Raising the roof

It is a ‘fantastic night out’, insists the theatre’s artistic director. Gemma Bodinetz is right, of course, but it is easy to see how those unfamiliar with Fiddler on the Roof might take some convincing. The first act ends with a pogrom, the second with the village’s Jews being expelled from
the country. This doesn’t immediately suggest an evening of joyous, life-affirming entertainment.

‘It’s the story of people being forced to leave their homes by the powers that be, and that scenario, sadly, is still playing itself out all over the world today. But it’s also about family and joy and love and it has terrific songs,’ says Bodinetz. It opens the first season of Liverpool Everyman’s new repertory company later this month.

Loosely based on short stories by the Yiddish author Sholem Aleichem, Fiddler on the Roof — the title comes from a recurring image in the paintings of Marc Chagall — is set in a shtetl in tsarist Russia in 1905. Tevye, an impoverished Jewish dairyman, is struggling to come to terms with the fact that a way of life unchanged for centuries is ending amid mounting harassment by the Russian authorities. Each of his three adult daughters, Tzeitel, Hodel and Chava, moves progressively further away from the cultural and religious traditions that are Tevye’s bedrock. Chava’s transgression is, in his eyes, a betrayal.

The cast of the original Broadway production thought it would have limited appeal. ‘We all thought it was going to close after the Jews had seen it. We thought it was a show for Jews,’ remembers Joanna Merlin, who played Tzeitel.

Yet even before the end of the opening number on the first night in September 1964, the actors knew they had a smash hit on their hands.