at the Sunday, Oct. 17, matinee by seasoned professional actor Hal Grant) and Golde (Lindsey Grant) had not five daughters, but seven –Tzeitel, Hodel, Chava, Shprintze, Bielke, Teibel and Yentl.
There was not only Yente the Matchmaker (Mara Jacobs) to spread the “news” of the town, but four gossips as well who enlarged upon Yente’s rumors, in the process changing them beyond recognition. We are introduced to Shaindel, who is Motel’s mother, and to others who were nameless and unrecognized in previous Fiddler productions.
Landwehr told me that in some cases the elaborations really were restorations. In Sholom Aleichem’s original story about Tevye the milkman, there really were seven daughters, he said. When the story was made into a play, the number was cut to five.
Even with such elaborations, not everyone could be given either names or speaking parts. What to do with the rest? In the opening number of “Tradition,” of course, they could serve as people with traditional roles in the village: “the papas,” “the mamas,” “the sons,” and “the daughters.” And in the final act, when everyone is forced to leave Anatevka, the entire cast, walking slowly and with heads bowed, could help to convey the pathos of the expulsion.
But what about in between? Here Landwehr and choreographer Devon P. Brawley showed some remarkable creativity. There are four aisles through the audience in the David & Dorothea Garfield Theatre of the Lawrence Family JCC and as Tevye’s family and visitors sang “Sabbath Prayer,” the youngsters holding candles slowly descended from the back of the darkened theatre toward the stage, heightening the effect of the holiness of Shabbat.
There were numerous cast members to drink and witness the agreement between Tevye and the butcher Lazar Wolf about a marriage with Tzeitel. (Incidentally, Lazar Wolf was played on Oct. 17 by Kevin McRee, who on other play dates stars as Tevye).
Later, when Tevye had a horrible dream to persuade Golde that they had to break the agreement with Lazar Wolf so Tzeitel (Jesse Carpentier) could marry Motel the Tailor (Adam Burnier), spooky denizens of the graveyard accompanied the butcher’s first wife Fruma-Sarah (Gabriela Lipson) from the underworld right to Tevye’s and Golde’s bedroom – what better prelude to real-world Halloween?
And in another scene when the gossips (Kaydon Schanberger, Hannah Houts, Gabi Leibowitz, Megan Carey) shared bad news, they had nearly the whole town on stage to regale with their misinformation.
While these elaborations provided the youngsters with more significant roles, they made the musical that was already lengthy in its original form even lengthier. The first act did not end until after Motel and Tzeitel’s wedding (“Sunrise, Sunset”), challenging the attention span of youngsters in the matinee audience and the bladders of some of the older people in attendance.
J*Company productions are filled with personal pleasures for anyone who is involved in the Jewish community. I brought my 9-year-old grandson Shor with me to the production and he immediately recognized that Nathan Miller, who had gone to Camp Jaycee summer camp with him, was playing the role of the rabbi, notwithstanding Nathan’s bearded disguise. With her usual aplomb, our dear friend, the professional violinist Myla Wingard, played the Fiddler—on a not-so-shaky roof. Choreographer Brawley, doubling as set designer, utilized the drawings of Vitebsk by Marc Chagall as a model for a quite sturdy roof upon which cast members danced during the sequence in which Tevye remembers the childhood of Chava (Maddie Houts), and trudged in their farewell to Anatevka.
Mara Jacobs, in a charming introduction to J*Company’s “Chai” Season, told how affiliation with the company over the years had built her confidence and willingness to do what was asked of her. She came out in Yente’s costume, probably a necessity given how early in the play Matchmaker Yente makes her appearance.
A minor problem, at least to my ears, was that after hearing Mara’s normal speaking voice, her thick Yiddish accent as Yente—played somewhat over the top for comedic effect – seemed jarring.
Everyone in the audience – even those not related to or friends of cast members – probably could cite favorite performers. In my opinion, the singing voice of Samantha Tullie, who played Hodel, is absolutely superb, and I thought that Adam Burnier gave a fine account of himself in the role of Motel, the suitor/son-in-law. In my grandson Shor’s opinion, Perchik, played by Joshua Shtein, was quite enjoyable because “he was funny.”
In one of those elaborated parts, Sebastian Mayer who played Mendel, the rabbi’s son, had a natural flair for comedy, whether he was questioning the accuracy of Tevye’s quotations from the Bible, or whether he simply was announcing that his father – “the Rabbi!”— was approaching.
No matter how many times you have seen ‘Fiddler,’ each version, in its small details, allows many Jews to connect with a romanticized Eastern European past. Emerging from the Garfield Theatre to witness the meeting in the lobby of the smiling, excited, happy faces of the young cast members and those of their transported, enchanted audience members also allowed me to glimpse the Jewish future.
Additional productions of ‘Fiddler’ will be presented October 21-24. Other secheduled J*Company productions include Thirteen, Dec. 3-12; Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Feb. 25-March 13; Children of Eden, May 13-22; and Goodbye Memories, Jan. 21-23.
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Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World