Fiddler on the Roof, Grange Park Opera, review: 'short on authentic chutzpah'

Although I seem to have imbibed most of the songs by osmosis, I must be one of the few people on the planet who has never seen Fiddler on the Roof.

Coming to it as a newbie, I noticed that (like South Pacific) much of its energy is concentrated in the long first act, leaving the second act without any cumulative plot development or a big number. The climax treats the appalling persecution suffered by the poor Russian Jews of the shtetls almost perfunctorily, as though the idea that these wretched people would end up in America made everything alright. It was not so.

So this isn’t a musical that for immediate emotional impact I’d rank with Carousel or Gypsy. Where it does score, however, is in the larger-than-life character of Reb Tevye, the philosophical milkman who regularly converses with Jehovah about his daughters and their problematic desire to marry outside the tradition.

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It’s a marvellous creation, long identified with such great Jewish actors as Zero Mostel, Topol and Henry Goodman, and taken for the first time in Grange Park’s pleasant new production by the great Welsh bass-baritone Bryn Terfel.

Burly and bearded, he looks the part comfortably and sings throughout with ease and clarity – “If I were a rich man” is nicely dispatched, without mugging or over-selling the sly humour.

But although the dialogue is handled very competently, Terfel needs to speed it up and thicken it a bit - playing more spontaneously with the comedy of the first act and mining the desolation and abandonment in the second. At present, the interpretation seems carefully calculated rather than naturally exuded.

^{Janet Fullerlove, as Golde, and Bryn Terfel (Photo: Alastair Muir)}

The rest of the cast does a decent enough job, but only Anthony Flaum as the tailor Motel really hits the spot.

Janet Fullerlove and Rebecca Wheatley as Tevye’s wife Golde and Yente the matchmaker are both miscast, and like Tevye’s three recalcitrant daughters, they seem to belong in Barsetshire rather than the Ukrainian steppes.

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The chorus is spirited, buttressed by some terrific dancing, and the BBC Concert Orchestra plays expertly under the spry baton of David Charles Abell. The performance is refreshingly unmiked, and all the better for it.

Antony McDonald designs and directs an agreeable production which plays no tricks and does no more than what is required.

The net result is an evening of warm but tame pleasure, short on authentic chutzpah.

Until July 3, grangeparkopera.co.uk; with a performance at the BBC Proms, Royal Albert Hall on July 25, bbc.co.uk/events