Fiddler On The Roof - Review

Barbican Theatre, London

****

Book by Joseph Stein

Lyrics by Sheldon Harnick

Music by Jerry Bock

Directed by Jordan Fein

Raphael Papo

Jordan Fein’s revival of Fiddler On The Roof first seen at London’s Open Air Theatre last year, returns to the city’s Barbican Theatre before a nationwide tour to last the rest of the year. As Tevye and Golde, Adam Dannheiser and Lara Pulver remain in their leading roles with both having matured from 2024.

Dannheiser always commanded the essentials of a Tevye . A big, bearded, Bear Jew of a man devoted to both family and faith and convincing as he deploys both humour and perfectly pitched pathos in his wrestling with life’s challenges, Dannheiser’s performance is one of the evening’s delights.

Pulver has grown in the last 12 months. Her role is now fully formed and be it gossiping with Yente, nagging Tevye, or just being the all-caring matriarch to her family, hers is a great Golde. While Tevye gets most of the juicy singing numbers in the show, Pulver, who’s musical theatre credentials are impeccable, makes fine work of the duetting balladry gifted to her by Harnick and Bock. Natasha Jules Bernard steps up to the role of Tzeitel, with Georgia Bruce returning as Hodel and Hannah Bristow as the clarinet playing Chava continuing to give Tevye one of the toughest challenges that can face an orthodox Jew.

Fiddler On The Roof is a Broadway classic and this production’s details are a treat. Beverley Klein’s maturely considered Yente and Raphael Papo’s enchanting Fiddler are fabulous. Julia Cheng’s choreography excites, while Tom Scutt’s ingenious design has beautifully translated the shtetl of Anatevka from the elements of Regent’s Park to the conventions of traditional theatre.

This musical remains a story of hope interwoven with never-ending tragedy. The show is set in Tsarist Russia around the turn of the 20th century when state-sponsored antisemitism was the norm, and the dark clouds of the Holocaust that was to befall European Jewry hadn’t even begun to form. Playing out in 2025, as calls for the destruction of the Jewish state echo around the world, the United Nations spouts blood libels that are echoed by governments and the media and murderous Jew-hate is manifest from Washington DC to Colorado, it feels like little has changed. 

This is a beautiful production playing to a very ugly world.

Runs until 19th July, then on tour

Photo credit: Marc Brenner

Fiddler On The Roof - Review

Open Air Theatre, London

***

Adam Dannheiser

Book by Joseph Stein

Lyrics by Sheldon Harnick

Music by Jerry Bock

Directed by Jordan Fein

Much like the village of Anatevka itself, Jordan Fein’s production of Fiddler On The Roof is a microcosmic melting pot, not only of the marvellous but also of the mediocre. It gives a curious message that the show's producers have decided that its main publicity image promoting and celebrating the show, should be of Chava (played by Hannah Bristow), the one daughter of Tevye and Golde who deserts her Jewish heritage to marry outside the faith, rather than upholding 'tradition'. Notwithstanding this unusual bias, Fein’s interpretation has managed to retain the show’s cultural essence.

This is of course the first Fiddler On The Roof to play in London since the horrors of October 7 2023. The pogrom that befalls a community of dancing, celebrating Jews and which closes the first act, leaving Anatevka in flames, chills in its identical ideology of hatred that led to the massacre at Israel’s Nova Music Festival last year.

Hannah Bristow as Chava in the show's main publicity image

Fein makes gorgeous use of Raphael Papo as The Fiddler. His violinist serves as a musical interpretation of Tevye’s (Adam Dannheiser) Jewish conscience, and intriguingly is rarely offstage. This is a beautiful touch, for Jerry Bock’s melodies written for the Fiddler deserve the centre-stage attention given to them by Fein.

Dannheiser himself (last seen by this reviewer as an outstanding Lazar Wolf on Broadway) is an adequate Tevye. Vocally strong, but occasionally disconnected, particularly in his brief exchanges his God, that feel as though they are played more for laughs than for sincerity. Lara Pulver is Golde, in possibly the worst miscasting to have been seen in years. Pulver is one of the more gifted musical theatre performers of her generation but her Golde lacks a shtetl-based warmth. Clipped and reserved, she appears more Lucille Frank (her outstanding 2007 role of an Atlantan Jewish spouse subject to horrific antisemitism) rather than Tevye’s loyal wife of 25 years.  Vocally strong, but with barely any detectable acting through song, her Golde disappoints. Similarly Dan Wolff’s Motel fails to convince us of the sincerity of his love for Liv Andrusier’s Tzeitel. The show however is in its early days and both of these flaws can yet be remedied by Fein.

Tom Scutt’s set is enchanting, a roofed canopy across much of the theatre’s stage, itself topped with fields of corn. It is a visual that works stunningly. Tevye’s Dream too is a comic delight that has been cleverly conceived. Upstage, Dan Turek’s 11-piece band are a delight. Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick’s songs are timeless works of genius and for the most part, especially in the company numbers, are worth the price of the ticket.

Runs until 21st September

Photo credit: Marc Brenner

Cabaret - Review

Playhouse Theatre, London

*****

Music by John Kander

Lyrics by Fred Ebb

Book by Joe Masteroff

Directed by Rebecca Frecknall

Eddie Redmayne and Jessie Buckley

In a remarkable transfiguration, London's Playhouse Theatre is ingeniously transformed by designer Tom Scutt to an in-the-round setting which after an equally imaginative pre-show mise en scene, goes a long way to transporting the audience to Berlin’s Kit Kat Club, the home of the show’s eponymous cabaret.

Rebecca Frecknall’s interpretation offers a bold take on the Kander & Ebb classic. The cabaret girls (“each and every one, a virgin”) are a chic metrosexual bunch, cleverly mixing 2021’s androgyny with Berlin’s famed inter-war decadence. The Kit Kat Club of course is a dive and rising from its deepest depths is the exquisitely ghastly Emcee, played in this iteration by Eddie Redmayne.

Cabaret’s Emcee is one of the most ingenious creations of late 20th century musical theatre. Almost like a Greek Chorus, or Lear’s Fool, he holds up a mirror to the Club’s audience (literally, in this staging, the theatre audience), parodying the hopes of the outside world (“Life is disappointing? Forget it”) while equally mocking the rise of Nazism and the persecution of the Jews. As Redmayne delivers If You Could See Her, the brutality of his satire chills to the bone. The actor is a tour de force throughout the piece such that when he is at times mute in the Finale, it only adds to the horrors that Germany as a nation will soon descend into.

Opposite the Kit Kat Club’s Emcee is of course the English cabaret artiste Sally Bowles. Jessie Buckley is sensational in her take on Bowles, bringing an understated haunting to the role. In her opening number Don’t Tell Mama, Buckley stuns with a polished insouciance that has the Kit Kat Club cheering for more. By the time the show is done however, and her Sally has both witnessed and experienced tragedy, Buckley’s take on the title number is breathtaking. Not for her the Broadway bravado of the song that one may perhaps associate with Liza Minnelli - rather, a delivery of Kander & Ebb’s signature tune that shows the singer to be broken and vulnerable. It is a stunning realisation of the song that shocks both in its despair and in quite how powerfully Buckley inverts the number’s traditional style into something far more poignant and haunting. I doubt that there will be a stronger performance to be found on London’s musical theatre scene for quite some time.

Redmayne and Buckley are surrounded by talent. Omari Douglas’ Clifford Bradshaw, a naïf to Berlin and the foil to the story’s piercing arc is assured and credible in his role. When late in the second act he is beaten up by Nazi thugs, there is a multi-faceted angle to the hate that he is subject to. Liza Sadovy as Fraulein Schneider, Berlin’s world-weary landlady, is gifted a number of musical opportunities, in which she shines, and her story too offers a sad wry glimpse into the country’s looming thunderstorm of fascism.

Fraulein Schneider’s two other tenants are the Jewish grocer Herr Schultz (Elliot Levey) and prostitute Fraulein Kost (Anna-Jane Casey).  Kander, Ebb and Joe Masteroff had a challenge in writing Schultz - as they sought to capture his pride in his German citizenship alongside his love for Schneider, while at all times keeping him wilfully blind to how the fate of German Jewry was to play out. It would have been easy to make Schultz a more soft and sentimental sop, but he is written (and here, played) perceptively, such that his future murder, that as a Jew he will likely face, plays out only in our minds, rather than on stage.

Casey is magnificent as Fraulein Kost, a small character who so skilfully depicts both Berlin’s depravity and its desperation. The gusto with which Kost joins in with Tomorrow is one of the most outstandingly simple depictions of the appeal of Hitler’s National Socialism to much of the German population.

Stewart Clarke’s Ernst Ludwig is the musical's face of Nazism, with Clarke cleverly capturing the ugliness of his role, at all times avoiding cliche and melodrama. As he leads the end of the first act with Tomorrow, it is a chastened and shocked audience that head out for their interval beers and ice-creams.

Jennifer Whyte’s musical direction of her 9-piece orchestra that boldly spans the auditorium is adroit, with Kander’s melodies being richly served. All her musicians are magnificent, but the guitar/banjo work from Sarah Freestone together with Matt French’s percussion are particularly distinctive and memorable.

With antisemitism again manifest on the streets of London, Cabaret has never been more relevant.

Booking until 1st October 2022

Photo credit: Marc Brenner

Julie - Review

National Theatre, London


***


Written by Polly Stenham after Strindberg
Directed by Carrie Cracknell

Eric Kofi Abrefa and Vanessa Kirby

Polly Stenham’s Strindberg straddles the centuries as she translates Miss Julie from 1800s Scandinavia to a modern-day mansion on the fringes of Hampstead Heath. Retaining the original's core themes, this iteration finds the eponymous Julie as the privileged, entitled daughter of an ever-absent millionaire father and a mother who committed suicide during her childhood. The show opened in London last week, not long after the tragic news had been reported of two millionaire celebrities apparently taking their own lives - Strindberg’s commentary on the depressive loneliness that can reach into the elite’s gilded cages is resonant and timely. 

Vanessa Kirby is Julie. Deemed as irresponsible - her personal fortune locked away in trust funds – she is a woman in her 30s who has never been allowed to mature. She glitters on the surface but there is a gaping hole in her deserted soul and like F. Scott Fitzgerald's Gatsby, her parties are attended by nameless people whose connections are devoid of care or compassion for their hostess.

Jean is Julie’s father’s chauffeur who’s also on duty as the hired muscle to keep the house free from being trashed during Julie's birthday celebrations. Eric Kofi Abrefa's Jean drives the play’s tragic arc as he smoulders with a credible, irresistible  attractiveness.

Completing the triangle of devastation is Thalissa Teixeira’s Kristina, Jean’s fiancee. Her finely nuanced grief, upon discovering her betrayal by her betrothed, is truly heartbreaking. 

The one act play runs just short of ninety minutes, brevity, as it transpires, that is much appreciated. As director Carrie Cracknell opts for style over substance, her production could well set the august Strindberg spinning in his grave. In an almost mirror image of the amorality of Julie’s casual affluence, the play drips with theatrical opulence that smaller theatre companies will only look at and marvel. The National Theatre have cast 20 (20!)  non-speaking partygoers in addition to the trio of protagonists, actors who spend nearly all of the show offstage. Likewise designer Tom Scutt’s trompe-l’oeil in the final scene is so lavish as to detract from Strindberg’s originally conceived harrowing denouement.

There is a very gory moment late on involving a food processor. Such is the extent of that violent incident (clearly and evidently a special effect) that many of the audience are moved to laugh out loud at its gratuitous excess - and in an instant the tragic drama of the moment is lost. If ever there was a production that proves “less is more” then this is it, such is the opportunity squandered amidst such budgetary extravagance.

But the tenets of the tale remain, as Stenham assuredly illustrates the complexities of power, wealth, race and gender. Julie may well be far from a definitive interpretation of Strindberg's classic, but nonetheless makes for an evening of thought-provoking theatre.

Runs until 8th September

Photo credit: Richard H Smith

Jesus Christ Superstar - Review

Open Air Theatre, London


*****

Music by Andrew Lloyd Webber
Lyrics by Tim Rice
Directed by Timothy Sheader

Tyrone Huntley and Declan Bennett

In what is unquestionably a Superstar for the 21st century Timothy Sheader's Jesus is no long haired prophet. In an electrifying performance that captures both Christ’s charisma and his flawed vulnerability, Declan Bennett's Messiah is a powerfully charged hipster. Played out against Tom Scutt's rusted-steel framed set (that interestingly evokes the Angel Of The North in its unpretentious simplicity) and with hand held mics throughout, this production places the emphasis as much upon Andrew Lloyd-Webber's rock-driven score, as it does upon its sensational cast.

Bennett brings an energy to the title role that is moving and credible. Vocally he is perfect and as act one sees a momentum gather, it is in the second half with his remarkable Gethsemane (opened beautifully by Bennett himself on acoustic guitar) that the actor soars. His performance is as harrowing to watch as it is probably exhausting to perform. We flinch at the Trial By Pilate / 39 Lashes and during his crucifixion, the extent to which Bennett subtly underplays his agony makes it all the tougher for the audience to watch - and all this alongside Scutt's ingenious interpretation of Calvary, itself a scenic triumph that must surely rank amongst the capital's finest this year.

Next to Bennett, Tyrone Huntley's Judas is sensational. His opening take on Heaven On Their Minds displays an intelligence and energy that has been carefully honed during his already impressive career. Gifted several stunning solos, he closes the first half with Blood Money and a neat theatrical take on the "pieces of silver" that won't be revealed here. Throughout, Huntley offers a clever interpretation of the complex dissolution of his friendship with Jesus. When the Oliviers are being handed out this year, both Bennett and Huntley deserve to be on the list.

There is imaginative excellence across the company. With both Everything's Alright and I Don't Know How To Love Him, Anouska Lucas's Mary is a thing of beauty, the actress highlighting not just Mary's damaged frailty, but also the inexplicably wondrous love that she feels towards Jesus. David Thaxton's Pilate is another treat and as he sings Pilate's Dream, leading on electric guitar, the background acoustic work of Bennett and Joel Harper-Jackson (who plays Simon Zealotes) offers another layer to the song's troubling spirituality. Peter Caulfield's Herod, truly as camp as Christmas, is a blast, (and wonderfully costumed too), whilst Cavin Cornwall's imposing Caiaphas offers a baritone that has to be heard to be believed.

Shearer has surrounded himself with a top-notch creative team. Under Tom Deering's direction Lloyd Webber's score thrills, with the show evolving into a celebration of the guitar in the modern musical, as much as a biblical interpretation. Drew McOnie's choreography makes fine use of the ensemble and the multi-level space with his movement evoking not just a seething biblical crowd but also the febrile tensions of the times. 

Lee Curran's lighting adds dimension too. The rock-concert style of the evening piece lends itself to smoke - and as the park’s daylight finally succumbs to night over the crucifixion, so to like Longinus' spear, do Curran's shafts of light pierce the darkness.

This is beautiful brilliant theatre. Don't miss it.

Runs until 27th August

Photo credit Johan Perssonn

East is East - Review

Churchill Theatre, Bromley

****

Written by Ayub Khan Din

Directed by Sam Yates 

Pauline McGlynn and Simon Nagra

A story about identity, packaged as a comedy but addressing some very real and hard-hitting issues, East is East is a slick production.

Simon Nagra's George Khan is a Pakistani immigrant, a staunch Muslim married to a Salford woman and the father of seven children. The play captures the life of his family as he does everything he can to cling on to his heritage and culture and we witness just how difficult this is.

The story will resonate with many British Asians (and indeed anyone who feels that they are juggling roles and responsibilities), as the struggles of aligning two very difficult worlds - the home and family, alongside the external environment in which they exist - are played out. 

Khan Din's use of the seven children is a clever tool, enabling the audience to see a range of differing attitudes. Among the six we find a devout Muslim, a college student, an artist (albeit unbeknownst to his father), the rebellious child and the son who has become a hairdresser, consequentially being disowned by George Khan.

The cast is excellent - bursting with energy, although keenly attuned to the challenges of their characters' identities. Salma Hoque is a delight as the only daughter of the house, playing out the juxtaposition of East meets West effortlessly, as she switches between being the foul-mouthed and outspoken sister, with being the dutiful daughter who makes and serves the tea and who will wear a sari when necessary.

Pauline McLynn as Ella Khan, the mother who loves George and her children - all seven of them - conveys her own conflicts beautifully. The audience roots for her throughout and wills her to protect her children from George's decisions, by going beyond to pick up the pieces afterwards.  

The concept of familial love lies at the heart of this tale and, as it candidly demonstrates, the differing ways of displaying this love. The siblings bicker and pull no punches towards each other, but when their unity and happiness is threatened, they face these pressures together. George Khan evolves as an interesting character, with a couple of moments where he shows weakness and a possible disgust for himself. Yet it is difficult to feel much empathy for a man who is such a bully to his family.

There is a perceptive social commentary on offer too, as the play touches upon racism, domestic violence and poverty - the latter also cleverly suggested through Tom Scutt's set design.

Set against the backdrop of the Partition, as Pakistan was split off from India at a cost of hundreds of thousands of lives the events of the times are closely followed by George Khan, as snippets from news broadcasts are played out.

In today's world where religion is vilified and native cultures can gradually be eroded or assimilated – often willingly – East is East has a contemporary relevance. A complex concept, worth exploring.

Plays at the Churchill Theatre, Bromley until 11th July, then tours

Reviewed by Bhakti Gajjar

Wozzeck

Coliseum , London

****

Composer: Alban Berg

Director: Carrie Cracknell

This review was first published in The Public Reviews

Leigh Melrose and Sara Jakubiak

Wozzeck marks Cracknell’s directorial debut for the ENO at the Coliseum, and this talented young woman arrives with some panache. First performed in Berlin in 1925, it was in 1988 that Berg’s demanding work was last tackled by the ENO and with a talented cast and creative team, Cracknell weaves a gripping but agonising hold over us during the heavily stylised 90 minutes that the interval-free production runs.

The story is drawn from Buchner’s Woyzeck, the troubling story of a young soldier of fragile mind and susceptible to paranoia who is bullied by his Captain, the army doctor and his Drum Major who then cuckolds him with Marie, his common law wife and the mother of a young boy. His struggles with his mental health and the abuse he suffers inevitably has tragic consequences.

Leigh Melrose is Wozzeck. Beautifully baritoned he displays a well-performed flawed grasp on reality from the outset. It is hard to watch him knowing that each challenge he encounters or humiliation he suffers is adding to the provocation that will unleash his final acts of slaughter. American Sara Jakubiak another ENO debutante is Marie, a perfect soprano , who notwithstanding her character’s lifestyle, still evokes our sympathy in her difficult relationship with Wozzeck.

Tom Scutt’s set design is as imaginative as it is convincing. Marie’s cramped flat set above the noisy pub suggests the poverty that she and Wozzeck endure and in the climactic finale, is home to some hauntingly visceral imagery. None more so than Harry Polden as her young son, donning his schoolboy rucksack and heading out into the world. Cracknell bleakly indicating that this cycle of violent abusive behaviour is only destined to continue.

Photo: Alastair Muir