New, long look at a 60s classic

FIDDLER ON THE ROOF, Lowry, to Saturday
FIDDLER on the Roof is rich in detail and a sense of place and time, packed with the sentiment of its pre-pogrom setting and boasting some of the most tuneful songs around.

It is also a throwback to the great days of Sixties shows — its political content pointing to the racier material that was to come.

But brevity isn’t one of its virtues. To watch Fiddler is pretty much akin to devoting the rest of your life to it, or at least until 10.25pm. The thing just seems to go on and on and on...

This production, by Craig Revel Horwood of “Strictly” fame, is interestingly different in that it employs the modern trend of having the actors be the band — in fact it uses the extraordinary orchestration talents of Sarah Travis, who shoehorns instrumentalists all over the place as she did with the magnificent Watermill production of “Sweeney Todd” a while back. Rarely does the score sound too thin.

But thin it obviously is; in fact the whole show has a few too many compromises for its own good: the cast is made up of singing, acting musicians, some of whom are clearly not strong singers; in hiring the otherwise excellent Paul Michael Glaser as Tevye we have an actor who could do a great job in a movie production but who on stage lacks full presence, and the overall impression is of a show that doesn’t quite fire on all cylinders.

This is unfortunate because the slow-moving, family-orientated exercise needs the biggest characters it can get to work truly effectively in a theatre this size.