When Jordan Fein called his grandmother to tell her he would be directing a new production of Fiddler on the Roof in London, she broke into song, a word-perfect rendition of If I Were a Rich Man, one of the musical’s most famous numbers.
Fein was not surprised by his grandmother’s excitement, nor by her ability to recall the lyrics and melody with such fluency: Fiddler on the Roof was the cultural touchstone of his childhood. His grandmother was born in Philadelphia, where Fein also grew up, but his great-grandparents emigrated to the United States from Kyiv in the early 1900s. The 1964 musical, by Joseph Stein, reflected their history and the story of their ancestors.
Set in the fictional Ukrainian village of Anatevka at the turn of the 20th century, Fiddler on the Roof charts the fate of villagers as tsarist forces arrive and evict the Jewish population from their homes. Its central character is the doting father Tevye, who is struggling to accommodate the changing times, or at least with how his five daughters express them. Contrary to the guiding principles of tradition – a faith more powerful than religion in the musical – they are determined to make their own way in the world: to educate themselves, to choose their own husbands and to follow their own political conscience, even if that means standing against their family’s history.
When the musical first appeared on Broadway, it was seen as ground-breaking in many ways. It was adapted from the Yiddish short stories of Sholem Aleichem by Stein, Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick, who saw the material as an attractive proposition, as Fein explains, because it “allowed them to talk about their parents’ and grandparents’ experience in a way which, at that time, was really very subversive, because people who had migrated from that part of the world were not talking about their history, what happened. My mother: her grandparents did not speak about the pogroms or the Holocaust. They did not talk about why families emigrated, so it was quite bold to be putting it on stage.”
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The musical’s success – it won nine Tony awards, followed by three Oscars when it was filmed by Norman Jewison in 1971 – meant it became “one of those cultural phenomena that marked the assimilation of Jewish culture into American culture”. As a result, “it was really important, almost biblical, to many Jewish-American families”. It certainly was in Fein’s. “I can’t remember a time not knowing the music,” he says. “It is a story I have always known.”
Fein is speaking from London, where the American director has been mostly based since 2019. Before relocating, he cut his teeth off-Broadway with an impressive portfolio of work that included subversive stagings of American classics from Thornton Wilder and Paula Vogel, experimental collaborations with performance artists such as Erin Markey and Ryan Haddad, and a smattering of big-budget opera work. The startling production images on his website position his work far from the commercially minded mainstream of musical theatre, yet Fein explains that the move from more experimental stages to a larger platform was not as unusual as it might seem.
“The fact that I would [be commissioned] to stage work like this is maybe not as surprising as the fact that I would get the opportunity to do a big revival at all,” he says. “In New York, there just aren’t that many new stagings of classic musical work.”
Musicals were actually his gateway into theatre. “I was a real musical-theatre nerd as a kid, but in a lot of theatre schooling” – Fein attended the prestigious Tisch School of the Arts in New York – “musicals can be beaten out of you. The things to care about are Chekhov, Williams, Shakespeare – and, of course, I learned to love all that.”
But Fein found himself more attracted to experimental modes of theatre-making. “I was surrounded by brilliant performance artists, writers, musicians, and it blew my mind when I began collaborating with my peers to realise how much closer that world was to musicals than it was to straight drama. [Experimental theatre] is about integrating different art forms, challenging form in general. It is so much about instinct and feeling, that ethereal thing that musicals also tap into.
[ Stop lying about musicals. We can see your foot tappingOpens in new window ]
“So those realms of the commercial musical and performance art were both always in my purview, and it is really exciting now to see how the [different modes of work] influence each other, to see how I can integrate those artists that I have worked with across different types of projects to create a web of collaboration, where [the different genres] are in conversation.”
Fein’s distinctive directorial vision will certainly strike anyone lucky enough to see Fiddler on the Roof when it tours to Dublin in October, after an award-winning run in the outdoor Regent’s Park Theatre in London last year. The sophisticated production won three awards at the 2024 Olivier Awards, including for best new revival and best set design for Tom Scutt, who presents us with a spare but striking feast for the eyes.
A backdrop of golden wheat-fields presents the Ukrainian countryside as “the bread basket of the world”, a floor is stamped with the village’s name lest the audience or the villagers forget it, while the roof that the eponymous Fiddler plays on moves dramatically as the show begins and ends, a release and reinstatement of pressure: a sealing of the village’s fate.
I saw the latest version of the production, redesigned for indoor venues, at the Barbican in London in early July, before the tour started, and was startled by the clarity of its presentation of the story, the clean aesthetic and the way in which universal themes of generational fracture are communicated.
Of course, the story’s resonance with contemporary global politics was also unavoidable, and deeply moving. I was not alone in the audience sobbing to the mournful lament of the final song, Anatevka, as the villagers take a last look at their “underfed, overworked, intimate, obstinate” home.
[ Chaim Topol, Fiddler on the Roof actor, dies aged 87Opens in new window ]
If it seems a subversive act to use a story of Jewish persecution as a means of highlighting the contemporary suffering of other communities, the chutzpah pays off. From the current war in Ukraine to the displacement of Palestinians in Gaza, the musical reflects a broader spectrum of human suffering: the physical and emotional cost paid by individuals who are forced to leave their homes by those with more power.
Fein is naturally reluctant to pin specific current events to the work. Art, he argues, has the capacity to engage us in ways that appeal to a more universal sense of our humanity. Indeed, for him, the most powerful theme of Fiddler is apolitical. It is “love – whether that is Tevye and Golde’s love for each other, a parent’s love for their child, a people’s love for their home.
“And what is most profound is that I can say that with no irony. [Fiddler] is so beautifully earnest, in a time that feels so cynical. Even the character of Perchick, the revolutionary, his journey is so beautiful. At the beginning he is bombastic and arrogant in preaching to the people of Anatevka, but towards the end of the show he realises what he is really fighting for is love: the opportunity and humanity of love. I don’t think there is anything controversial about that.
“The fact that Fiddler is always relevant and feels extra potent right now,” he concludes, “is beyond tragic – I don’t know another word for it.” But theatre has a special role in bringing us beyond the headlines. “We are inundated with images on our phones, our computers, TVs, of all the horrific things that are happening at the moment, and it can be really hard to connect to that, because of the great flattening effect [of screens].
“But a piece of theatre asks people to sit in a room together and watch a live event, and examine that human propensity that forces people to lose their homes: it forces us to reckon with the human cost, the communal cost, and that sense of loss feels vital.”
Fiddler on the Roof is at the Bord Gáis Energy Theatre, Dublin, from Tuesday, October 7th, until Saturday, October 18th
