With so much attention currently on the Ukraine/Russia conflict, it seems prescient that the Pike Road Theatre Company is presenting the award-winning musical Fiddler on the Roof set in a 1905 Ashkenazi Jewish shtetl [small market town] named Anatevka during Tsar Alexander III's series of pogroms that either massacred or expelled the Jewish communities from an area that then included Ukraine.
Director Mike Winkelman keeps his actors on a steady pace in the just-under two-and-a-half-hour running time. Choreographer Kim Isbell creates inventive and disciplined dances for the 30+ member company. -- And the score has so many memorable songs that enhance the drama and challenge the talented acting ensemble's vocal abilities -- among them, "Matchmaker, Matchmaker", "If I Were a Rich Man", "Sunrise, Sunset", and "Do You Love Me?"
Based on stories by Sholem Aleichem, the plot is focused on Tevye [a commanding Jon Darby], a dairyman whose sense of Jewish tradition is articulated in the show's opening number "Tradition" that outlines the accepted authority of parents over children as based on strict Torah law. -- Arranged marriages are the norm while love rarely comes into the picture, finding husbands who can provide a comfortable life for their daughters is expected, and marriage within the Jewish faith is required.
So there are two major conflicts in the play: the constant threat of a pogrom in Anatevka shtetl, and Tevye's predictably strong-willed daughters who dare to break with tradition in order to champion a more modern sense of marriage. -- Both conflicts are difficult for Tevye and his long-suffering wife Golde [Stephanie Coppock], as they try to find acceptable mates for three of their five daughters with the assistance of the matchmaker Yente [Angie Mitchell].
The eldest, Tzeitel [Kristen Vanderwal], is in love with a poor timid tailor Motel [Travis Clark] who is saving money to buy a sewing machine in order to build a business that will give him appropriate funds to provide for a wife and the courage to ask for Tzeitel's hand. But the parents arrange a marriage with an older richer man Lazar Wolf [Sam Wallace], and complications arise. -- To get out of the arrangement with Lazar Wolf, Tevye invents a "nightmare/dream" in which Grandma Tzeitel [Abby Wallace] and Frumah-Sarah [Grayson Hathaway] play the broadest comic roles.
Middle daughter Hodel [Ash Shanks] fancies Perchik [Kevin Mohajerin] a firebrand socialist who breaks tradition by dancing with Hodel at Tzeidel and Motel's wedding when the Constable [Nick Swartz] arrives with soldiers who trash the celebration with a warning that a pogrom is imminent.
And youngest daughter Chava [Bella Posey] falls in love with a gentile named Fyedka [Ever Moates]. And though Tevye capitulated in accepting husbands for the two other daughters, marriage outside the Jewish faith is intolerable for him and he disowns her...almost. This is the most heartbreaking sequence that cries out for more scripted stage time.
Throughout the proceedings, Tevye has several "conversations" with God trying to assess each situation from all sides; his refrain "on the other hand" affords him opportunities to weigh the opposing views, and we feel his dilemma acutely and feel confident that he will do what is best.
When the Constable gives the townspeople three days to evacuate their homes, they grieve while they anticipate the next stage in their lives in foreign places. -- And audiences are left with a sense that they will survive [and perhaps we feel the plight of our contemporaries in Ukraine].
