Fiddler on the Roof


Oct 12, 2012

Westchester Broadway Theatre


OK, the story of this well-known musical is:  Tevye is a dairy farmer who owns at least one cow that we know of.  He has daughters, none of whom follows his orders or ‘tradition’, which is the name of one of two well-known songs from this play, the other being If I Were a Rich Man.  So what is a man who loves his daughters over all to do when they plead and resist his admonitions, even when a mixed marriage is afoot?  Cave, is what.


There is a fiddler on the roof, who comes off and on the roof when it suits him kind of like a Jewish leprechaun.  Bill Nolte as Tevye and Andrew Mayer as the fiddler are great.  Nolte has the light touch and range to pull off this lead role and Andrew handles the movement and violin playing as well as one could hope.  Clearly classically trained, I can only imagine how well he plays Beethoven and Mozart.


Unfortunately, the support players are average at best, some clearly could have been better cast, and some might just have to keep their day jobs.


As always, we enjoy the ambience and dinner at the Westchester Broadway Theatre in Elmsford, as well as seeing a musical play close to home without the expense, the hassle or the parking nightmare that a trip to Manhattan entails.


So, as always, we recommend you check out this play despite its flaws.  They can’t all be great, though some at WBT are.


Not a big fan of this play in any case.  It is a slice of Jewish life under the Czar in the late 1800’s.  It portrays the resilience of the Jewish people under greatly adverse circumstances, but other groups have shown it too, so it is more a paean to human nature than specifically to Jews.  All humans share a piece of the nobility and flexibility required to survive.  Be it famine, persecution or plague, humans are a resilient species.  Like rats.